Pakunoda's Choice - Hunter x Hunter ep. 55-58: Media Club Plus S01E18

Hey everyone, it's Keith.

Just got a couple bits of news.

The first episode of the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure bonus episodes are up.

We're covering six total episodes from season three, which is part four, Diamonds Are Unbreakable.

The first episode covers season three, episodes three, four, and five, the Niji Murray Brothers, parts one, two, and three.

It was a ton of fun.

The episode's really good.

And then next month, we'll have the second set of episodes that we're going to to cover for JoJo's bizarre adventure I had a ton of fun and then it was so good I even went and watched that whole season uh you can find that episode and our other bonus episodes and our future bonus episodes at friendsofthetable.cash the other bit of news is that there's merch in the friends of the table shop if you haven't seen it there's a barielda shirt and poster that's awesome a

Hyron tote bag a Hyron notebook uh a Hiron uh glass I love the glass glasses have made it.

Just go see some of the art.

It's so good.

Friends at the table.shop.

We have Sang Fiel stickers.

We have a Slumbos candle from Sang Fiel with a prayer on it.

A Slumbos prayer candle.

The merch is great.

Go check out the shop if you haven't been in a while.

There's a bunch of awesome stuff there.

Welcome to Media Club Plus, a podcast about diving into the media that interests us and the stories that excite us.

As always, we are brought to you by Friends of the Table.

This season, we're watching 2011's Hunter Hunter based on the manga by Yoshihiro Tagachi.

My name is Keith Carberry.

You can find me on X and co-host at Keith J.

Carberry.

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What else do we do?

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With me as always.

Bonus stuff coming soon.

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Sylvie, would you like to do your?

Yeah, sure.

I jumped in rudely, so I'll introduce myself.

I mean, it was extremely rude, but it was extremely fascinating.

Listen, it was a podcast faux pas.

It was a faux pod.

I understand.

It was a faux pod, yeah.

Hey, I'm Sylvia.

You can find me everywhere at Sylvie Bullet.

That's S-Y-L-V-I Bullet, like the things you put in a gun.

Some bullets today.

Oh, many of them.

Some extremely important bullets today.

Yeah,

my people.

Also, hey, just to shout out something that started recently on the Twitch channel.

Keith and I started playing 999 from the Zero Escape series.

Yeah.

And I don't know how much we've, I don't know if we've played more of that since

by the time this airs, but look at the Twitch and the YouTube.

Oh, I'm sure we'll have played more.

I sure fucking hope so.

I love that.

It was so much fun.

Oh, my order changed.

Jack.

Hi, I'm Jack.

I was thrown by the order change.

I have to talk into this microphone, the only one on my desk.

Yep.

What day is it?

Who am I?

I'm Jack.

You can find me on co-host at JDQ, and you can get any of the music on the show at notquitereal.bandcamp.com.

Andre Swan.

Hey, you can find me on Twitter at Swandre3000.

A professional.

A consumer professional.

Yeah.

No messing about.

Ready to speak.

Yeah.

No facts.

Normally I plug Media Club Plus and I don't have to do that here.

You're here.

That's true.

We are here.

We are all here on Media Club Plus.

Gosh, it's exciting.

I know.

It's been actually, it has been a while since we've recorded.

These are a wild few episodes to come back on.

This is like the most kind of set them up, knock them down episode that I think we've had.

Like,

episode,

the first episode, episode 55, is like

fully just

putting the pins up for the next three episodes in a way that is maybe more clear than it's ever been that that's what's happening.

Like, almost nothing happens in that episode that isn't,

we need to tell everyone this information so that everything else that happens makes sense.

Uh,

and then the next three episodes are Karabika's plan to uh attack the phantom troop, and it's just like plot stuff, plot stuff, plot stuff.

It's so good, it's just like constant, it's constant.

And then I was writing in the intro, and I was like, I don't even know like what to say because there's, there's so much, like,

uh, you know there's so many bullet points but also that's what we're about to talk about and it just felt we it just felt like so dense trying to summarize it so instead what i want to say is you know these are the things that are that are uh really important to me about these episodes factioning within the phantom troop what krolo does and doesn't believe about his allies what gona kiluo really want from helping karapika and how's karapika holding up

yeah yeah I think that that is a really good...

Like you said, Keith, this is past the first episode, which is...

It's not wheel spinning.

In fact, it's quite the opposite of wheel spinning.

It really is.

It's engine revving.

It is engine revving.

They're tuning their instruments, you know?

Like, they're getting ready to start shredding, and then Chain Bastard is going to kick in for the next three episodes.

They're packing their bags for the Chain Bastard vacation.

Yeah.

And then it begins and it doesn't really stop.

And I think that it is worth saying off the top that we will run into some major trouble if we try and tell you everything that happens in these episodes.

As joyful as that will be, we will be here for hours.

Now, you might think that we make long podcasts.

We go at pace here in a way that would mean that we would be talking about this chunk of episodes, you know, until the cows come up.

They're great episodes.

I love that you're saying this because no matter what our runtime is, it's going to end up being funny.

Yes.

I'm writing a check that is going to be cashed in a funny way.

However.

But I think it's worth kind of focusing in on those points that you made, Keith.

And also that what emerges really quickly is that this is a little mini arc about a hostage situation.

Right.

A hostage situation develops.

What starts out as a plan to take out the Phantom Troop from Karapica rapidly develops into a plan to take out Pakanoda, the Phantom Troop's sort of touch memory reader,

because Karapika correctly identifies in a sort of dawning horror that the game would be up if they don't get rid of Pakanoda as quickly as possible.

Something they've been setting up for like eight episodes ever since Gone and Kilua were abducted by the Phantom Troop briefly and were cleared of suspicion by Pakanoda, only for Kilua to realize, oh, fuck, I know who the chain user is.

If they ever read me again,

that's it yes

and and and now you know the it's time to pay the piper there and so Karapika sort of remaneuvers his plan to be like well let's take out Pakanoda instead yeah this goes wrong in a really interesting way and instead of taking out Pakanoda what happens is that the Phantom Troop gain two hostages in Gonan Kilua and Karapika and Leorio and Melody who is now sort of

an honorary member of the main four,

gain a hostage, terrifyingly, in Krolo.

Karapika manages to kidnap the leader of the Phantom Troop.

And what could be a sort of open and shut case, you know, Karapica makes a nen contract on the leader of the Phantom Troop and kills him in the same way we saw him do with Uvo,

turns into a really tense and interesting game of how much risk am I prepared to put my friends in?

What am am I willing to sacrifice in order to get the revenge that I want?

What turns this arc into something kind of extraordinary

is that, you know,

any time there is a like a mutual hostage exchange,

there are going to be interesting parallels, you know, where people on either side of the hostage exchange might want different things, might have different ways of thinking about the hostage situation.

What Takashi has done here is amazing because it rapidly transpires that both sides are essentially dealing with the same emotive concerns.

How much risk do we want to put our friends in?

Does it matter if my friends have told me that they will sacrifice themselves for the sake of

the collective?

And so, what you get is Takashi playing themes and variations on what does it mean to do revenge?

What does it mean to be stuck in a hostage situation?

And the stakes are exceptionally high because rather than pissing about with some lesser member of the Phantom Troop, you know, if this was

you know shout out to shizuku i love shizuku but she's no krolo this is she sure ain't she sure ain't

uh and so the stake and of course it's gone and kill you were on the other side um and so

We just focus in again and again on these questions of how do you respond to a situation that has gone wrong in this way?

And what does it mean when our heroes and villains are essentially operating by a very similar playbook?

There are these eerie mirrors over and over again of like both sides of the equation are

thinking the same thing, are working through the same ideas.

There's this great moment in episode three.

I don't want to jump too far ahead, but I'm saying this as an example, where both sides independently start worrying that

the opposing side's hostages are being controlled by manipulator NE users.

And what a great deployment of like

how

invisible NE can be and how powerful of a tool.

And when you know your nen stuff like like oh i'm seeing now threats everywhere so there's some like really fantastic like

act adding to the dread of nen in these few episodes i guess is a way to put it like the the there's some stuff in the in episode 58 that's like really dreadful i think that like this arc in particular is

paying off so much of what we kind of like were a little bored of in heaven's arena of all the setup where,

you know, we were learning about like, oh, the four core tenets of Nen and how it can kind of get a little wacky.

But here we see this is what it's like when people who are very skilled at this have like are battling with people who are equally skilled with it in ways that aren't just 1v1 in an arena like

and all the different like factors that come into it.

And another another interesting thing, this is just, this is going back a little bit, Jack, Jack, you were saying, you're talking about how like originally they're targeting Pakunoda and they end up with Krolo, and that's like a much bigger bite of the apple.

But the sort of like nimble

maneuvering of

the writing and how these characters operate, specifically the Phantom Troop, is that like...

Krolo sort of becomes the only viable hostage because he's the only one that can drive this wedge into

the very specific spider ideology of like, you know, lose a limb, we don't care.

Nobunaga was the weak link with Uvo, but everyone else knew the score.

But as soon as it's Krolo, it becomes a game where like we can negotiate this hostage exchange because

even though some of them are willing to lose the head, Not all of them are willing to lose the head.

And that's the only thing that keeps Gona Kiloa alive.

Who can blame them you know

who can who can blame them not me i understand their motivations very well we get into some spider ideology as this goes but ideology spidey ideology spideyology yeah um but the place i'd actually like to start but you know i know we said we wouldn't go through this beat by beat but i think you know we come in in a really interesting place um

Do we have sorry, I just wanted to check Keith.

Do you have like an overarching summary for this week that we should do before we get into stuff or did Jack's?

These are so dense that I opted

I opted to just have my

handful of things to look out for as we go through this.

The summary was

in

the way that I was writing it.

I think that Jack did a great job of doing an impromptu further summary.

I mostly just wanted to check in case you

do not have anything.

I don't have anything more.

Keith, could you put those topics that you would like to kind of revolve the discussion around in the doc?

because I think that

they lined up pretty much exactly with what I wanted to talk about.

But I think the place to begin is that I'd like to talk a bit about tone.

This is a very odd series of episodes, and I want to shout out the way you segmented this, Keith,

because

it comes together in like a perfect way.

And I think that if we had had like a trailing episode from the last group into this, or if we had had left this little chunk of episodes one episode early the overall effect would have been very different because after the sort of explosive orgiastic ritual violence of the the phantom troops assault in the last you know sort of chunk um

what this ends up being is kind of subdued and sad and frightening.

You know, any hostage situation is a tense hostage situation, but I feel like in fiction you see the like

almost like Christopher Nolan-esque ramping up of the tension of oh god, we have to get the hostages out.

There's very little um

uh people are people care for the hostages here and you know, that's what drives the episodes, but um a lot of the time the hostages are just sort of staying impassively where they are.

Nobody is really afraid, except you know, in a few critical moments, that their captors are going to kill them.

Um and instead it's just this like clammy, quiet, weird exploration of the hostage dynamic, which is such a contrast to the chunk of episodes that we had beforehand.

Yeah,

it's interesting that they set it up in a way that

the

spiders are really only ever concerned with

the other faction within the spider, the faction that wants to save Krolo and the faction that thinks that they should,

you know,

lose everything that they need to lose in order to get revenge is basically what it is.

Like, kill the boss,

let everyone who's going to die die as long as we kill the chain user.

Those two factions are way more concerned with each other than they ever are with Karapika.

Right.

Because they, I think that they're both confident that either side will work.

They, they think that they can get the boss back if that's what they choose to do, and they think that they can sacrifice themselves in order to save the boss if that's what they want no sacrifice themselves in order to kill the chain user if that's what they want to do uh and so it ends up being like

more about this tension within the phantom troop than like their concern for crowlo or their disregard for crowlo

although that is kind of a pivot point for this for this faction it emerges but the place you come in on is the sorry did you have something else oh i was i was going to say exactly what you just said.

The place you come in on is where we left off last time, where

Hisuka has to explain himself because he has set up a scenario where he's chosen to reveal

an alternate version of his hand.

He's great.

He knows that he's the traitor.

And so in order to shunt suspicion off of himself, he freely volunteers his fortune that he has changed to make him him look guilty in a slightly different kind of way.

As we know, this was like

Hisuka had been working with Karapika.

They exchanged some information.

Hisuka actually, in his lie, says that what he did was worse than what he actually did.

He reveals that he only ever gave Akarapika two members' powers.

In his limited hangout,

texture surprise version of his fortune, he says, oh, yeah, I said everything everything that I knew.

It's just so funny.

He says eight members.

He says he gave eight members.

I have the list of who he said.

He said

Krolo, Uvo, Shizuku, Machi, Franklin, Pakunota, Shalnark, and himself are the ones that he claimed to tell Karapika.

Not true.

Not true at all.

Not true at all.

But I love, I love, there are multiple things I love about this.

The big one is it does still feel like Hisuka's gambit here is like, well, if it doesn't work out, I'm probably going to get to fight one of these guys at least.

Yeah.

But like the fact that he

does

sort of confirm some suspicions, but in a way that isn't necessarily, at least what actually is going on, is just like, oh, yeah, he's doing...

This is him doing sleight of hand.

