English Dub Review: Blue Exorcist “Friends”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Despite Rin and the others fighting their way through the zombies, Izumo can’t contain the Nine Tails spirit and it begins to consume her. But to everyone’s surprise, her mother Tamamo pulls herself together to lure the spirit out of Izumo and into herself and dies, taking the spirit with her. Happy Mother’s Day!

Gedoin is enraged and turns himself into a giant monster, but Izumo regains use of her spirits who give her even greater power than before and soundly defeats him, though Shima retrieves him and retreats. The True Cross kids recover in a hospital, with Izumo being visited by Takara informing her that the woman who tried to free her and her sister Tsukumo actually managed to get Tsukumo out and into a new family. He allows Izumo to see her, but having only last seen her when she was three, she naturally doesn’t remember Izumo at all. Izumo decides to leave her be and returns to her friends.

OUR TAKE

…Huh, I guess that wraps up the Illuminati arc? I mean, apparently not entirely, as the next episode seems to have the last bits of it, but…yeah, that’s a wrap on this phase of the battle against the Illuminati. Clearly this won’t be the last we see of them, since not even Gedoin was fully defeated, so while the war is far from over, this battle has come to an end. And it’s a battle that you could definitely say team True Cross won, maybe not in taking down any key members, but definitely in thwarting apparently decades of research in trying to make use of this Nine Tails spirit through the Kamiki family. Now all of that work is down the drain, the only one who could have contained and controlled the spirit is dead, along with the spirit, and Gedoin has reverted himself into some weird squid. And I think we have further hinting towards Shima not being a real traitor for a couple reasons, him seemingly killing Izumo’s spirits turns out to be only a mostly death, and probably deliberate on his part, while his last words to Ban are to let him know that his betrayal is only for him, not because of anything Ban did. Guess we’ll see where that goes.

But the high point of the episode is definitely the conclusion of Izumo’s arc. She finally gets closure with her mother, who finally does a clear cut motherly thing by…sacrificing herself to a fox demon. Don’t know if the bar needed to be that high, but hey, good timing for this dub episode to come out since this review comes out on Mother’s Day! So yeah, that’s already a pretty cool way to develop Izumo, along with her realizing she actually likes her friends in the last episode. But on top of that, we finally get to see her meet her little sister again AND…it’s pretty dang bittersweet, emphasis on the bitter. It’s nice to know she’s alive and well and not being used as an unethical and lethal experiment, but it’s sad that she doesn’t remember Izumo (though the fact that they look a lot of like will hopefully get some gears turning in her head). Probably the right move for Izumo to leave her alone for awhile, but hopefully one day, when things have calmed down, they can try to be a family again. And with that, we move into the cool down part of the season and see where it all lands. Two more episodes to go!