Aoi’s struggling with recent events and she’s only going to get less help back at the Shrine.
What They Say:
Aoi is still flustered from her encounter with Hilda and Baby Beel in Oga’s body, and the other Red Tails are worried about her. In order to get her to rejoin the Red Tails, they gather at her family’s shrine for a meeting, but a rival gang from West Kanto shows up to take them down!
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
With the recent fun events out of the way, including the body switch silliness of the previous episode, Oga is now having to start getting more serious about things when it comes to his Super Milk Time mode. While it’s something powerful that he can use, he hasn’t mastered it and it just causes too many problems at the moment. We get a cute little flashback to how things went the last time with it and even the negative Baby Beel which is just adorable in his shadow form as he’s managed to find himself a new home with Oga’s trainer. It’s kind of disconcerting that he’s still around in a way, but it’s likely to just add more fun and confusion as the show goes on, providing he stays long enough and isn’t used for a cheap gag somewhere.
One of the bigger focuses of this episode though is on Aoi, who herself is coping with the strain of the previous episode when Beel as Oga almost kind of molested her in a way without realizing it. It’s sent her down an amusing spiral where she’s just a mess. Amusingly, she’s realizing things have changed beyond that incident as well since she began her training with Oga as everyone else back at the school is getting along really well, which makes sense after the chase episodes to find Lord En played out and they all spent a lot of time together. It makes her feel somewhat uncertain and adding that on top of what happened with not-Oga has left her out of sorts to say the least. It’s not overdone and is kept fairly simple and cute when you get down to it.
Because of what she’s going through, her friends in the Red Tails and some others decide to come and help her a bit by trying to bring her back from her training and right her ship, so to speak. Of course, she completely misunderstands the situation thinking it’s all in relation to what not-Oga did in the previous episode, but the whole thing just turns comical since Aoi had just essentially unleashed one of the shrine spirits there and the little perverted creature is now ready to run around. And Aoi now has several cute high school girls there to mess with. It has some good fun to it, especially when girls from St. Marian show up at the shrine, having looked for the Red Tails for a bit now, ready to offer them the challenge in order to take over the final part of the Kanto region. Of course, being the series this is, it all gets taken care of in a very amusing and perverted way that felt highly appropriate.
In Summary:
Beelzebub takes its focus off of Beel and Oga for the most part, though they have some cute moments here, and shifts to that of Aoi and the Red Tails. A lot of it just deals with the various things that Aoi is coping with but it also brings the Shinto shrine spirit into play, which factors well to the arrival of a rival group of girls from St. Marian at the end. When you watch the ending sequence that kicked in recently after this story, it makes sense that they went there as they want to focus on the Red Tails more as it goes forward for a bit with this story, and that’ll be just fine. While I do like Oga and Beel as the center, the girls add a bit more color to it and is definitely a bit more necessary after so many male-centric episodes for so long.
Grade: B
Readers Rating: [ratings]
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDS-R70XBR2 70″ LCoS 1080P HDTV, Dell 10.1 Netbook via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