This is him being a magician.

Because if he knew...

If he.

If he revealed that he only revealed two people's powers, then that would be suspicious.

Because if this guy had something over on you and was able to force you into revealing powers, why wouldn't you have had to tell him everything that you knew?

Uh-huh.

And then it gets to, you know, they have to buy this.

And so it becomes this whole thing of like Kisuka's like banking on Krolo, who he thinks is smart and talented, to figure this like weird puzzle out.

And then Krolo, of course, is like able to surmise pretty accurately accurately exactly what Karapaka's powers are it's great yeah

this is real um Krolo uh

I

talked a lot in the sort of early stages of Krolo arriving about how how do you make this character work you know how do you make this character scary how do you make this character um interesting and you know part of the answer that that tagashi has begun to reveal is that like Krolo is scary, but as soon as Tagashi started making the Phantom Troop protagonists, you know, Krollo didn't need to be as scary as Hiseka because he's the head of the Phantom Troop.

You know, he's a creepy guy, but he's going to be taking on a protagonist role, so it's just as interesting that he is

compelling to watch, that he asks and answers interesting questions, that he moves through the story in a way that is compelling.

He has a creepy moment in these episodes, though.

Actually,

he has two really

creepy moments.

To the point where, in those moments, I was like, oh, this is what it would be like if Tagashi was only interested in playing the troopers villains.

This would be the only Crolo we see.

Instead, we see this Crolo, where he immediately starts functionally interrogating.

Yeah, he plays Detective.

He plays Detective.

And he does...

He's playing Detective a lot.

That's actually mostly what Crollo does.

He just asks people questions and listens to the responses.

And then we get the little Crolo inner voice as he figures it out very shonen style as a character's inner voice.

He's like, oh, well, that means X.

And then we get Crolo impassively feeding this back to

the troop.

And Hisaka moaning about it.

It's so good.

So he says, what does secrets mean?

You know, the riddle talks about secrets.

I mean, he doesn't say it like that.

He just says, what does the riddle mean by secrets?

And Hisuka says, the powers of eight spiders.

Because Hisaka is answering very freely.

He's answering very quickly.

Hisuka has to be very confident in this bluff in order for people to buy it.

And then Hisaka reveals that he can't answer a bunch of questions.

He can't answer who the chain user is.

He can't answer what the chain user's power is.

He can't answer what the chain user's relationship to Hisuka is.

And Krollo deduces correctly that

not correctly.

Krillo buys the bluff.

Right, Krowlo deduces what Hisuka meant for him to deduce correctly.

Yes, he's able to figure out

a couple of Karapika's powers, right?

Like, or is it just the judgment chain that he's able to solve?

Mostly just the judgment chain.

Yeah, mostly that.

He has figured out that Karapika has put some kind of a nen contract on Hisuka, ensuring that he can't answer.

And this is hilariously prescient, because while we've seen Nen contracts be used on Uvo to sort of compel

truth-telling and or act as a sort of a method of execution,

this is Hisuka sort of speaking out into the world, something that will become critically important here in these episodes, which is Nen contracts that prohibit kinds of speech or prohibit kinds of sharing information.

And it is so cool that the first real time that these kinds of like prohibitive nen contracts emerge are in a lie that Hisaka tells when they are going to form the back part of this whole chunk of episodes and are going to be

I mean there's a kind of dramatic irony here for the for the for the viewer like this is going to shape Krillo's arc immensely presumably

you know that that Hunter Hunter is so good at is like,

you know, I

talked about this episode is like setting up pins, and like Hunter Hunter is constantly setting up pins, and you just never know when they're going to get knocked down.

Sometimes it's two minutes, sometimes it's 10 episodes, sometimes it's 30 episodes.

Like, who knows?

Like, later on, we see

it's introduced that Courtup has

that his copies count as N, and then like five minutes later, that becomes like a crucial part of the plan.

And that sort of maneuvers happening constantly in this show,

where you learn something, and then a little while down the line, they pull it and twist it in a new way, and then use it and be like, look, this thing that you learned about, I mean, it's like the silliest example is the

what is that fucking the stupid auction type?

The

conditional system.

Yeah, like that's like, that is the version of this that, like, isn't working because it was more funny than anything else.

You know, it's still, it's fine, but it was just like conditional auction, what?

And then it becomes rapidly...

It's extra sad here because it's worth saying, by the end of this arc, Krolo will have been separated from his troop so utterly that if he communicates with them, the Nen dagger in his heart will fire and kill him.

Yeah, and he is also prohibited from using nen.

You know, Krolo is kind of cut off from things that are important to him so tremendously as a result of nen contracts that there's a kind of like it's sleight of hand.

It's like a magician's joke that the first time that is really talked about is in a lie Hisuka tells about something that has happened to him.

It's great.

Right.

Which then comes around and bites Hisuke in the ass completely.

Oh, in the funniest joke.

Weirdly, I know that this is this, all of this stuff happens to Krolo, but in a way, it feels like Hisuka's the one who's lost the biggest.

It's so funny.

Yeah, sure.

That's why it's even better.

Yeah.

Before Krolo's little interrogation sequence, there's a moment that I really want to touch on where Nobunaga is threatening to kill Hisuka.

I love Nobunaga.

Nobunaga is both

really, really funny.

He's a really funny character.

He is scary in the way that you never quite know how short his fuse is.

He is extremely capable.

He cares very deeply for Uvo and in times in this little arc when Crolo is out of action, demonstrates himself pretty capably to be able to think on behalf of the troop.

But it is funny how no.

He does too.

Franklin does a good job.

Yeah, Franklin has a really great moment.

They're both founding members too, right?

They also are.

Yeah, I think that's like a really important thing to draw on is the like who's the founding like the way the different founding members sort of step up during this sequence.

That is like the

like emotional core of these episodes is that Pakunoda, Phaeton, Franklin, Machi,

Nobunaga, and Finxo and

Finch and John.

They're all founding members and they have all found themselves on opposite sides of this thing.

They have like they have spent years together both developing totally separate understandings of how the spider moves.

Yeah.

Really quickly, while we're talking about how that's sort of the emotional core of a lot of these episodes, have we talked about the new segment in the opening animation at all?

No.

The difference?

There's like a little phantom troop roll call, and the you can smile part is Uvo smiling now.

And I think that's like really crucial to like some of the both the way that the anime team and Tagashi have been changing who the

focal point characters are of this arc

between

Karapika and Gone and Kiloa and

the Phantom Troop.

Sorry, Leorio, you were kind of always a supporting cast here.

But like, we still love you, ma'am.

Hey, Leori has one of the best moments of the show in this episode.

Absolutely.

Don't get me wrong.

Keith, Keith, Keith, what do my notes say?

It says, okay, I know.

This is now a Loyorio respect zone.

Yeah, I know.

I know that Leorio does some fantastic stuff.

He falters only once.

Uh-huh.

Only once ever does Leorio falter.

Yeah.

And we've seen that.

I've forgiven him for it.

I've forgiven him.

Pele Mario, you have been absolved.

By the way, my community has forgiven Le Mario.

I don't know if this ever comes up.

I don't know if this ever comes up, but it's much less creepy and transphobic in the manga.

Yes, I think we talked about that.

I think, because

that sounds right.

I remember looking at every different version of that.

Yeah.

Oh, yes.

Yeah, you went, you printed out all the different copies for my people.

Yeah.

Held them up next to each other.

I should say, as we're getting into these episodes,

you know, just to illustrate how

effective

the narrative moves around the Phantom Troop stuff is,

I'm not a media crier.

Like, I don't like watch things and cry, but I have like, I have two distinct moments of like kind of misty-eyed welling up in part of these episodes.

Oh, two moments, two and a half moments.

One in

one in 55, and then two in 58.

So Nobunaga immediately tries to kill Hisaka.

And he actually goes to fight Hisaka and then says,

You're too much of a pain to fight.

Looks down and turns away and then suddenly turns back and lunges,

saying, as if that would stop me.

And then Krolo teleports him.

Krolo teleports him away.

Krolo's nen power being any nen power that he has sort of gained is extremely funny because you don't know what he's gonna

pull from the book.

And there's a great line where Nobunaga says, did the boss do that?

Someone else says, probably.

It's so good.

It's like, who knows what could be in his bag of tricks at any time?

Like, that's such a powerful thing for a writer is

I've built in this thing.

It could be anything.

And I think like

the fact that the troop don't even know everything that he's got in there is like kind of kind of clutch or like kind of crucial to the the dynamic like krolo is a step above these guys so much that they don't even know all his power is yeah which in the sort of nen calculus is that's about as good as it gets you know uh we even saw this in heaven's heavens uh arena where it's like whoa whoa what's his power and then it reveals itself so for krolo to have this sort of seemingly limitless book but i think that nobunaga backing down and then it being a trick and him lunging is such a nice illustration in the difference between how Hisuka and Nobunaga see like worthwhile fights.

You know, Hiseka has that ridiculous game that he plays that I'm now sick of, where he's like, you have to be good enough to fight me.

And Nobunaga is like, I'm going to cut your head off with a katana because, you know, you betrayed the troop or whatever, and it's only Krolo's intervention.

Something about this Hiseka fabrication that I really liked is that between the fortunes

and between, you you know, the way that this has sort of been paced,

the Mr.

Bones' wild ride that we've been on with the troop assault on York New City, I was trying to remember how much of this was true.

You know, I could tell that not all of it was true, but I was there being like, how, where is Hisaka lying and where isn't Hisaka lying?

I can see in your notes, Dre, you wrote, does Hisaka have some weird Nen curse on him or is he bluffing?

And I think that that sort of understanding that the viewer might not have as full a grasp on this as Hisaka does is super deliberate in this scene.

Yeah, it's

there was like one major giveaway for me, and I think we went over this at the very end of the last episode when they read his fortune, but I don't have the text.

But I remember there, I remember when I first watched it, there was something that he said that tipped me off.

Like, oh, this like whole thing is a lie.

They also kind of show him like reading it and it's different and then he like folds the paper and then gives it oh, yeah, yeah, and then it's pretty clear that there was like some kind of a lie going on

I just spent the scene going like where is he lying and where is he telling the truth?

Yeah,

and it's it's subtle.

I mean cuz it really is partially true.

He did meet with Kropika.

It was he suka's idea.

That's part of the lie.

He didn't wasn't forced to do anything.

That's part of the lie.

And then the whole thing about, like, if you leave your hideout, half of the spiders will die.

Right.

So Hisaka.

Oh, go on.

I was just going to say, like, I think that that aspect is, like, the main reason Hisaka as a character works, right?

Like, this is just, if, if you don't have the

constant doubting, uh, or, like, if the audience isn't unsure of what's true and what isn't with Hiseka, then it, I don't think he lands nearly as well.

Yeah.

Um,

I agree.

Yeah.

I agree.

And especially as, like, oh, go ahead.

As how, how well they construct his lies.

You know, we watch Krolo

sort of figuring out all of the Karapaka stuff based off of Hisuka's lies.

And it's, you know, like, oh, this is really impressive.

But then the sort of like unstated undercurrent of that is that it's actually Hisuka, like, you know, making this path for Krolo while also protecting himself while also setting up a scenario where he gets to fight Krolo,

which is like

a sort of terrifying gymnastics that he's able to do to like try to get his way, which he ultimately doesn't get, but it was kind of only by chance and by not fully understanding Karapika's plan.

I don't know, and I don't...

I don't remember anything about this thing that I'm about to posit.

So I don't think I'm spoiling anything because I don't remember anything about this.

There's just a part of me that feels like, I don't know, man, maybe Krolo did know that Hisuko was like lying about the things that Hisuko was lying.

I also don't know.

Maybe, but there is, there is something,

there is something to that.

What makes you think that?

Krolo's just on the bowl so much.

Just the way he looks at Hisuka.

Yeah, because it's Krolo.

Also, like,

I don't know.

I don't know.

It like

you saw the length that Krolo had to go to be put like out of control and how much control he still had when that happens.

And so, a part of me is just like, I don't know, I bet he fucking knows.

There is one big hole in Hiseka's story, which is that his poem doesn't line up with anyone else's poem in what they're supposed to do in order to survive.

Everyone else's poem says, You need to get out of here, go east.

That's the only way.

Hiseka's poem says, don't seek revenge on the chain user.

That will kill you, but also stay at at the hideout.

If you leave the hideout, yeah,

and like it's one versus

seven or whatever.

Yeah, I do think Krolos is the only one who specifically says to go east, though.

I think everyone else is a little more vague, but Krolo's

the go eastward thing is like kind of like crucial to remember is just for Krolo, especially at the end of the episodes.

Because I think that's his like last line, right?

It is, yeah.

Hisuka really wants the troop to stay in York New City, and this isn't said explicitly, but my read, my understanding, which I think is correct, is that there is that thing which is that when the Phantom Troop disbands, Krolo disappears, and no one knows where he goes.

Yeah, um, and so I think Hisaka thinks if they go back to Meteor City, I just won't find this guy.

And it's been a long time since the Phantom Troop all uh sort of convened, so this is this is his moment.

