A little one on one time with the Chairman is never a bad thing, right?
What They Say:
After Gon and his friends successfully passed the second phase of the exam, they boarded the airship which would take them to the third phase. Gon and Killua are exploring the airship when they run into Netero, who proposes a very simple game. All they have to do is take a ball away from Netero and they can become hunters.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
After a kind of awkward episode when you get down to the details of it with the whole Gourmet Hunters thing, we got to whittle down the applicants once again but shook things up for this Exam. Bringing in the Chairman this early wasn’t part of the plan so they look to move things forward a bit further than originally planned. There’s some grief given the Examiners over what they did, especially with the failing of everyone at one point, but what’s done is done and now everyone who has made it to this point has boarded the airship and are heading off to the next phase. But what they have to do in essence is survive the night, and being with each other, in order to go on to that next phase.
With this being a transitional episode as they move from one event t the next, it’s an opportunity to get to know the characters better. There’s a lot to be said for the relationship between Gon and Killua as even the Chairman knows it. He has a close eye on the both of them andin particular Killua, who has started to open up a bit more to Gon about who he is, being from a family of assassins and all. The Chairman has a great bit of style about him and he’s the type to do something fun when bored, which is why he challenges Gon and Killua to a game in which they have nine hours in a confined room to go against the Chairman. If they can take the ball from him in that time, before they arrive at their destination, they can become Hunters automatically. Obviously the Chairman sees something in them, and even Gon gets to be taken in by what Kullua is capable of doing.
There’s a lot of fun in watching both Gon and Killua go against him, especially as the Chairman handles it all with such relative ease. It shows a lot about the characters when you get down to it though in that eventually Killua gives up because he knows he can’t defeat him, understanding just how little of his abilities that the Chairman has used. At the same time, we get to see some really good things out of Killua that highlights his own abiltiies. The fallout from it is absolutely perfect though, showing us a new side to Killua that’s hidden from Gon and the others and just how far Killua would have gone, had he not stopped himself. While Gon may feel one way about it, the truth is something different and in a way you’d really want to see that manner unfold as well.
In Summary:
Hunter X Hunter does some really good stuff with this episode by keeping its focus mostly on three characters after it does a bit of fun with everyone else. There’s some solid discussion at the beginning that highlights what a threat Hisoka will be and that helps to establish things even more. But the bulk of it is given over to the match between Gon, Killua and the Chairman and that’s just good stuff all around. They accomplish a lot in showing personalities and capability here as the Chairman is sussing out more of the two kids individual strengths as he’s really starting to see something special in them. It’s just a matter of luck that they ended up in the match, but it’s very illustrative for all involved in different ways. Killua gets some real tweaks to his personality here though, first by opening up a bit and later showing that he may be just as effective as Hisoka, but in a different manner. Watching the friendship blossom between the core cast is definitely enjoyable but seeing the individual personality traits come to light outside of the view of each other is even better.
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.
