Blue Exorcist: Shimane Illuminati Saga

Episode 4

One of the downsides of Blue Exorcist's overlong production cycles is that episodes like “Insider” don't hit quite as hard as they should. We have Shima's “shocking” betrayal paired with the status-quo upending arrival of the Illuminati, who are led by Lucifer himself, and they manage to not only successfully kidnap Izumo but also declare general war on the Knights of the True Cross, providing an ultimate deadline of Satan's arrival at the year's end. It's a lot of stuff to go down in just one episode. It would have been much more exciting if we didn't have such absurd waits between seasons to cloud our memories and dampen our emotional connection to the story.

Take Shima's betrayal, for instance. The guy has never been a major player in the story, so it isn't like his being a secret Illuminati goon is all that earth-shattering since having anyone other than him or Nemu turn out to be a bad guy would be the kind of truly major shakeup that I just don't see Blue Exorcist trying to pull at this stage in its overall story. It's still a decent twist, mostly because we've come to care about all of the other characters enough that it still stings when Izumo's kidnapping and Shima's grandstanding end up blindsiding our heroes.

Nemu is another character that I wish I was more invested in getting to see more of. In general, I love his whole shtick. Being controlled by an almost certainly sentient magical puppet is a fun enough gimmick on its own, but then we throw in the fact that his powers involve summoning battle-ready versions of all the different, weird toys that Nemu's company presumably manufactures. Again, it just ends up feeling a bit anticlimactic with its placement at the very beginning of this season, when we've had seven whole years to forget that guys like Nemu and Shima even exist. It also doesn't help that the animation during Nemu and Shima's big showcase fight is bad. Nothing terrible enough to ruin the episode, but it drags down the action.

The proper introduction of the Illuminati and their squad of villains works better, as it offers some truly major stakes for Rin and Co. to deal with that Blue Exorcist could use right now. It's a shame that we seem to have blitzed past all of those other school mysteries that we were meant to be hunting down, but I'll take the exchange if it means getting to dig deeper into the show's celestial lore, including some more juicy details about Mephisto's—aka Samael's—antagonistic relationship with his otherworldly brethren. It's all good stuff, though I'm sure the best is yet to come, so I hope the show can tap into its potential with this arc, now that we've gotten past some of the inevitable growing pains and wonky pacing issues.

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Blue Exorcist: Shimane Illuminati Saga is currently streaming on Crunchyroll. James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.