Um,

but yeah, the Phantom Trope are,

not helped by Hiseka lying,

locked in a series of complicated fortunes.

The show doesn't really spend any time beyond the sort of the initial couple of reads of the Fortunes reminding you of the Fortune's conditions or of sort of sort of facets within them.

So the overall impression, if you haven't seen the show before, is that they are sort of...

standing frozen in the middle of a very dangerous maze.

You know, I have these sort of weird, shattered memories of, like, you can't be alone in the same place.

You can't leave your hideout.

You can't pursue the chain user.

You can't answer the phone at a certain time.

But I can never quite remember, like, when they trigger or to whom.

And I think that's fine.

You know, I don't think that the show is necessarily asking me, you know.

Remember these fortunes one-to-one so much as just get this awful feeling to mirror what the troop are feeling, right?

Of like, any move we make might, might,

you know, really screw us up.

Yeah.

And I think that you can feel a little bit of that, like how they're,

they kind of don't feel used to being trapped like that.

They're kind of the burden of knowing that for a lot of this.

They what?

The troop is bummed out for a lot of this.

They are, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Okay, we've got to move on or we will be mired in this forever.

Us?

Never.

Okay, so we cut back to

oh, oh, one last thing.

Sheltonic delivers a PowerPoint about uh conjurers versus manipulators because of Karapiga's chains, uh, just sort of reinforcing how important that part of Karapiga's kit is.

Yeah.

Um,

I think this is important because conjurers kind of felt like punks early when we first got the early descriptions of them, where it's like, well, you could make a really good sword, but like, why wouldn't you just buy one?

Yeah, type of thing.

And so, like, this kind of like recontextualizing them as more of a threat, I think, is really important.

Yeah.

Um,

Just because this comes back up later, again, Machi brings up Gonakila again.

Nobunaka's excited about it.

And then Krolo like sort of takes her sort of hunches very seriously, just sort of reinforcing Machi's,

not just her nen's threads, but her plot threads.

They've all been right, by the way.

Her threads.

They've all been right.

She's 100%.

She's 100%.

And

so, okay, so now we're back with

and Kilua, who they have to quickly remind us that the auction is still going on.

And then Gone sort of makes a promise to Kilua, but also kind of to the audience, don't worry, don't worry.

I've got a plan for Greed Island.

We can ignore it for now.

And then they.

There's a really good

bit where

Kilua's like, how sure are you about this plan?

And Gon's like, 70%, maybe more like 60%.

And then Kilua's like, oh, that means it's a 50-50 shot.

Yeah.

Doesn't reveal the plan, but they both are, or sorry, they both go to Karapika, but it's Gone really wants to go offer Karapika help.

Killu is like begging with his eyes for Karapika to not accept Gohan's help, but he does.

Fantastic internal monologue from Kilua during all this stuff where it's like Gon's like asking to like, we want to help.

And Kilua's like, say no, say no.

And then Karapika's like, it's really dangerous.

You could risk your life.

And Killua is like, don't throw.

You know, you're just fanning the flames with that one.

What are you doing?

It's great.

So they.

Oh, go ahead.

Karapika gives a little PowerPoint that we know already about kind of how the judgment chains or how the chains work.

There's some new information here, though, that's important.

Well, so Goan

says,

it's great.

Go and say, can you use the nan condition dagger on my heart?

And Lioru immediately says, look, Kilua,

we are going to leave the room so Goan and Karapika can have a talk.

Well,

there's a crucial line before that that I do want to point out where I think someone points out, it's like, well, he can only use that on the spiders.

And then they leave when Karapika's like, I'm going to explain it more.

Because

Gon's like, well, if you can only use it on the spiders, how come you have a judgment chain on yourself?

And that's a great question.

isn't a great question

um and then karate needs a sort of explanation about stuff

uh where it's kind of revealed that um

i think it's just is it just judgment chain that's the one that can only be used on the spiders or is it chain jail as well uh chain jail can only be used on the spiders judgment jail can be used on anyone Right, but okay, but his eyes have to be scarlet in order to use it.

And this is a lie.

This is a reveal that he lied earlier

because he said that he could only use it on the spiders and it just ends up not being true because he was worried that if he used it only on the spiders that spy setting that condition would break the condition and then immediately kill him.

Yes.

This is a bit like when

you

spec out a really interesting character in an RPG that allows for a lot of really expressive player design and you find that the spec that you've made instantaneously kills you.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

This won't work.

I need to go back here.

I've built a build that just destroys me instantly.

You literally have three sixes.

I equip explosive gloves that do a thousand points of exploding damage to everyone I punch, but oops, the exploding damage also explodes on me.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

And Goan's response to this is great.

He says, I'm not sure what that all means.

He asks Karapaka to set a rule on his heart.

I think just making explicit, you know,

a lot of the ways we have talked and thought about Goan's heart as like a transformative, powerful entity.

You know, everybody's hearts are really important in this show, and especially with non-contracts.

But here is Gohan saying, set a rule on my heart, you know?

Let's make a vow against my own heart or, you know, with my own heart.

And then Leorio and Kiliwa say, we would also like, you know, our own daggers.

They've been hiding behind the couch.

It was very funny.

It's so funny that they're like, let's leave.

And then they just end up behind the couch.

Like, did y'all...

Leorio doesn't know Zetsu yet.

How did he get there without them noticing it?

Kilua taught him Zetsu in 46 minutes.

I think there's another...

One thing that I made a note of in this scene before the explanation

was that Karapika admits, I think he admits...

I have a note here.

Again,

the recording schedule on this was a little messy, so I did like a rewatch of these, but it was less attentive than the first time I watched through.

But Karapika admits that he would risk the lives of his friends for his mission, which eventually we find out isn't true.

But in the moment, I thought was kind of chilling.

And I think like a good setup for the way things end up going where you're like, oh shit, is this going to happen?

Is Karapika going to give up his friends for the mission?

Spoilers.

No.

Well,

I thought that actually what happens in these episodes is that Karapika says, I thought that I would do that, but actually

he has the line that this is where he says,

you know, I thought that I would do anything for revenge, you know, but actually I was blessed with good friends, and so I'm actually going to

do that.

A new song here, by the way.

I was going to say, New Banger alert.

Eyes of Burning Scarlet.

God, yeah.

It's good.

You know that there's like some nightcore remix of this that goes hard as hell.

Yeah.

Like right

after that, it goes into like intense, you know, electric guitar power chords.

Yeah, well, still, any DJs out there who dress like Kiloa, please do a remix of that song.

Oh, hell yeah.

Are we talking about Kiloa Drip now?

I mean, there's some Kiloa Drip.

I wrote down in my notes that Kilua dresses like a Trans Mask DJ, and I stand by it.

It's true.

It's like so true.

I love all his outfits.

I say that as a compliment to Killua.

Oh, yeah.

Just to be clear to all the T-Boy DJs listening.

The other thing, the other thing that we can have, this isn't a new song, but it's the first time that I think we've played it.

We've talked about it, I think.

But The Eyes Burning with Scarlet is what plays when Karapika is explaining his powers and explaining how they're going to do their plan.

Oh, we didn't say his plan, by the way.

Killua is going to be the lookout to find

Pakanota.

Leorio is going to be the driver.

Karapi is going to be dressed like a beatnik for some reason.

and Goan is there to create a diversion of at least one half of a second to get it.

It's a plan-ass plan, you know, it's it's like Austin saying, What are you going to do?

And then we spend, you know, 46 minutes and come up with climb through the window.

Um,

it's that's the beginning and end of it.

But after the I've been busted with good friends, we get

the theme song, uh, or not the theme song, the our the media club plus theme song, uh, but with uh, with strings.

We get the

oh

this arrangement it's good i like it maybe my favorite in the show so far like it genuinely like it makes my heart feel happy when i hear it um i didn't bless this friend

this is a half tier i give this one half of it one half of a tier i was wondering if this was the the the the tier up moment um yeah actually i wanna i wanna i wanna uh dial into that line uh karapika says you're making a big mistake although it's great because karapika is now karapica's in a really great place he has committed to asking for help here.

He's committed to involving his friends in his quest for revenge, which was, you know,

the.

That was the question towards the end of the last little chunk of episodes, and now he is committed to it.

But he is still kind of resigned to saying, you are making a bad idea.

And I kind of like the trust and resignation that comes with saying, I'm glad you're here.

I'm glad that we are together.

I think you're making a bad mistake, but I am not going to stop you.

There's a slightly alternate take on this from Melody in the next episode, though, where

she says Karapika asked me for help.

He must be getting pretty desperate.

He's usually doing this on his own.

I think that this is a misread of Karapika's character.

I agree.

I think that it is

Melody not realizing that she is now someone that Karapika really trusts.

Yeah.

And we get a confirmation of that a little bit later on.

Where Goan talks about,

you know, Karapika being different now and thinking back back to the moment where he says he's been blessed with good friends, where something changed then that was, it was

not the same Karapika that Melody knew.

Karapika says, I've been blessed with good friends.

And then discussing the risks that are going to be sort of...

That he he is going to have to face Gohan says the pressure of risking my life isn't nearly as bad as letting down a friend.

Yeah.

Which is just the thesis statement for the hostage situation.

The thesis statement for Gone freaks too, honestly.

Yeah, right.

We sort of papered over this.

Gone's desire to have the.

to be judgment chained is

absurd.

It's outrageous.

Oh, yeah.

Well, Karapika doesn't do it, at least as far as we can see.

They talk about it.

Yeah, they talk about it.

Nobody gets judgment chained.

Yeah, and to none of them,

not to Killua or Leorio either.

It would be really funny if he just did it to Leorio, but, you know, Karapika's not doing this for bits the way I would be.

Yeah.

Great Kilua gag.

Goan and Kiliwa aren't and Karapika are like laughing along at some kind of a joke.

Leorio starts laughing and then Kilua starts laughing.

In his internal monologue, he says, this is not funny at all.

I think it's after the

Karapika says, like, oh, that's what I was hoping for after Gon says

the disappointment of letting down a friend is worse than dying.

I think it's like it's like shortly after that line.

So they're tangentially related in some way.

I mean, it's sad.

It's a scary moment.

It's up there with, you know, like every time Killua has been faced with Gon's sort of blithe obstinacy and gone, oh, God.

But it is very funny to see Killua laughing along and going, this isn't funny at all.

Yeah.

We mentioned his raincoat, right?

No, we did not.

Okay.

Because we're not there yet.

Actually, it's right after the I've been about to be good friends scene.

It's at the end of 55.

Yeah.

Okay.

So we're about to, we transition into

Killua sort of scouting out, wearing a rain.

Did anybody catch what his $1,800 Techway raincoat says on the column?

I can't see what it said.

Killua is wearing a.

What did I write down in my notes?

Killua in an extremely cool raincoat is sticking out a hideout.

It's like a parker that he has pulled the cord on the hood so that it fits really tightly around his face.

He's got a sort of almost like phetan-esque

flap covering his chin.

Yeah.

And written on the flap is ABC CBA.

Which of course stands for all bastard cops cops bastard all.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He briefly before this,

I'm only getting into this to sort of illustrate the

psychic hell that knowing their fortunes has put the Phantom Troop in.

Krolo attempts to sort of solve the

wheat, the chicken, and the fox

constraints that are being put on him.

The sort of that riddle of like, you know, right, yeah, the chicken fox over here.

The fox eats the chicken.

Yeah, he's doing Professor Layton puzzle.

He's doing it.

Krolo does a Professor Layton puzzle.

This is extremely funny because it is meaningless.

Events are about to transpire that means that all of Krolo's hard work about this gets undone in about a moment.

But Krolo says for the next few weeks, the spiders are going to be split into groups and nobody is going to be alone and then he goes down the list you know tagashi really sells that that this is going to be um significant and it breaks immediately he says yeah whatever 100 is it's a show that's not afraid to throw out a bunch of work

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Shizuku, Pakanoda, Machi work together, Kotopi, Finks, Feitan work together, Bonolenov, Franklin, Hisako work together, Nobunaga, Shalnark, and then Carlo says, I'll go with you.

It's sort of like the echoes of setting up all these tournaments just to be like, no, we're actually not really really going to do that.

Or if we do do it, we're not going to show it.

Just be like, we've set up all of these stakes and then they just get thrown away for something else.

Something different comes along.

Some new shiny thing.

The Bonolenov Franklin Hiseka trio has such dark universe vibes.

I don't know shit about Bonolenov.

He's nobody has said anything.

Here is what I will say.

I don't hunt down Hunter Hunter spoilers, and I've been really lucky not to have anything absolutely gigantic spoiled for me ever.

Oh my god.

Very occasionally, and I want to keep it that way, very occasionally I will just see like a completely contextless screenshot from Hunter Hunter in some like image compilation or something.

And I saw an image of Bonolenov and then someone with a load of like really sad-faced emojis next to it, which is one of the funniest context-free spoilers to get because it's like, either something really moving is going to happen.

with Bonolenov and I'm going to be there.

Or this person cares deeply about this mummy.

So that's exactly.

That is the only thing I know about Bonolanov.

I've seen an image of him and then a bunch of people responding with crying emojis, which is that's funny to me.

