REVIEW: 'Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Vento Aureo' Episode 15: "The Grateful Dead, Part 1"

by Katherine Simon Disclaimer: This review contains spoilers for this episode and previous episodes of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. Despite the episode’s title being “The Grateful Dead, Part 1,” this episode is more of a middle act for the actual Prosciutto and Pesci fight than anything else. Due to most of the main conflict’s setup taking place in the previous episode, this episode is primarily focused on actually getting into the fight and setting up the battle’s climax. Even though there is more going on in this episode, it still suffers from a lot of the same pacing issues as the previous episode and does very little to progress the show’s narrative or flesh out its characters.

After Team Bucciarati learns of The Grateful Dead’s aging effects, Mista is sent outside of Mr. President to locate Prosciutto and stop him, but not before being snagged by the fish hook of Pesci’s Beach Boy. With the hook deep inside his skin, Mista attempts to break the fishing line using Sex Pistols to no avail due to Beach Boy’s invulnerability. To work around this, Mista instead aims for Pesci’s glass of ice, cutting off his lifeline against The Grateful Dead. Pesci tries to escape from the train but ends up being stopped by one of the aging passengers. Mista corners Pesci and is then grabbed by the same passenger, who reveals himself as Prosciutto, who used his Stand’s aging effect to disguise himself. Now in direct contact with The Grateful Dead’s user, Mista begins to age rapidly in spite of the ice keeping his body temperature low. Prosciutto proceeds to shoot the aged Mista three times in the head with his own revolver, assuming him to be dead. A strange pattern with a lot of Mista’s fights is that they tend to take place on moving vehicles. His first fight against Kraftwerk took place on top of a moving truck and the fight in this episode takes place on a train. Of course, moving vehicles usually make for exciting setpieces in intense fight scenes, but why it’s always Mista fighting in those settings is a mystery. My best guess would be that, out of all of the Stands in Team Bucciarati, Sex Pistols lends itself best to those kinds of fast-paced action scenes more than the Stands that are less direct combat-oriented like Aerosmith or Purple Haze. Observations about series trends aside, the episode does a pretty good job at showing how horrifying The Grateful Dead is. The previous episode did a good job having the Stand’s effects come off as genuinely creepy and this episode continues to deliver on the body horror. The disguised Prosciutto grabbing onto Pesci sent chills down my spine and the actual aging effect of The Grateful Dead is the closest I’ve come to physically cringing during this part. Considering how the staff over at David Productions were able to bring The Grateful Dead to life in such a horrifying way, I’m both looking forward to and dreading some of the later fights in this part, because Part 5 is notorious for having some of the most gruesome stand abilities in the series.

With the combination of being shot in the head three times and rapidly aged by The Grateful Dead, it’d be safe to assume that Mista was killed off, but it turns out that Sex Pistols Number 5 stopped the bullets before they could reach his brain and saved Mista’s life. Despite this, Mista has been severely damaged to the point of being unable to fight, so he sends Number 6 to warn Bucciarati about Pesci and Prosciutto. The two antagonists eventually find the turtle inside the train’s machinery, but when they look inside the key’s gem, they notice that Bucciarati is missing from the group. It is at that moment that Bucciarati ambushes the assassins and throws himself and Prosciutto outside the train, ending the episode on a cliffhanger. As much as I harped on the Illuso fight for its contrived reasoning for keeping Giorno alive, the non-death of Mista is much less egregious because it actually makes sense within the context of his Stand. Obviously Sex Pistols isn’t going to want to harm their user, so it makes sense for them to try and stop the bullets from causing any fatal damage instead of having them unwillingly kill their user. Compared to the absurdity of Giorno conveniently creating a snake that’s immune to a fast-acting fatal virus, I think Sex Pistols protecting their user is a lot more reasonable. This is also the first time in a while that Bucciarati actually gets to fight on his own, which is great because Sticky Fingers is one of the coolest Stands in the series and he hasn’t been in the spotlight for a long time. It’ll be exciting to finally see him in the spotlight again in the next episode.

Aside from that, the Grateful Dead fight in general suffers from meandering a bit too much with not much else interesting going on. While the Narancia vs Formaggio arc was just as long as this, they used the extra time to flesh out La Squadra without dragging out the actual fight, which is not the case. Although the beginning and ending of the episode are really solid, the middle act just involves Prosciutto bickering at Pesci with some exposition sprinkled in until Bucciarati arrives, and it kinda makes the episode and the arc as a whole feel like a drag. If the exposition from the previous episode had been cut down a bit and it had ended with Mista’s “death,”  the pacing issues in this string of episodes would’ve been mitigated. This feels like a two episode arc that was stretched out to meet the series’ 39 episode quota, which is odd because up to this point, Vento Aureo’s pacing has been excellent and has even made some weaker fights from the manga quite entertaining (“Moody Blues’ Counterattack” being a standout example of this). The Grateful Dead fight itself isn’t necessarily bad, but it’s kinda disappointing that the most exciting stuff in this arc is likely going to be packed into its next episode, since the last two were somewhat weak.

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