What They Say:
Oga Tatsumi is a first year student in Ishiyama High, a notorious school for delinquents. One day while taking a nap by the river he sees a man floating by, and the man suddenly splits in half to reveal a baby boy inside! This boy is the son of the Demon King and Oga has been chosen as the one to raise him, together with the baby’s demon maid Hilda! With his close friend Furuichi and a bunch of other characters joining in on the fun, Oga must raise baby Beel while preventing the world from being destroyed!
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
With the kinds of ups and downs Beelzebub has had recently, I wasn’t too surprised to find this episode kind of all over the place as well. The introduction of Lord En definitely added some fun to things, especially since he’s easily distracted by things but still wants to destroy the world, and there’s the background idea that he’s supposed to work with Beel in order to accomplish it. But they also brought in a few other characters that are taking up space and are invariably giving us less time for the core cast, which is very unfortunate since they were clicking on all cylinders just before the entire Academy arc began. It’s had fun to be sure but it hasn’t been as consistently fun as it was before.
Which is why the segment that had me laughing the most here isn’t the garbage involving the newer characters and their issues, but seeing how Oga’s mother reacts when dealing with her son. She wants him to do some stuff and he just brushes it off and that leads her to just going off, internally, about how she’s accepted his whole bringing home of a wife and child without batting an eye. While that’s obviously not what Beel and Hilda are, her way of coping with it all is priceless and she does have a lot going for her. Like a lot of the best series of years gone by, it’s the adults/parents that often get in some of the best lines and have the most fun when it comes to observational humor or just taking it all in.
While there is a bit of subplot material going on with the non-core cast here, it’s pretty uninteresting and doesn’t add much at the moment and even dragged the show down a bit. Where things do start to pick up though is when someone very, very powerful arrivals before Oga, Hilda and Beel touting Aoi as his contractor, though she’s completely unconscious and unaware of all of this. The episode does provide for a quick build towards what’s to come by bringing in new big bad demons in human form to work with, throwing one against Tojo as well as Oga, so it says pretty clearly where things are going to go in the next arc. But it just comes off so haphazardly that it’s hard to get completely behind it at this point.
In Summary:
Beelzebub continues to be a show that even when it doesn’t excite me terribly, I find a lot to like about it. The show just has something that a lot of other shows have lost in its sense of fun. But at the same time, it’s strayed a bit in the last ten episodes with a smaller focus on the core cast of characters and more on expanding it, which has worked at times but has managed to marginalize the core cast in a way that doesn’t help. This episode takes some uninteresting turns for the first segment but it starts to come back together as it progresses, but it is taking its time to get there. There is once again potential in the show, and hopes that it isn’t completely squandered this time. This is a fun cast of characters that just needs to get back to where it started.
Grade: C+
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.
0 comments