Machi tells Krolo about Gon and Kilua, Nobunaga, one of Nobunaga's two games.

Nobunaga actually has three games.

Nobunaga game one, I'm going to kill the person who killed Uvo.

Game two, I'm gonna fight anybody at the smallest moment's notice because I'm high strong

but I'm also kind of funny about it game three we should recruit Gona Killio

I I was talking about this recently with my girlfriend who I've been going through the show with about how Nobunaga like Nobunaga's grief is so like

it's like always present in these episodes in a way that like the specific grief of other Phantom troop members isn't necessarily there where like he wants to have a little Uvo again he wants to have ganin so he can like bring him up to be his new bestie um

or like because he reminds him of his dead best friend and it is really heartbreaking yeah i love nobunaga nobunaga is really great i'm glad no

has made it out of this little arc is he your favorite phantom troop member jenny no krolo is my favorite phantom troop

i don't know about anybody else just really quick can we check out sylvie's mic did it explode i backed up enough i didn't even i didn't even clip it's sylvie for some reason is the only person on friends of the table that gets ducked by discord for me whenever she gets loud the the mic just cuts out and so

no no one ever happens for yeah it's only you oh that's great i love that so i can hear the very start of a scream and then it i heard you go

and then immediately it turns into like a tiny little whisper of noise.

I'm turning off noise suppression than you guys get my sound rates.

My favorite of the legs is Nobu.

Oh, I got a nickname for him.

Then,

yeah, yeah, it's the

I'm just following on the Shao Paku.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm familiar that way.

And then I really do like, I think Machi is great.

Finx comes up really well in these episodes.

This is something I also really,

like, this watch through, I didn't really put together, how much Finx has like got a place in my heart.

Yeah, I love that.

Yeah, this is work done to develop Finx, and we'll get there.

Finx's development kind of happens in two or three moments, including some of the funniest phone business I've seen in years.

Oh, it's so funny.

It's probably my favorite parts of these episodes as far as just like comic relief.

It's great.

Finx manages to screw up using a phone in every way you could use a phone across three separate calls and two separate phones.

There's nothing, there's nothing

there's only one thing that's even close to as funny as Finks

answering the phone and then immediately having to give the phone to someone else and being so mad about it.

And it's another Finks moment.

Yeah, okay, so

Machi speaks about her hunch again that something's wrong here, and Krolo says, Your instincts are too reliable to ignore.

Part of the reason that Krollo is a good leader is that he is very aware of

what

the legs, what the other spiders can provide for him that he can't.

And this is actually an argument for me that Krolo couldn't tell that Hisuka was bluffing.

He might have been, Krolo might have been counter-bluffing.

You know, Krollo might have been making Hisuka think, does he know?

But I think Krolo has got people like Pakunoda and Machi in the troop

to account for this, you know?

Yeah.

And I think that's really cool.

It's also so fun to see so much weight is put on Pakanoda as the kind of

the Phantom Troop has got all aspects covered.

They've got the past covered in Pakanoda.

They've got the future covered in Krolo's fortune telling via Miss Neon.

And then they've got sort of like vague guesses about the present covered in Machi.

I do have a which is nice.

I have a slightly alternate theory about Krolo and Hisuka and the does Krolo know?

Which is that does he know?

I don't know.

Does he know?

I don't.

We know.

I don't know.

i i think that these episodes demonstrate that krolo has a desire to win and for him winning means surviving but that his overall motive is for the spiders to survive and i think that if he had a hunch that hiesuka was only in the spiders to kill krolo that that would

be fine

because he's either like like,

yeah, they'll get a new head.

Yeah, either he could do it or he couldn't do it, and either way is acceptable, or maybe it doesn't happen.

Maybe I'm just thinking crazy.

It won't.

I gotta be honest.

I think if Krolo and Hisuka fight, Hisuka would get fucking dogwalked.

Like, I don't think he stands a chance

until the end of the fight.

It's so funny.

Okay.

As part of his Professor Layton puzzle, Krolo asks Kotopi to make 10 dummy hideouts.

This is another rapid escalation of Nen.

You know, I have now just given up on the sort of upper limit of what I think Nen can do.

We saw Kotopi copy things,

and now Kotopi, Krowlo says, make 10 hideouts, and Kotopi says, I'll make you 50.

And they will all act as N.

Anybody who enters them will be.

Yeah, Kotopi instantly makes a fake city.

And it's great.

It's such a beautiful set.

And it really guides us into...

So, Kilua on the rooftop in his all-bastard cops, cops bastard, all

raincoat

looks out at this sort of

God, it's like a surrealist painting.

It looks like Meteor City.

To me, at least.

Like, that is the way

it super does.

Yeah, like, that, I think, is, I don't know.

There's a lot of, like, I have a lot of Meteor City thoughts percolating because of this arc, not just because they talk about how, like the mafia doesn't want to like piss off meteor city but also like there's a cut there's a moment earlier where like some of the the found i think finks is the one who mentions that they some of them didn't have it all the data needed to do i was thinking about that and i was like they must not know their birthdays yes that is and like i think that again is

really ties to where they come from and like the the the like conditions that molded them into the phantom truth right i mean they're perfectly at home in this dilapidated church it's I was just thinking of the

fake,

yeah, it's the quote that is

attributed to the Spanish anarchist Durutti, but was actually probably written by a Dutch writer called Pierre van Passen, who fabricated an interview with him.

Nonetheless, it's a fantastic line in which Duruti is quoted as saying, we are not at all afraid of ruins.

You know, with the implication being, you know,

we have spent our lives in ruins, ruins that have been constructed by the bourgeoisie, literal ruins of conflict.

If you think that we are scared of a little ruin, of bringing things to a little ruin, of inhabiting ruin, you know, you've got another thing coming.

Yeah, the Phantom Troop are in this dilapidated church because, not just

that's the only place they can be, but because they're like clearly not, we see them all over the place

in fancy suits, in you know, yeah, uh,

they're they're very happy with this.

Um,

oh, another thing, just on this, real quick, is um, uh, we only get it as sort of conjecture, a conjecture from Melody, sort of extrapolating,

extrapolating, like, why would they call off the hunt for the phantom troop?

Uh, and uh, in the last episode we recorded,

uh, right, well, her sort of imagining that, oh, well, I guess probably the mafia doesn't want to piss off

relationships with Meteor City because they're from there and the troop is from there.

And who knows how much of that makes sense as a guess?

Like, it seems like people don't know a lot about Meteor City unless they're from there.

But I do kind of like it, the idea that Meteor City is out there, like, rooting for the Phantom Troop.

Like, yeah, fucking get them.

I mean, like,

I, if I was from the city that society forgot, I would probably root for the super strong fuckers from here.

That we learn about the Phantom Troop is that they're known for their philanthropy.

Yeah.

And the only thing that to me that makes sense is that they like, oh, they just like funnel huge amounts of money back to Meteor City.

Hey, the Phantom Troop's fucking incredible.

How did you get through the first chunk of this show, Media Club Plus, without being like, I want to talk about the Phantom Troop?

Jack is hard.

Jack white-knuckling.

That's so hard.

No way.

And also, by the way, we talked about them every chance that we got, which were few and far between, but we did, we, you know, we did.

Anytime there was a hint of the Phantom Troop troops showing up, you were like, yeah, the Phantom troops.

Yeah, and you were able to say Krolo's name.

You know, I'd seen pictures of them, but

I was so glad that I was able to say Krolo's name because of the screenshot stream.

Yeah, that would have killed me.

Worth saying, does Karapica know Krolo's name?

Karapika calls him the leader.

And I can't tell whether that's just Karapica's way of speaking or if he has actually extracted the name from.

I don't think he has.

He could have.

Uvo didn't give him any info.

No.

What What did you say, Keith?

He could have gotten his from Hisuka at any time, really.

That's true.

That's true.

Yeah, good point.

But I can't tell.

Karapaka is exactly the kind of weirdo who would be calling him the leader.

I love the way that the troop call him boss.

They don't use his name.

Nobody especially puts a lot of energy into calling him boss.

He just has this special kind of boss delivery.

Yeah, it's great in the dub as well.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

That's actually, I watched, I watched almost every other arc primarily in the subs.

And this arc I watched mostly in the dubs because I like.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Well, partially, I think that a lot of the Phantom Troop VO is excellent

in the dub.

And then also because

it's just been a lot easier to take notes without having to pause it constantly.

I prefer Crollo's Japanese voice, so I stuck to it.

I was going to ask about

Crollo's English VA a little, but it was before we'd heard him speak in Japanese a lot.

Does he still have this kind of like pale light affect in English?

Yeah, yes, totally.

To me, it's a very good thing.

It sounds like a face-to-face almost, but

it feels a little more pronounced in the dub to me, but that also could just be because I'm an English speaker and I'm able to parse the nuances of the linguistic things they're doing there easier than when I'm listening to Japanese voice acting, you know?

Yeah, sure.

The Hunterpedia this week,

that's the end of the episode, is is Killua in his raincoat looking out at

all the copies of the hideout and going, shit, okay, this is going to be trickier than I thought.

The Hunterpedia is Phaetan.

Killua says, his hobby is to torture, which is pretty awesome.

That's really, you know...

This is, again, the way I think of these papercraft Hunterpedia figures as sort of being like the larger-than-life expressions of their characters.

And here we have Killua as this assassin child being like, his hobby is to torture.

That's pretty awesome.

When in fact, you know, in the show, Killua is like, I would prefer not to fight or kill anybody.

I don't have to.

That's miserable.

My family come from torturers and I hate them all.

Gon does a Phaetan impression.

I don't remember what he does, but I think he

pulls his...

He puts his, why am I forgetting the name?

He's like, his jacket up.

His collar.

Yeah, he pulls his collar up over.

He talks like this for a little bit.

I can't do a Phaeton very well either.

Killua also is like, that's a terrible impression.

Killua would get my ass too.

We get a little bit here.

Something that I love about the Hunterpedias is their willingness to, A, give us information about characters who have just died, as though they're still alive.

And B,

give us information

that hasn't come through in the episode at all.

Phaetan is apparently interested in Greed Island.

And that's interesting.

Yeah, that is interesting.

Because this is my first hint that, you know, obviously we're going to see the troop outside of their arc here.

You don't write characters this good and then just jettison them at the end of one arc.

But this is sort of the first hint of how that might get woven back in.

You know, if Feytan is also interested in Greed Island, then he might be a player in the Greed Island arc, like a literal player.

You know, we'll see.

Yeah, I don't know if it's necessarily a spoiler to say that the Phantom Troop cast a very long shadow over this show.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Do you think that when, how much of a planner is Tagashi?

I don't know.

I genuinely don't know.

Well, I don't know either.

It seems like at least like an arc or two ahead.

From watching the show,

what I gather is

a lot of planning, but it's hard to know because this is also kind of the second run at the show.

And so a lot of the manga's been written.

And so it's easier to put this adaptive word.

Like, oh, I'm blaming on her name.

The

cool butler with the staff.

Canary.

Canary, right?

Canary,

who actually we took we took a chance to talk a lot about meteor city based on like one line about meteor city uh

um

like yeah yeah they put that stuff in the show

that wasn't in the manga or in the 99 version um like a lot of that information uh oh maybe i'm wrong maybe i'm misremembering that it's actually the flashback

I can't remember now, which is the part that's in the manga and which isn't.

The flashback of like trying to make friends with Kilua.

I think that's manga canon, but the backstory about Meteor City and the Phantom Troop

is anime cannon.

Okay, because we do have that flashback of

Kilua and Kanary trying to be friends in the show.

We do have that.

Yeah, yeah.

They're both in the anime, but only one of them is in the manga.

Oh, that's what you mean.

Okay.

Yeah.

There is.

There is stuff that happens in this arc that is still paying off in the manga.

Oh, yeah, definitely.

I know.

To me, that leads me to believe that Tagashi does plan significant stuff out ahead.

But I don't know if it means everything is.

Yeah, who knows?

Especially when you're writing a serialized work that, you know, had such a grueling publishing schedule that it gave him permanent health problems.

He's got four endings already.

So, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Maybe that says something about how much planning he's doing.

I think, especially when you spend so much of your life working on one specific story, you have to have some level of ideas of where you want it to go.

Yeah.

Otherwise, you're just flying blind.

Exactly.

And that is, you know,

I have a great deal of respect for people who are able to work without an outline or are able to work with their intuition in terms of where a story would go.

But I think that if you are working on something of this scale, and like Sylvie said for such a long time, it becomes exhausting, you know, even to not have an outline you know even setting aside is the story good is the story working i think to work on something of this scale without like much of a sense of of where you are moving would just tire you out and i mean that is kind of what happened to Tagashi but but I was thinking about you know Tagashi writing the early stuff on Whale Island and thinking to himself I'm gonna introduce 13 nightmares then I'm gonna kill one of them really quickly

you'd better wait and see it makes me think you know we've talked a lot about Tagashi's dear love for freaks

F-R-E-A-K-S.

And he never has his dear love for freaks.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The Phantom Troop are his dearest freaks, right?

We're never going to meet any freaks that he loves more than the Phantom Troop.

I don't know.

It's hard to tell.

