Wow! So am I the only one who thinks a live action TV adaptation would do this anime justice, because this show has it ALL! Now all we need is Daniel Radcliffe and Tom Felton, and director Guillermo Del Toro!
So we move on from Chise's flashback party and move on to Joseph's and this is the part where it hit me like a Rock Slide launched by an Archeops. Joseph, or in this case, Cartaphilus is...you know what, let's talk about that later. So we find out that Joseph was a misunderstood son of an undertaker, who just so have happened to find a talking dead body right behind his graveyard (What are the ODDS!) He tends to the poor soul, only to find no solutions to the being's poor rotting condition. He eventually merges somehow (Yeah, just roll with it) and he only suffers more. He pulls a Sweeney Todd on a hapless girl and gives Hans Christian Anderson inspiration for his story, the Red Shoes, and becomes a walking chimera and Hodge Podge of human bodies, all in the search for an end. Though he didn't find that solution, he did find out who he was, and he is PISSED! And I guess you can piece together what happened there. Meanwhile, Elias broods and emos the forest until Spriggan (aka Best Husbando) drops in and pins him down, until the Fairy Queen's loli familiars pop in and gives him a hand, right after what I think after she attempted to turn him into a tree (?) Soon, she calls everyone for a search party to find Chise. Meanwhile, our little witch friend gets a surprise visit from Phylius. Apparently, she wasn't supposed to tell Elias what she told them, and so in an effort to make up for it, she meets Chise in a creepy Alleyway (What were the ODDS!) and turns into a bull and charges after Joseph to the ED of the anime.....I'm not kidding, the fountain in the ED is exactly where the episode ends. Not bad, that was very clever of the folks.
This episode was another flashback episode, mostly, and it gave the audience a much needed exposition dump, which I wished it had done much better, like they could've done for Chise's, but what's done been done, and let's move on to the rest of the episode. Sadly, everyone was just second fiddle, only to join Chise near the climax of the episode, and by extension the entire arc. Overall, it was ok. I am looking forward to the next episode though. With a transition like that, I just can't help but wait!
About who Cartaphilus is, he is the Wandering Jew. I didn't know about this because
- I thought Joseph was just a commonly regular name, and
- How was I supposed to know that?!
For those of you who were uninitiated, the Wandering Jew was a bystander who taunted and threw a rock at Jesus Christ when he was crucified, and was doomed to walk on the Earth forever until his Second Coming. OK we know that bit, simple. What you don't know is that his conception as a character has various allusions to other forms of literature. We have the Red Shoes, a girl passes by and loses her FRICKING LEGS IN A BLOODY FASHION, and then there's Cartaphilus himself. Believe it or not, he is not the only one to get the immortal walk of shame from God, there was another, and his name was Cain, the world's first murderer. Unlike Cartaphilus, he was made to walk as a mortal where he eventually lived long enough to build a city and be crushed under the building he built. however, in other forms of literature, he is seen as the origin of ALL evil (Oh no, not the devil, nor the demons, nor Hitler, just Cain) most prominently in Beowulf, where in the epic, he was described as the father of Grendel, and all other demons and monsters that walk the Earth. Similarly, in the anime, he is seen as an obstacle to the cast, and the origin of all things bad that happened to them. The Wandering Jew was also the inspiration behind AZ from Pokemon X and Y (Hence the Archeops reference earlier) |