OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)Rin breaks Yukio out of custody but they are soon flanked by the Illuminati, who Yukio goes with willingly. Rin tries to stop him but is stopped himself by the satanic flames within him.OUR TAKEWe have finally reached the season finale…is what I would be saying if this was like last season and was only twelve episodes long, but as I have brought up before, we’ve still got another dozen or so to go. Which is kind of a relief because this would be a CRAZY place to leave this series in potentially eternal hiatus, in more ways than one. But this is the end of a story arc and in that regard it is…mixed. In some ways it definitely shows the gravity of what has been building up the past few episodes, both emotionally between Rin and Yukio and the major world devastating impacts of demons being made public to the world. Unfortunately, the latter doesn’t get much focus this time and the former turned out to be rather disappointing. My first instinct upon watching this episode was to immediately compare certain aspects to how they were handled in other shonen shows, specifically how they handled that better, but it’s honestly damning enough how they’re handled here within their own context. The culmination of Yukio turning to the Illuminati over the course of this arc simply being because he was insecure about not living up to his more superpowered brother is pretty reductive when it seemed like it would be about much more.And heck, even if it’s not and this is yet another double agent thing, well…we did that already with Shima, remember? Shima, who also gets to go with them because of his weird unclear status as a triple agent that allowed him to stay and remain in the school antics which itself kinda took the tension out of that revelation too. But even that is not the biggest change, as Rin’s sword breaks, releasing his full demonic power (which was hinted at in the OP but it was unclear what that meant, I thought it was Yukio’s demonic power but I guess not). He gets a handle on it but his hair changes color and he now has a giant fire ball on his chest which must make sleeping on his stomach a real pain now. Oh, and now Mephisto is going to send him back in time to see what really happened with his and Yukio’s mom and Satan, which is what Yukio wanted…but apparently could not be given because of how much he wanted it. Fine, whatever, let’s just move on and see what happened, which we will get to do next week as we begin the Blue Night Saga.