I actually think, you mentioning that, the early Whale Island stuff, the thing that we have mentioned that is cut from the 2011 anime, but is in the first chapter of the manga, I think speaks to

Tagashi definitely having a long view of things.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, that's a phenomenal.

Yes, absolutely.

I didn't put that together until Jack mentioned Whale Island.

That is the thing.

And we won't be able to bring it up for another arc.

That is like a fucking, you know, kilometer sniper shot through the entire series.

Holy shit.

Yeah, that is Babe Ruth calling his shot.

Like, that is, he's, he is about to, he is going to make that home run, you know?

Can one of you all

message you.

Yeah.

DM me.

Yeah, well, you write that message.

I will say,

you know, Jack, the thing about,

you know, Whale Island and the Hunter exam and being like,

one day I'm going to introduce so many freaks and they're going to murder each other and it's going to be crazy.

Something that I wrote in

the working doc,

you know, weeks and weeks ago based off of like listening to us have a conversation that I was editing for an episode that was going up.

You had written

or you had said in that episode,

where is it?

This is is a big block of text.

I should edit this down.

Oh, you also did guess early on.

I think the Phantom Trooper are a one-in, one-out gang of murderers.

That was a pretty good guess.

Jack has machi-like hunches.

Here it goes.

There's something flattening.

Absolutely.

There's something flattening in the way that all the messages from the beginning of learning about Nen.

Flattening in the way that all the magic in the world that appeared in the Hunter exam as this outlandish, regularly, deeply surprising maneuvering first gets boiled down into nen, then gets further boiled down into six Pokemon types.

If the ways that I'm being guided to think and talk about this world are, if I'm being pushed towards, oh, right, this person is an enhancer rather than, oh, this is Goan and Goan behaves this way or whatever.

I feel like I'm walking into mirrors in a mirror maze.

Did you talk about mirror maze earlier too today?

I talked about a dangerous maze.

Okay.

I just like mazes.

One thing I wish.

Oh,

that's the end of what you were talking about.

And I wrote that one thing I wish I said here to Jack is that it's okay to never stop having a soft spot for the Hunter exam.

And that's why for me, it's a vital part of my enjoyment of the show as a whole.

The way that the world kind of opens up and complicates, like, I think it does generate a nostalgia for the simpler version of the show.

And that that is like textual about the show.

I think like

that, that it's that like looking back with funness to the squid game.

Yeah, I think it's like I think it's yeah, there's a part of the show that's like wow, I wish that gun could just be living in that time back before Nen, back

when the hunter exam was just like uh sort of like an obvious first step to finding his dad

before he was like being like Kropiga, shoot a fucking magic dagger into my heart right now and make me swear on my death to help you.

Um, let's move on to 56.

Okay.

Um, we've talked a little bit about this beginning stuff here with Courtipe.

Yeah, the first note I have here is that Killua has a line where he says, he's looking out across the copied city, and he says, I have no idea what I'd do if I heard one of them behind me.

My heart is already pounding.

And I love how the Phantom Troop has opened up Killua to fear, as far as the audience can see it.

Well,

Illumi did.

That's true.

Ilumi did first.

And then,

because, you know, in a lot of the Hunter exam, yes.

But even post-Ilumi, it's important that you bring this up.

I agree with you, by the way.

There's stuff with,

oh, what's Killua's brother called?

The computer hacker.

Miluki.

Yeah.

There's stuff with Miluki torturing him where it becomes clear that Killua is not scared of this at all.

I don't think that Ilumi has sort of like

maybe on some level, Illumi has asked Killua to recontextualize how he thinks about fear.

But the troop troop from the off, Kilua has been saying, do not mess with them.

They are stronger than us.

They will kill us.

It's linked to me, right?

Because we have that moment in our last set of episodes, right?

Where I think it's the last set of episodes where this happens, where they're captured by Nobunaga, and Kilua is going to try and, like, he wants to fight to get out, but he has that vision of,

like, it basically feels like Ilami directly speaking to him in the moment, being like, don't fight an opponent that is

stronger than you.

Don't fight anyone who can kill you.

And that, like, that was two episodes ago, by the way.

It was two episodes ago.

Okay.

I watched that episode pretty recently again.

So that's why.

But yeah, you're right.

I think that I think that Kilua is who's introduced as kind of a terror.

And there is a point, Jack, where you're like, I don't know if anyone in the world is stronger than Kilua.

13 people here are stronger than Kilua.

At least.

But Kilua is like, compared to Goan, is so cautious.

like with Ilumi, with Hisuka,

and then now with the whole Phantom troop, I think that he's realistic about his chances in a way that, and his skill versus other people's skill.

When compared to Goan, and when we see that, that part at the beginning of Heaven's Arena where he ranks

everyone on the scale and he puts himself way above Goan, but then puts Hisuka and

uh

hanzo way above himself um i think it shows that maybe he's even a little too cautious i you know maybe i'm wrong here misinterpreting but i feel like hanzo ain't shit uh

yeah i mean like i feel like i feel like kiloa

compared to kilua yeah probably yeah at this point yeah and also i i do think that kiloa probably could but i think i i mean given what happened at the end of that arc right with kilua being mind-controlled by Ilumi and killing someone and stuff like that.

Well, potentially mind-controlled.

Potentially mind-controlled, yeah.

I think that, like, him

may, I don't know, something about that, like, ties together to me that I'm not necessarily putting into words right now.

Yeah.

No, I think I see where you're coming from.

Um, brief Hanzo aside, Hanzo, and I realized this the other day, is actually fairly high on my list for potential spiders.

It's potential spider replacements.

Interesting.

Um, you don't think his

you know, ethics or whatever would prevent him from being a spider?

For some reason, I thought you were going to say his bald head.

Is anybody bald in the spiders?

Bottle lenoff, my people.

Potentially, yeah.

Yeah.

Anyway,

oh,

to Killua's fear,

something that is notable is Silver and Zeno are not scared of the Phantom Troop.

This is great.

They are older professionals.

They are, you know, Killua is a trained assassin, but he's also a 12-year-old trained assassin.

Silver and Zeno are like...

They're annoyed by the Phantom Troop.

They're annoyed by the Phantom Troop.

What a chore.

What a pain.

Is it not worth the trouble?

Was that what Silva said?

It wasn't worth the trouble to take a contract

that he ever pays a target, which is a great line.

They get the impression that they are

that they see them as worthy opponents in the sense that not in a Hisaka sense of worthy, like a sort of psychosexual

qualification, but in the sense of like, they'll put up a fight and I'm going to have to work hard.

And we see this when Silver does that, no, Xano does that incredible dragon move on Krollo.

Oh, yeah.

That was so cool.

Yeah.

Are we in the car?

No, are we?

I want to skip to the car.

There's just

Krollo does some more detective work.

Krollo figures out

why

Neon is at the auction and then sort of works out why Karapika is hunting them.

This takes him longer than it might have taken me, but I have the

I can see the show.

Yeah, I can see all the different parts.

This

combined with the way that Kortopi, like they talk about Kortopi's N, I feel like is like such a big, like, oh, the roller coaster is cresting the top of its rise.

Yeah.

This is what we talked about early, where when they're making the fake city

as a to hide their hideout, Cordopi's like, Yeah, the building's function is my end.

So if they're walking through it, I'll be able to tell that there's intruders coming.

And then they now reuse that ability for, hey, Cordobye, like we just realized that we have those scarlet eyes, and we know about that the phantom, the chain user also was interested in scarlet eyes.

Why don't you find the scarlet eyes, touch them, and then it'll bring us to where their hideout is.

And this we got like a really good shot of them like digging through crates trying to find the scarlet eyes.

They're overwhelmed by their own loot the um

the

visual of kordopi using his n is so cool i like love the way that you describe what this looks like i wrote down kortopi vision it's just like it's sort of like um

is it what you say wireframe i don't really know how to describe the actual like the um the beginning of escape from new york yeah there's like some the the it there's like this representation of the city and then the red eyes are just like floating in the darkness basically of it.

And I like that it's just the position of the eyes that you get.

Like there are limitations in this.

It's not necessarily like

Cortopi can tell how many people are in the same room as the eyes.

He can just tell, oh, they're moving this way and someone has them.

Which I think is like great for the tension of these episodes, especially when Squala, who is there with the eyes,

tries to leave with them.

Oh, Squalla.

Oh, Squala.

All those death flags finally came home to roost.

Yeah,

the one last job cliche finally took its toll.

This is last day before retirement.

Literally, we get him

telepathically communicating with his girlfriend in the last episode where it's like, I'm going out now.

It's like, okay, I'll see you soon.

I'll be fine because I have my dogs.

No.

No, you don't want to.

Oh, that one little dog is so cute.

And when he gets out of the car, he lets the dogs run away.

The dogs run away.

And they all do.

I do love Squalla.

Yeah, poor Squala.

I like like his dogs.

I don't know how I feel about him.

No, I like him.

Well, his dogs like his dog.

He's a wife guy.

He is a wife guy, yeah.

Two things.

The floating red eyes in the kind of wireframe city as Cortopi sees it sort of literalizes the way the troop views the chain user as sort of like as they learn someone possessed of a pair of scarlet eyes hunting them down you know single-mindedly loose in the city we get a new song here by the way this is this song this there's a great song in in this chunk of episodes called

holding a card file

oh

oh

i can see the river dancers in my mind yeah holding a card

play a lot next season

it's a good it's a good track um it's got some movement to it um i i think that um

The composers here are great, and I don't mean this as like a broader dig at the composers.

I think that they have ended up in a situation where throughout the Phantom Troop arc,

a lot of the troops' themes and a lot of Kilua's theme kind of moves quite sedately.

It's very sad, it's very melancholy, but it's very sort of gentle.

It's one tempo, it's not syncopated.

The chain bastard is syncopated and is high tempo.

Thank you.

So much, yeah.

But that plays in kind of specific moments.

So it was really nice to get, I think about like the wonderful arrangement of Hiseka's theme in Heaven's Arena, where it's the full sort of flamenco band coming into play.

Hiseka's theme with this great syncopation.

That hasn't been a good thing.

It's a blade soundboard.

I'll make sure to have that on the board.

It's one of my favorite cues so far.

You know, a show full of great cues.

I like both of Hiseka's songs.

I like

the Spanish guitar sort of solo version and then the more ornate version from Heaven's Arena.

They've only written one theme for him, which is...

Oh, sorry, it's the same funny, but it's like two basic.

It's just arrangements.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's also, you know,

you don't hear all the instruments until you know about nen it's so good yeah it's great isn't that good oh isn't that good you don't you don't get the whole picture you just get the sort of vibe of it

something that i really want to make sure i note here as krollo puts together why neon is at the auction krollo has been so focused on her ability to see the future and and the sort of role that that would give her in the mafia That he neglects to sort of see the obvious thing, which is

she cares about

flesh goods, she cares about evil,

and she's come to the auction to bid.

And this is sort of the first domino that lets Crowlo work out really quickly, you know, what the chain user wants and how the chain user thinks.

And I wrote down here: this might be a weakness of Crowlo's.

This like focus on ability or procedure,

neglecting the kind kind of obvious

other things that are in play.

And

this is a weakness of Krollo's.

It's the thief's mentality, right?

Like, Krollo is so focused on what they're there to steal, not necessarily on the people around it.

And I think that that, again, ties into his nen ability, ties into the Phantom Troops MO entirely.

And it is Krollo's blind spot.

It is absolutely.

Krolo makes, in these next couple of episodes, Krolo makes a colossal misreading.

And it it is wonderful seeing a character who who we who we know is incredibly smart is incredibly good at reading people krollo makes a mistake or or has a misapprehension about how the troop how his own phantom troop works and i really love this little tease of this in krolo explicitly saying maybe i overlooked what was obvious uh in figuring out you know why neon was here

I thought that was really nice.

Do you think...

Maybe this is a question for later, but I'm almost positive that I'll forget it.

So, I'm going to say it now: which is like, there's two kinds of ways that Crowla makes the mistake that he does,

which is thinking that the troop are going to treat him like a replaceable head the way that he sees himself.

Is it that

he's so confident in his order to them to treat him that way?

Or is it something like

that he doesn't understand

how influential of a leader is he overestimating or underestimating

I think it might be the latter I think yeah I think he believes that these people are his friends I think he I think he would

disagree with that

although you have I suppose I mean I do yes I suppose what I mean is

it's the it's it's a mirror of Krapica, which is wonderful.

I Don't think he believes that these people care about him in such a way that they would risk the troop to save his life

Yeah,

I mean hey, guess what Sylvie had the most sympathetic read of this it's shocking

The way I came through for me was like he doesn't want them to do this because he doesn't want he would rather him die than lose more the more members of the troop like he would rather be replaced than have yeah like

I don't think those are necessarily like, I think those can coexist.

Yeah, probably.

I think it can both be true that that is what he wants, and that he doesn't also fully understand that that would make him

the Phantom Troop friends with each other.

But then the question is, why does he care about the survival of the troop or of the spider if the spider doesn't necessarily mean any like he's basically like the spiders are a ship of Theseus.

It doesn't matter how many parts gets replaced as long as the ship is still intact.

