Hell’s Paradise – Episode 13

Episode Synopsis:

Sagiri, Yuzuriha, and the wounded Senta face down the transformed Mu Dan, and all seems lost until Shion and Nurugai arrive to aid them. Despite Shion’s skill and growing knowledge of how the Tensen fight, he’s unable to land a killing blow. It takes the combined efforts of the survivors to finally bring down Mu Dan, and Senta succumbs to his wounds soon after.

The party moves deeper into the palace grounds, where they finally have a chance to rest. As they take stock of their situation and wonder what has become of their other companions, Yuzuriha raises unsettling possibilities about the elixer of immortality and Gabimaru, who awakens elsewhere after recovering from his earlier battle, but may no longer be the same person we’ve come to know.

Episode Review:

In a strong conclusion to the first season of Hell’s Paradise, episode 13 concludes the vicious battle with Mu Dan and gives us a glimpse into the conflicts to come. It gives us insight into how our surviving characters’ personalities come out under stress and when they have time to consider their predicament. There’s some great storytelling at the end of this season that makes me even more excited to see where things go when the series continues.

The fight with Mu Dan is the centerpiece of this episode, and delivers a great conclusion to that struggle. We get to see Shion’s skill on full display as he buys time for the others to recover, and the tension remains high. Even though Shion has been honing his newfound understanding of Tao to complement his mastery of the sword, he’s still not strong enough to defeat a fully-transformed Tensen alone.

This highlights one of the things I love in pitched battles like this – everyone contributing to the final victory. We’ve seen fights that Gabimaru and others have won almost single-handedly, but when things get truly deadly, even our heaviest hitters have been unable to succeed alone. In this case, Nurugai helps Sagiri recharge, while the latter holds Mu Dan’s attention and Shion hunts for a weak spot. Even Yuzuriha, who decides to sit out the battle, uses her slimy powers to protect the others from the Tensen’s lethal flowers. At the end, it’s Senta’s knowledge of plants that gives Shion his true target and wins the day.

With the battle over, we’re forced to confront the fact that Senta isn’t going to survive. Yuzuriha shines in this moment, balancing her pragmatic understanding that they can’t afford to spend precious resources on a dying man with her compassion for Senta. She sees him off in a brief but beautiful scene that genuinely choked me up.

The shinobi actually has another strong moment when she and her companions find shelter after the battle. They’ve learned from Mu Dan that the Elixir of Life isn’t what they were told, and won’t perform the miracles the Shogun desires. When Sagiri insists that it must be real because the chief of Gabimaru’s village was immortal, Yuzuriha counters that he may have experienced an illusion, like the ones she and her clan use. What better way to prevent the children you’re training to be assassins from turning on you than by convincing them that you can’t be killed?

That may not be the only illusion Gabimaru is suffering from. One can’t control a group of merciless killers by fear alone, so would the village chief really marry his daughter off to one of these assassins, or would it be easier to motivate him by planting the illusion of a wife he can return to in his head? I struggle to remember if he’s even said her name to anyone else. There’s a very real possibility that his relationship to her may not be what he thinks, or she may be entirely fictional. While I think it’s unlikely and no one in the show is sure either, it would make Gabimaru’s life even more tragic than it already is.

Speaking of Gabimaru, we do spend a little bit of time with him, Mei, Ganketsusai, and Fuchi when the shinobi awakens after passing out from the strain of his last battle. He immediately jumps away from his companions, ready for a fight (his catlike nature keeps coming out even now, which gives me a chuckle), but pauses when he sees that no one is looking for one. Though he says he’s fine, he clearly doesn’t remember where he is or who those surrounding him are, and we get a chilling shot as Mei observes his energy.

As I said at the beginning, episode 13 is a great finale for the show’s introductory season. It gives us a nasty battle, some much-needed downtime with the characters we’ve seen brutalized for three straight days, and the fear that something may be terribly wrong with our core protagonist. I’m really looking forward to seeing where they take the show when the second season premiers, though we don’t have a firm date on that as of this writing. Hopefully we won’t have to wait too long to see what fresh horrors the island has in store for Gabimaru, Sagiri, and the rest of the survivors.