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

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Yuri gives birth to Yukio, Shiro seals Rin’s demon fire in the Koma sword, and Satan’s body fully breaks down, forcing him to find a new one, which causes The Blue Night.

OUR TAKE

After multiple episodes of build up, we finally reach the moment that changed this world forever: The Blue Night, which we now know was caused BY…Satan burning through his body and desperately screaming “body body body body body body body” while hopping through multiple people like it was going out of style. Of all of the ways to explain the mysterious phenomenon of people bursting into blue flames, that is…certainly one of them, but it’s not exactly satisfying. Part of why that is would be due to Satan himself still not being very well characterized, with his obsession with Yuri still feeling shallow and based on her being like his mom? And yeah, this is Satan we’re dealing with after all, so we should expect him to be kinda gross, but we’ve seen his kids, including Rin and Yukio, be a lot more nuanced in their motivations and actions (although Yukio himself is going pretty overboard in the present day, so I guess he takes after his father there). Also might’ve been better if we had a feel for Satan in the present day, but as of now we’ve only met him at the beginning of the story when he possessed and killed Shiro, and THAT still hasn’t quite been explained.

Anyway, considering this is all a flashback meant to explain where every main characters’ families were at the time, we get the prequel-y moments of seeing the parents or ancestors of those characters in still shots as the blue flames consume people around them while they themselves are save from death due to plot armor and imperviousness to time paradoxes. Although considering this isn’t actually happening and this is just meant for Rin to see, it’s odd that we’re seeing things he wouldn’t. Speaking of Rin, we finally get to see the moment Shiro seals his demon powers in the sword, unsurprisingly while Shiro was actually trying to kill him (that’s gonna be an awkward conversation later). But I’m sorry, having a naked baby demon Rin running around killing people is just goofy to watch. And with that, we’ve basically covered all of what we came to see in this flashback, aside from maybe some falling action to put us right before the beginning of the series proper. But we also have four episodes left of this arc and season, so perhaps we’ll go back to the present and see what Rin plans to do about the future.