Well, but, but why does he think that?

I don't, and then he gets an opportunity to answer that question and fully doesn't.

He says some insane shit that doesn't make any sense.

Does this come back to I have that written down?

Yeah, of course I do.

Does this come back to like us not having like the full picture of the troop, maybe?

Like, does this come back to Meteor City?

Does this come back to like origins?

Because it it has to right yeah yeah i think that there is um

krolo ideology and phantom troop ideology are a venn diagram i think i think that you know what krollo believes the function of the phantom troop is and what the phantom troop as an entity has sort of been constructed to do

are things that have a degree of similarity and a degree of difference.

And so I think there's a great Crowlo moment like to where he begins to express his ideology and then stops himself.

And I think that this is something that we just don't have a full picture of yet.

And I know that a lot of post-anime manga is spent on what is the Phantom Troop's deal?

Which is really, really interesting.

But yeah, I think that there is something going on there.

I think that Krollo has a

consistent internal belief for why the Phantom Troop should be allowed to sort of continue, why it's important that they continue as a sort of ship of Theseus.

The Phantom Troop Crowlo

is like, all right, fine.

We're on the move.

We're going to get the thing.

This is great.

They go, Krollo quickly switches some groups around.

He does a little more Professor Layton very quickly.

Yeah.

And goes stalking out

into the city.

We need to talk about the car.

We've skipped the car.

We need to talk about what's going on in the car because here's my first note for this episode.

In the

car, you mean

Melody

Leorio and Karapika.

Karapika.

Yes.

Or going Leorio and Karapika at this point.

Melody is out with Kilu.

When I saw Karapika dressed like a girl, I stood up and started clapping at my TV.

This isn't even the most girl that Karapika.

It's not.

But like these entire, these whole episodes, I was like standing up and clapping like a dude watching the Super Bowl.

Like I was like,

yeah,

yeah.

Like I was losing.

Oh my shit.

This is funny because I wrote in two different places

what Karapika was dressed like.

The first note that I have is of the episode is beat Nick Karapika.

And then later on, I have Karapika dressed like old Joni Mitchell.

Oh, he's seen clouds from both sides now.

This is lovely.

Karapika looks great.

It was great.

Hey,

I wonder why I had so much trouble referring to Karapika with he, him pronouns at the beginning of the show.

I know.

He's got like nice nails.

Oh, yeah.

No, I'm just saying.

I'm just saying.

I'm pushing an agenda, but you know, I freely admit to it.

Sure.

It's Sylvie's two-part agenda.

Part one, Girl Karapika.

Part two, Krolo exclamation mark.

Yeah, yeah.

Yes.

Yes.

As the Phantom Troop leave,

the episode moves into a really cool phase, which is like the villains stalking through the city and our heroes alternately kind of tracking them and trying to figure out what's going on.

People on our side, by which I mean Karapica's side, immediately get freaked out when they're like, why are they on the move?

What are they doing?

Are they, you know,

they think they found the chain user, and we don't think that they have actually found Karapika, but they're probably going to the hotel.

Killer and Gon start tracking them and in the middle of all of this we get these lovely shots of oh it's worth saying a rainstorm has rolled in at the beginning of the last episode and it has just been raining non-stop the whole time.

It looks so cool.

This city just drenched in this like grey miserable sort of rain shimmer, rain sort of like mist rising from all the surfaces as the troop kind of stalks through it.

And we get lots of city establishing shots.

I remember earlier in Media Club Plus, I was kind of bemoaning the fact that we didn't actually see a lot of York New City on street level.

And York New City is all over these episodes.

People riding the train, people in traffic jams, people putting up umbrellas to protect them from the rain, people walking around outside of stations.

You know, part of the way that Tagashi and the anime team sell, isn't it terrifying that the Phantom Troop are on the move?

Is that they situate them in a city full of normal people?

It's a great moment when the Phantom Troop suddenly break into a run, and I can't tell if it's just like dramatic license from the camera, but they seem to be like running on a wall or something.

Oh, yeah, they're totally running on the wall, yeah.

Yeah.

And there are these great reaction shots from just like regular people looking and going, what the fuck is going on?

I have a note here about how Crollo runs, which is that he's doing the John Lennon walk at three times speed.

Yeah, why does he do that?

This guy is so funny.

Why is he doing that?

I think it's just got to do with the outfit, honestly.

I feel like, you know, he's wearing those big boots.

It's hard to run it.

As someone who has knee-high boots, it's kind of hard to run in those.

He did not pick up on the John Lennon.

He has his hands in his pockets when he runs.

What's he?

I don't know.

I don't think he does.

The note that I wrote about Crowler's outfit here, actually, is that, you know, we get to see Krullo's shirt for the first time,

you know,

in clear light rather than in his.

Take it off.

Sorry.

Who is that?

I don't know.

He wears a shirt with a spider web on it, which is great.

He's the leader of the spiders.

Melody is holding her hat down in the wind.

Lots of really good detail of the web.

Melody and Kiloa's little team-up that we get in these episodes is great.

Just like

Melody being the nice aunt who is like telling Kilua, like, wow, you have the nicest footsteps I've ever heard.

They're so quiet.

Yeah, I really adore just like, because like early on in the arc, I remember the first time watching those, the two characters I didn't think like

would really, I didn't, I wouldn't have thought Killow and Melody would do much interacting this arc, you know?

Yeah.

And then we got like a couple really nice moments of it.

And it's just, I love when they do that, you know?

It is definitely the most like fandom brain shit I have about this show, which is like, oh, I love seeing these two characters I like interact.

But they do it well, so

you know, I'm allowed.

Uh,

yeah, this is where we get Melody's line about uh, you know, Karapika must be really desperate if he's brought friends in.

We spoke a bit about, you know, Melody's read on that line, but something that I like is that this strikes Killua, kind of this, this affects Killua hearing this, because it is at the intersection of all Killua's anxieties.

He is worried about Gon, he's worried about Gon's broader obstinacy and desire to help, even when it puts him in danger, he's worried about Karapika's single-mindedness, and he wants to prove himself.

Akilua, you know, wants to prove himself as capable and independent.

He's definitely come like full circle on

the version of himself that was like annoyed with Goan for waiting up for Leorio at the start of the Hunter exam.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like, he's like...

He's not upset about having to help Karapika.

He's just worried about Goan, who takes things too far.

He's worried about not being able to help Karapika.

It's like a full 180.

Yeah, but I liked seeing his little reaction, seeing that what Melody had said had kind of struck him precisely because it was the laundry list of Killua's anxieties all being talked about at once.

This scene also ends with one of Killua's great non-sequiturs, Killua.

Later in this episode, Killua talks about Gone.

He says, I'm so glad that I'm friends with someone who doesn't shy away from asking questions because Gone, you know, just like will butt in with a question, whereas Kiliwa will try and keep quiet, but will actually secretly want to know the answer to the question.

But I think something Killiwa does really well, and is often played as a kind of weird, weird humor, is that Kiliua will be very blunt and open about what he feels very suddenly, even if he is almost answering a question that hasn't been asked or following on from a sentence that hasn't been said.

The example here that I really like is after Melody compliments Killio's footsteps, he says, I guess I'm in the habit of moving silently.

And then she compliments his technique.

And Kilua's response to this is, I'm not too thrilled about all of this.

Where he's sort of like, you know, we can talk about my technique here, but like, really, what this comes down to is that we're doing something that I'm not excited about and I'm afraid of.

Much like me, Kilua is a habitual toilet stepper.

Always has to tiptoe around, hates making noise.

Respect.

Killua telephones in to Karapika to let him know that the group is moving and he mentions Krolo.

He says their leader is with them.

This is the first time any of our characters have seen Krolo, correct?

I believe so.

Yeah, yeah.

And a new music track plays here, Keith.

Do you have it?

I don't, I don't, I, I don't know that a new music track does play.

Oh.

I'll need to listen back to this.

It was notable to me at the time, but I may just have been wrong.

So the tracks that I have playing around here are a field in spring from whale island and dirge from the dark side and then uh As for those outlaws unrivaled strength, which is like another spider song plays a little bit after that.

It's accounted for all music that happens from

Yeah, there's no gaps here from for the whole episode basically.

There's three minutes between 1544 and 1809 that are like don't have music, but that seems believable to me.

Yeah, you shouldn't soundtrack something all the way through unless it's like a ballet or something.

Yeah.

Squala, little, you know, a man about to face his death scenes intercut here, something that is very funny, so we get to see Squala's Nen being applied to the dogs properly for the first time.

What the fuck?

This is such a funny gag.

Someone knocks on the door.

You're going to make this guy do something ridiculous before he dies.

Yeah, someone knocks on the door to bring room service, and it's great.

You know, this is classic.

Like, oh, are these the killers?

But it's not.

And Squala commands one of his dogs with Nen to go and bring in the room service.

The dog stands up like a man, walks over to the door, opens it, wheels in the cart like a man, and lifts the closh off the food.

This is just Tagashi having a little joke with us, right?

Because, like,

we've known he can control dogs the whole time, and we've seen him use...

His nen power on the dogs.

The dogs have attacked, they've sort of ran around, they've scouted.

And so in Squala's last moments, the reveal that he could also command them to act like fancy little men is so funny.

He should have been like doing a Vegas

variety show with these dogs instead of being a bodyguard.

Like, he could have, like, he really could have had this a way safer lifestyle.

Instead,

yeah, as the troops split up and make for the hotel,

Karapika's plan just falls apart completely.

This is the nadir of of Karapika's planning.

First,

Goan and Kilua start chasing

the troop, and then Karapika starts chasing the troop, and then Killua says, what's wrong with these people?

It's like they do whatever they want.

This coming from the

spoiled boy rich assassin is so funny.

Killua genuinely does have, you know, struggles with, and his plotline is often about the kind of discipline that he has, but it is so funny to see him, to see Killiua being the one who's like

these fucking idiots.

Yeah, the guy who we know has canonically spent tens of thousands of dollars on candy.

Being like, they gotta do whatever they want all the time.

And then the hostage situation sort of emerges.

In order to save Karapika's life and sort of prevent him from acting rashly, Goan and then Killiua offer themselves up as hostages.

They don't do this explicitly.

They just play the line of like, we didn't know the bounty was cancelled and we were following you again.

And I looked it up, by the way.

The song I think that you're talking about, Jack, is it a guitari song, heavy guitar song?

Possibly.

It's syncopated.

It's got a really good percussion part.

Yeah, I believe that that is Ask for Those Outlaws Unrivaled Strength, which is just one of the spider songs just played a few times.

Oh, cool.

And the troop

take Gon and kill you up

hostage.

The storm continues

as Gunnar.

Gosh, I forget exactly what we were talking, but we were talking about

this being

Karapika having that transformation of Karapika believing in episode 55 that he would endanger his friends in order to move the mission forward.

And then that changing, like, Karapika basically learning that about himself, that he would not do that.

Yeah, and to me, like, that's that is this moment textually for me.

It's when Karapika is like getting ready to fight, and then Goan basically like jumps in line in front of him, and Karapika is just like, Well, shit, now I can't do anything now because I don't, I don't want to pull Goan into this fight.

Yeah,

yeah, I think you're right.

And it's sort of the first instance of both teams of hostage takers seeing their own

members members trap them in a situation, you know,

sort of force their hand and go, well,

how do we resolve this?

There's no way out of this that I can see clearly.

Goan is really caught up on the troop's morality or the troops

or things that Gohan ascribes to

feelings that only moral people feel.

That is to say, care for your friends.

That is to say, grieving when you lose your friends.

Goan is really trying to figure out, you know, why is it that people I consider evil also have these feelings?

How do they justify those feelings?

Is it even true?

What does that mean?

And so he takes this opportunity to ask Kroller.

He sort of just like blurts out, you know, how can you kill people who have nothing to do with you?

And at that point, lightning strikes the city and all the power goes out.

Can I read the Krollo quote?

Yeah, it's so good.

Why?

I wonder.

wonder, it might be because they have nothing to do with Gone and sorry, Gone specifically asks, how can you kill people that have nothing to do with you?

That's an important part of this.

Why, I wonder, it might be because they have nothing to do with us.

No, on second thought, it isn't that simple.

I don't like to talk about my motives, but surprisingly enough, or rather, as I expected, the reason is the key to understanding myself.

And then I wrote, he's so cryptic.

Wow.

He's just like so deep.

Oh, my God.

This is on some level just

write a check as the author that you are going to cash later.

I want that, you know, I'm going to write a nice mystery in here.

I'm going to have the character say,

in order to understand the answer to that question, you have to know something about me.

And then be like, I will not reveal that.

But this is one of the creepy moments.

It's great.

Krullo is illuminated by lightning.

We're looking up at him from Ghan's perspective.

It's great.

This is Crowlo, and it does.

Crowloe in villain mode again.

It does sort of remind me of

the Danny DeVito Young Zip Me

thing from Always Sunny.

I don't like it.

I don't like to think about it.

That's who they got to do.

That's who they should have got to do is English voice.

Okay.

Everything exactly the same, but Danny DeVito is Crowlo.

Oh my god!

Oh my god,

he's a good actor,

he's a really good actor.

