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

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Rin briefly returns to the present day, while Yukio is brought to the Illuminati HQ, and Shiemi realizes her true feelings before she is also taken away somewhere strange.

OUR TAKE

Huh, I guess we’re taking a bit of a break from the flashback to check back in with what the present day characters have been up to since the end of the last arc. Yukio has just arrived at the home base of the Illuminati and meets with Lucifer, still clearly mixed about his choices to join them but still wanting answers about his past and his eye. The exorcists are still fighting off waves of demons everywhere they can. Ban has finally gotten some of the data that Lightning uncovered before getting arrested to Arthur. And Izumo looks after Shiemi, who finally puts together that she has feelings for Rin…before being taken away by a mysterious group, among whom is someone who looks and sounds suspiciously like Lucifer, but we did just have a whole bunch of episodes talking about how multiple clones of someone can exist, so he must be one of those. Still, wherever Shiemi got taken is not passing the smell test, especially in a meta sense, considering she only realized that she loves Rin and almost as if it checked a final box, she is now likely being a damsel in distress. What the hell is going on here?

Well, it seems we will need to wait a little bit more to learn THAT, because just as quickly as he returned, Rin is going back into the past to find out about the horrible day that sucked ass. Specifically how his mother died and how Satan went off the deep end and triggered the infamous Blue Night, which now looks to be confirmed as happening because of Yuri’s death. Aw, so tragic and sad. Like yeah, it actually kind of is for all the loss of life, and Yuri dying is a bad thing, but the way we got here hasn’t exactly made me think highly of many of these characters’ intelligence. I guess it’s finally time to go back to the first season and its anime original arc that tried to explain this before the chapters these episodes were made from were even published to compare and contrast, but I gotta say, I don’t think I’ll be finding much to like from either version. Thankfully there are only a handful of episodes left and not a whole lot left to adapt after that, so even if this does end up with a bad finish, at least we know we’ll be taking a long break no matter what.