English Dub Review: Blue Exorcist – The Blue Night Saga “Alone”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Shiro rises the ranks but he and Yuri remain a connection despite their growing distance.

OUR TAKE

More flashbacks this week! Just like there will be more flashbacks next week! But don’t worry, as Mephisto keeps reminding us, this will end in tragedy, so keep paying attention! Okay okay, this week’s episode does actually have some significant details to go over. For starters, we see the proper beginnings of the Shiro and Yuri romance, for all the good that will do them. I mean he’s an adult by this point and she is sixteen, so he does THE CORRECT THING and turns her down, which I guess opens the door for…literal Satan? Yeah, I honestly cannot stress enough how much I am not a fan of these new retcons surrounding Shiro and Satan. Shiro’s are especially weird, since he just went from being a normal human to a clone made to house a demon king’s body, which I cannot think of a single reason why that had to be done or what it does for his character. Satan is…a BIT more excusable? Like he was already a demon but now he’s…still that, but he’s trying to enter a vessel? Worth pointing out that the fan wiki still lists him as the main antagonist despite him not being in any manga canon stories beyond the first part of the story up until this FLASHBACK that takes place before that, but…I guess he gets to date a teenage girl now, which is kind of a twist since that’s usually a pastor’s job.

But the main thematic addition to this episode is the philosophical debate between Shiro and Yuri regarding how to handle demons. Shiro wants to exterminate them outright while Yuri seeks merely to stop them from doing bad things but overall keeping them alive, seeing them as beings worth protecting and preserving…so it makes a bit more sense why she goes on to have two kids with one. This was the kind of debate that was in early parts of this series back when Rin had to hide his demon identity and then something his classmates had to reckon with when it was revealed. This is the kind of stuff that prequels can do best: show how the world of the story functioned prior to the lessons that would be learned by those in its present day. Now at least we have something substantial to look forward to in the rest of this flashback that isn’t just “hey here’s a character from the show but younger!” And hopefully that’s what we get more of next week.