I mean, I think that scene, that's some of the best acting that he did in his whole career, is that scene.

Um,

here's what is what's going on.

Um,

I don't have all the information here, here's what's happening:

Crowlo

in Meteor City as a child

suffered an immense loss even beyond the loss that Meteor City demands of its residents

he made a bargain a sort of Faustian pact this isn't me doing demon world theory I promise I'm genuinely trying to this is the I'm making this is a metaphorical Faustian pact not a literal Faustian pact Kroller made a sacrifice that got him the book.

Maybe actually getting the book is what caused him to lose.

You know,

his

reach exceeded his grasp, and to get the thing that made him Crolo, he lost a huge amount of, you know, stuff that was important to him.

Um, and he assembled the Phantom Troop

as a kind of, and I don't even know if I would like this to be the case, this is what I think it is, as a kind of like, um,

Robin Hood sort of uh um

redistributive entity who will go out and will will make right for the the damage that has been done to Meteor City.

Um and over time, the Phantom Troop gradually, you know, in the same way that Karapica's quest for revenge began to take into darker and darker places that we've seen him sort of pull out of that

nosedive, the Phantom Troop was asked to act in ways that

they felt less and less sure about.

And the way that they defended themselves against that was that they turned inward, was that they strengthened their bonds with each other, that they furthered the care that they had for each other, and they became this sort of like extremely tight unit with an extremely

thorough care for each other.

And that's what Krollo is talking about when he says, I don't really like to think about this because

what it invites him to do is view the path from, I suffered a great loss and I built a unit that would help sort of redistribute that pain,

to

we we walked down this path so hard that the only people

that we can care about, the only people that we can love, are

the people who are in this kind of dread pact.

That's what I think.

I wouldn't be shocked if I never learn,

if they just never say what happened, what Krolo's about.

I always

got the vibe that

they were just some gang.

They were just like a normal.

I don't know, like, you know, he's a specialist, you know, something, you know, they imply that something's going to happen to you to make you a specialist.

He's a specialist who has the book when he's a kid.

Remember, we saw that tiny

flicker of them running in Meteor City.

Although, well, actually, he was dreaming.

That was a dream of Krolos.

Uh, we saw him wake up from that, so that's actually not necessarily true.

He might not have had the book, right?

It may not have had

special powers then, it may just be that he used an object from his normal life that was important to him as the vehicle for his specialist ability.

I kind of always understood, like, you know, like

just a gang of friends, and it's like,

like, man, I fucking hate this town.

But the town, like, really sucks because it's Meteor City.

And,

you know, it just gets out of control.

I think it just gets out of control because it's such a, it's such a, it reminds me, and I think this is not fair because of what we do know about Meteor City, but but the like uh like fuck this town I want to get out and start a murder gang thing reminds me of such like uh suburban malaise kind of thing yeah I love John Darnell

um yeah I mean I want to be clear that when I say all that I'm not saying this is what I want Krolo's story to be or even this is what I think Krolo's story to be one of the really nice things about doing a project like this is that we can especially me who doesn't know what's happening I can say things into a microphone and then listen back to them later and go, it's almost like I'm saying marker, and then I'm writing down a little, you know,

here's what the story, here's what I think the story is saying.

But yeah, I don't know, I don't know.

It's a really distinctive moment, and I think that

it is just cryptic enough that I would be irritated by it if Crollo wasn't such an interesting character, and if the scene wasn't shot so well, with the, you know, Goan kind of coming to this crisis point, blurting out the question, the power going out, and then Crowlo being illuminated by lightning.

It's not even that he's illuminated by lightning so much as like the whole street is dark, and you're only seeing bits of his face as he speaks.

It's really, really good.

Then Squala dies.

Yeah, in a...

This whole scene rules.

It said it felt like no one there really wanted to kill Squala.

No, I mean, like,

he died because he, because.

No, you know, I feel like Nobunaga was fine with it.

I don't think Nobunaga's on a short fuse.

Nobunaga's on a short fuse.

He warned him several times.

He was sort of pleading.

Not, you know,

pleading is too strong of a word, but he was like, man, I'm telling you, don't move.

And it's Make My Day.

You know, it's like

Make My Day, I feel like, is I dare you to move.

I don't think Nobunaga is daring him to.

Yeah, I don't think Nobunaga was daring him to kill him, but I don't think Nobunaga cares at all about killing him.

No, well, cares

is too strong also.

I think that

they all feel like we could have gotten out of this without killing you.

Why did you, why didn't you just listen?

It reminds me of the scene where they're talking about Phaeton torturing people, and they kind of all go like, man, those people are unlucky.

That sucked.

Like, I think that there's like this

recognition that when people run into the Phantom Troop, it's not a nice thing for them.

Um,

and that probably Squala could have gotten away without

dying.

But also, you know, the flip side of it is like,

he really didn't move that much, you know?

It's not like he just kind of got a little mad, right?

Like, am I remembering that correctly?

But then, yeah, but then he does cut for Odobunaga cuts his head off, and he's like, I told you not to move.

You know, maybe it's the maybe it's the dub giving it a little bit of flavor that felt like no, you know, they could have not killed him, but he was too scared to be still.

Too scared and angry about Eliza, his girlfriend.

Yeah, Pakanoda does a really nasty piece of work.

It's nice to get the occasional reminder that despite being extremely fun sort of secondary protagonists, the Phantom Troop are just cruel murderers to a person.

Pakanoda starts interrogating Squala with her sort of game without revealing exactly how her game works.

So

she sort of tries to dial in on how much Squala knows about the chain user.

And again, I was trying to remember, how much does Squala know about the chain user?

How cooked are we?

The answer is extremely cooked.

But we don't learn that quite yet.

Instead, Squala says, okay, I've got everything I need to know.

Do you have one?

I have one more question for you.

Is there anyone you care or love?

care for or love?

And Squala says, no.

And Pakanoda says, you're lying.

Her name is Eliza.

She's very beautiful.

And then he yells and Nobunaga decapitates him.

And then in the mall, Eliza just turns and looks round in the sort of like, you know,

something has gone wrong.

The like way...

There is like a moment after

Nobunaga decapitates him where we see Squala's head.

thump off the hood of the top of the car and flop to the side.

Yeah.

And it is just like so unceremonious and Nobunaga is being like, I told him not to move or whatever afterwards.

And it's like such a nice touch.

Again, makes the Phantom reminds you that the Phantom Troop are not just a funny samurai who gets mad and like his friends and stuff, you know?

Like, oh yeah, these guys are murderers.

We need to see the other side of the equation to make

the fact that they care very deeply about each other and that they care extremely about Krolo work, right?

You know,

if this episode had really just been focusing on, hey, the Phantom Troop are friends, it wouldn't be half as compelling if we weren't also seeing them

act like this.

And yeah, to the head bouncing off the

hood of the car, the show

is often sort of abstractedly violent.

You know, people are flinging nen at each other and bouncing around and punching the shit out of each other.

Our heroes regularly hit each other.

Yeah.

But there are times when the show is really quite explicitly violent.

The Phantom Troop regularly decapitates people.

Yeah.

The main thing we see them do.

Or, like, breaks their neck in such a way that people's heads do a 720.

Yeah.

The violence

when they play their hand is, not just the trope, but generally, I think about the great scene when Uvo bit the guy's face off.

Oh, yeah.

Is really embodied.

It is really visceral.

And it is almost always on camera.

You know, when the anime team commits to one of these moments of violence, they don't cut away from it.

And I like that.

you know,

if we want to sell that this world is fundamentally violent and 13 of our protagonists deal this violence

regularly, I think it makes sense that the violence remains shocking when it happens.

But...

I mean, time for another incredible moment of violence as Pakanoda starts loading her pistol.

We actually get a good

another new song that I can't tell you...

I won't tell you the title of this one

because it's it be it actually becomes

a variation of it becomes the theme for a character that we haven't met yet.

The spoiler that Keith's not telling me is that this title actually is called Pakanoda comma nen freedom comma reunited with the troop

Yeah, that's that's a real that is Jack's best called shot yet But no, during the whole scene where Pakanoda has

Squala in an arm lock and then also the memory stuff that we're about to talk about, it plays this song.

Oh, it's good.

This is sort of like a 60s French sort of mystery theme going on.

It is a little bit noir-i, which is funny for what it ends up being used for.

It's definitely.

Pakonoda is kind of noiry.

She thinks about people's memories.

She has a revolver.

Yeah, there's a lot of detective stuff going on in this one.

People are trying to figure out the location of everything.

But it becomes.

It does not.

This is much more noir-y than what it gets used for eventually.

They replace the strings with a guitar, and it's odd.

Odd choice.

So,

no use beating around the bush.

Pakanoda can shoot her memories into people for as long as she has bullets using a nen power called memory bomb.

Recollection bullet.

Memory bomb.

So fucking killer.

It's so cool.

I love nen.

It's great.

It's great.

You know,

what you need to do when you're coming up with a nen power is you need to get a big

sheet of paper and you need to write the numbers one to ten on the left-hand side.

And then you need to think of how the nen power would be executed, but very calmly, and write that down as number one.

You know, Pakinoda touches you on the shoulder and transfers the memory to you.

And then for each one down, you need to write it slightly more outre until you hit number 10, and then you circle that and go with it.

You need to go through that process of making it stupider and stupider until you get to Pakinoda's gun catches fire, she loads bullets, shouts memory bomb, and shoots her friends in the head.

It's so funny that the way that she gets the memories is by touching you gently on the shoulder.

But

if you give them, you have to shoot, load a revolver with memory bullets.

So I recollect your voice.

Right, because it's, and I'm turning over my binder of like

high school critical reading.

It's because the Phantom Troop can only act through, you know, they can receive things passively, but if they want to put things out into the world, it has to be a violent action.

I'm nodding and stroking my chin.

I'm nodding and stroking my chin, and I said it.

Because now we see that Squala did know about Karapika.

In fact, Squala knew quite a lot about Karapika, as Nobunaga starts laughing and says, So that's what you look like, Mr.

Karapika, as the guitars play for the episode to end.

It's great.

It's really good.

It's really good.

Hunterpedia this week, Nobunaga for that episode.

There's like a bit in this Hunterpedia where they have a lot of fun.

There's two insane Hunterpedias in a row, honestly.

Yeah.

I don't know.

Why are they weird?

Music directing Hunterpedias now?

No, no, no.

This one isn't super weird.

50.

50.

Are you sure?

Oh, am I thinking 50?

57 and 58?

Is that what I'm thinking?

I think 57 and 58 are the weird ones.

Oh, which one is this?

I know 57 is the weird one.

56 is they are talking about Nobunaga who can take out foes with one strike.

Oh, okay.

And then they briefly become Krolo inside an N radius.

Yeah.

You know what that's about?

That was the thing where I was like, what's the deal with these Crolo rings?

Yeah, I don't understand the Crollo rings, but yeah, I was misremembering.

We want to take our little five-minute break before getting into the next couple episodes.

Please.

Let's do it.

Okay, listen up, everybody.

If we keep going at this pace.

The fortune that I wrote for myself as Miss Neon.

So,

we're going to move through some stuff a little quickly.

All of this is great, and it's worth saying that the pace of the episodes themselves alternates between stultifyingly slow, frightening conversations between three people and characters just going leaping off in directions to do stuff.

Hey, I just want to say to people who aren't watching along, even if you didn't watch all the episodes up to this point, I would recommend watching these four episodes.

Yes.

Especially these last two.

Ditto, but for like the last 12 episodes.

I mean, yeah, just, you know.

Just watch the show.

Okay, so just right off the bat, this episode, we talk a lot about the Phantom troop and I want to point out an interesting discrepancy between the sub and the dub the English dub consistently refers to

The Phantom troop as the spiders but in the dub sorry

Yeah, the dub but in the sub they call themselves the spider as a sort of collective now which is very interesting It's much cooler.

It's much cooler and it's much more descriptive of what's happening and why there's an argument called the spider sorry I'd heard them called the spiders in the Japanese a couple of times, but they start calling themselves, the troop, the spider here.

Krolo heads back to the hotel with his hostages,

Gonan Kilua.

Kilua figures that Karapika should now switch targets.

It makes no sense to go for Pakanoda now because they know that the game is up.

And in the hotel, and I'm just going to go through this quickly and then we can dig into this because this bit's great.

Leorio is there and makes a play.

Secretly communicates to Gonan Kilua

the power is going to go out.

How does he time jump attack?

He does this by making an extremely loud phone call and then calling into a local radio station to request the closing theme of Hunter Hunter.

The first closing theme, specifically.

The original closing theme.

Yeah.

Larry Winslow.

It's so funny.

It's perfect.

He's playing to his strengths, you know?

The Feed of Drupal almost kills him

for being annoying.

And then then they're like, well, this guy's just a blowhard.

Like, whatever.

And I think that's like, yeah, that's Leorio right there.

That's how he flies under the radar.

Imagine like Crowlo having to stoop to saying, just ignore him.

Does Carlo actually say just ignore him?

He does about Leorio.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That sounds right.

Crowlo has spent his whole life trying to ensure that he doesn't have to interact with people like Leorio, and he is dragging himself by his fingernails to deign to say just don't don't don't engage don't pay him any time um this is where Nobunaga Pakanoda and um

who's the third that shows back up is it Machi Machi Machi yeah yeah uh they show up with the with their new knowledge of uh

uh

of who the chain user is um kilua's like they keep cutting back to kilua being afraid because i i don't know gon's probably too busy being annoyed by the spiders to be afraid uh Yeah, he's got Nobunaga to deal with.

Yeah, and

Krolo is just like, he's in full suspicion mode and does the worst thing that he could do, which is asks Pakunoda to scan them again.

Yes.

Which is so funny because it's like,

we know how it works.

Theoretically, it should be bulletproof.

Well, well.

So, um,

Killer is terrified of getting scanned again and is trying to bluff to stall.

Pakinoda has some great dialogue here.

Pakinoda in villain mode.

She says, I extract the purest memories that are beneath your consciousness.

She's sort of saying, There is a kind of objective truth that I am able to reach that you cannot hide from me.

She asks what they're hiding, and she gasps at what she discovers as the lights go out.

You said this was a mistake by Krolo.

Do you want to talk a bit about that?

Did I?

You said it was

he did the worst thing he could possibly do, ask Pakanoda to scan.

Oh, from Kiloa's perspective.

Oh, right, I see.

I was like, why does

this actually seem like very sound logic?

Yeah, from Kilo's perspective, worst thing.

Oh, we do get a brief,

we get a good moment of

Nobunaga finally gets to pitch Gonan Kiloa to Krolo.

Yeah, what's Krolo's take?

I don't remember what he said.

Krolo's like, yeah, this seems kind of interesting, I guess.

But Machi, I don't know if Machi's like protecting these kids or because Machi doesn't seem as insane as some of the troop.

Or maybe she just doesn't.

I don't know.

She puppets those machines.

I think she wasn't horrifying.

She's definitely horrifying.

Yeah.

She's not as ohish.

She walks this line that's kind of interesting of like, she thinks that they have to do with the phantom with the chain user, but she also doesn't want them in the phantom troop.

and she doesn't want to kill them either.

And so it kind of feels like she's pitching to just be like, can we please just not kill these two kids?

Yeah.

But it's pretty subtle.

It's pretty subtle.

And

but Krolo wants to keep them around based on Machi's previous

gut feelings about them and where she says something that's kind of weird, which is like,

you know, no, my, my hunches aren't that great, which is like

an odd thing to do when I don't think that she believes that.

But I can be wrong.

I don't know.

Maybe.

But anyway, they shut their eyes.

They're like, we're so mad about the Phantom Troop that we won't even look at you.

Which is Goan's excuse, or was it Kilua or Gon's idea?

So they both do this in order to like shield their eyes to get ready for the darkness, basically.

And in the dark, they launch an assault.

It broadly fails.

Kilua stabs Machi with his sharpened hand, but Machi's muscles lock his hand into her.

She trapped it with her muscles.

Everybody gets captured again.

Goan lunges for Kilua to rescue him, but it's grabbed by Nobunaga.

It seems like this has gone very badly until someone tosses a dagger at Nobunaga with a message on it.

And

just as Pakanoda is about to reveal what she learned from the kids, presumably the full extent of their connections to Karapika, Karapika's connections to the Kurta clan, Karapika's nen contract ability, and the way that all these people have genuine care and love for each other and are prepared to sacrifice their goals for their friends' safety.

Pakanoda says that this is a sorry

Nobunaga says that this is a message for Pakanoda.

And now we just get into full-scale ransom note territory.

And from this point on, the episodes basically become an exploration of how fucked up a ransom note can get.

Sort of, sort of, abstractly.

The first note says, discuss their memories, and I will kill him.

Karapika has kidnapped Krolo.

This is extremely exciting and not what I thought was going to happen.

What did you think was going to happen?

I didn't know.

I thought that

where this arc was going was going to be that

a sort of final destination-style series of events would produce the unfavorable fortunes for the troop, and Karapica would be able to start picking off troop members.

I mean, I knew the troop was going to stick around, so I knew it wasn't going to go quite as badly wrong as Neon thought, but I thought we were going to go into a sort of tense root.

Put it this way: if Karapica's first strike against the troop was this pristine flawless furious execution of uvo i thought that the way this arc was going to wrap up was in like a panicked violent rube goldberg machine of assaults against the troop following a failed um kidnap attempt uh tagashi's uh fatal flaw is that so many of his ideas are so good that there's a million avenues to go go down and explore and spend hours playing with ideas like that, but that's just not where it goes.

And it's like, well, that stuff all could have been cool.

Well, no, but what he does actually end up doing is

he dials into NEN contracts and

he ends up putting everybody in a really nasty place through a very simple series of sort of NEN contracts because

Krolo

in the car.

So Nobunaga immediately assumes leadership and says, all right, Pekanoda, do not speak.

And there's some slight rumblings in the troop at this point.

It hasn't quite reached the nightmarish boiling point, but the rumblings are less, Nobunaga shouldn't be the leader, and more, well, we should just go out and hunt the captain.

You know,

why are we messing around with any of this ransom note?

Let's go.

This is where we get a really crucial flashback to Krolo that we sort of discussed earlier, Crollo's sort of

ideology about how the spider works.

He says, I am the head of the spider, and you are the legs.

Natural law dictates the legs must follow wherever the head goes.

But this is just the chain of command.

It doesn't apply to my life or death.

My orders are priority, but my life or death are not.

What's key is the survival of the whole, not the individual.

Never forget that.

And so much of the tension of these next episodes comes from Krollo

hoping that his spiders will

embody this philosophy.

And ultimately, they don't.

And he's so confident about that they will.

And again, this ties back to like, is it because

he's so confident in his leadership or because he doesn't understand how much he means to some of them?

I don't know.

It's a very interesting thing where it's like only the two extremes make sense.

We also get young Uvo with an afro, pre-Frankenstein Franklin, short hair machi, and conservatively dressed Pakunoda.

Also, just busted a haircut, Crowlo.

I'm so glad he had a glow up because, my God, he looks like shit.

Um, I think that he still has that haircut.

No, it's the same haircut minus the headband, and the he sort of has a center part now.

He's got, yeah, no, it's the e-boy center part that ties it all together.

Okay,

listen, I'm looking at the Crowlo on my desk right now.

It's not the same haircut, it's longer.

It is longer, yeah.

Anyway, that's a great scene.

I love the flashback of.

And it's also

a crazy thing to say to your friends.

What an insane thing to say.

Well, I think this is like founding document zone.

These are the founding members.

You know, this is Krollo speaking that ideology out into the world.

Pakanoda is essentially trapped.

Whether the spiders are ready to sacrifice Krollo becomes the

pinch point.

The troop missed the boss.

I can't remember who it is.

It's probably Pakunoda says, We need you back, even if this means betraying the spiders.

It was so cool to sort of see in this moment, oh, this is where this is going.

The spiders aren't actually as committed to their Shippothes ideology as Krolo thinks they are.

There's a great moment with Pakunoda where she's sort of like analysis paralysis.

What do I do?

Do I betray the spider by saving Crolo, or do I, or the idea of the spider by saving Krolo, or do I betray Krolo by sticking to the ideas of the spider?

And Nobunaga is like, like, reassures her.

It's like, don't talk.

Like, I read the thing, don't talk.

And then, and then she feels better for a minute.

And then a couple minutes later, after the flashback, she's doing the same thing again.

She's caught in the same loop.

And then this time it's Machi who says the same thing,

which is interesting because Machi and Nobunaga have been at odds this whole time season, have been just sort of lightly disagreeing on everything, but the chips are down.

Cards are down.

What's down in that?

Chips are down.

The chips are down.

Chips are down.

And Machi's like, no, no, no, I wasn't in it for Uvo the way that you were, but now it's the boss.

Like, yeah, we got to save the boss.

It definitely speaks to the

founding member bond that kind of came up earlier, right?

Yeah, like that,

this is a discussion happening between three of the the like we were here from day one for this, we've been with Crolo from the start, so were Finx and Phaeton, right?

No, Finx, I don't know if Finx was

and they're like the main players on the other side, well, yeah, again, I think yeah, yeah, I guess it's a different interpretation of the or rather, it's it's a it's a

more ready to take what Krolo said seriously.

Um, in the oh, oh, you might be wondering, listener, uh, how

does Karapika's team, the wondering listener,

how does Karapaka's team know if Pakanoda will speak?

They've made it clear that they have Melody.

They haven't been explicit about it.

Which is a block.

Yes, Melody is extremely powerful and can hear, but it may not be...

It probably isn't close enough to be able to speak.

Yeah, I think it probably would say

unequivocally too far, but they don't know where Melody is.

No, so she could be anywhere is the threat, which is a great threat.

Melody MVP here.

Melody

actively or inactively is making a lot of this plan work.

Oh, you mean the goblin?

Now, listen, I want to go on record, and I think

I'm inviting the listener to look to my output.

on the rest of the work that we've all made together as colleagues.

When I say that someone is the goblin, it's far from pejorative.

Yeah, it's, you know.

You're reclaiming the G-word.

Yeah.

Odd.

The, I don't even know.

I think that's it.

I think I'm good for that whole section.

Is this when we get the little phone call with Finx?

We get a bit of Kroller being a villain in a car.

This is lovely.

Right.

We get Girl Karapaka number two.

Yeah,

this is Girl Karapaka number two.

This is like

Secretary Karapaka instead of Joni Mitchell Karabaka.

He's taken his hat off.

He's got great hair.

He's dressed as the receptionist of the hotel.

I believe is what this is supposed to be.

I think that's what the reveal is supposed to be here.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

And Crowlo says, I didn't think the chain user would be a word.

It's so funny.

That's right.

The transgender agenda is here.

I didn't expect the chain user to be a woman.

And then he takes off his wig and he says, who says I am?

The only mafia that's in charge of York New City is the alphabet mafia.

Oh, do you mean the community?

Yeah, the

alphabet mafia community.

It's all coming together.

Sylvie's playing.

Krollo is betting that Krapica won't sacrifice his friends.

He bets this aloud, essentially.

And Krapika...

angry, Chain Bastard rises up.

And Krollo

figures out in this moment,

this is the chain user's weakness,

is

his care for his friend.

This is when the direct hostage situation mirror started appearing so beautiful to me, where it's like, Crollo, you are in the same dilemma, and you don't realize it.

There's such a great moment of misunderstanding.

This is Crollo's mistake.

Of misunderstanding how the fortunes work because he gives us really amazing speech about, or think part of it is internal, part of of it is external where he's got this fortune the fortunes didn't say anything about this and so this is a non-event as far as the fortunes go this doesn't matter um uh i think he says it's calming it might as well be a walk in the park or something like that um he's in full um uh affectless villain mode yeah this is his this is his creepy mode number two is is uh are these speeches that he gives about not it not mattering if he's uh alive or dead and uh you know his heartbeat is so insane that Melody can't even listen to it.

Just

funny.

Melody says, make it stop.

But this actually leaves her really good line.

But yeah.

He sees the fortunes as a process that they can intercede in, and then they can use the fortunes to their advantage and change the future outcomes, but doesn't see how the rest of the world also can do that.

And also how their own intercessions will then change how fortunes play out so there's I think he's he's he's right we we talked about this last time I think he's right that neon's fortunes aren't uh what do we call them fixed um

but he hasn't this is Krowlo's mistake right

as if they're fixed in this moment Yeah,

and this is also really fun because something Melody Melody, something Neon said over and over again to the point where in Neon's scenes where she was talking about her fortune telling, it sort of became a a hallmark is that she doesn't really know how the fortune telling works right um so why would

krollo it's it's demon world theory we we know how they work right we know how they work but why would krollo know you know he has the same information that neon does um so it makes sense that he has also sort of misunderstood this this is where we get a really good crow villa villain line um

uh where melody says

what are you what are you people and krollo looks out of the window and we see his face reflected in the window and he says we're the spiders.

And it's nice in part because the line would be kind of

passe if he followed it directly off Melody's line.

But there's this little moment as he looks out of the window and thinks as though, you know,

he lets the silence kind of speak for itself for a moment before he speaks.

It's great delivery from that actor.

He had to think about how good this, how cool the spiders are.

He's like, damn, we're fucking sick, huh?

It's the only thing he knows.

I always feel like that too.

Whenever I'm thinking about the Phantom Troop, I do the exact same thing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I just go, wow.

They're so cool.

They are.

They are so cool.

Who wants to talk about how funny Finks is all of a sudden?

Oh, my God.

I

adore this scene so

much.

So much control over the tone to be able to say, we're going to have like four laugh lines back to back, and it's not going to compromise, you know, the feel of this thing.

So what happens is Karapika calls, and um

does Finx initially pick up yep, yeah, or whoever picks up, Finx asks for the phone, I think.

Okay, and then Karapika starts laying out terms where it's like, if you harm the um, if you harm the hostages, I'll kill him.

Uh, and Finx is like, oh, is that so?

We've already broken some of their limbs, and Karapika's like, okay, and hangs up, hangs up.

He gets his shit done

because they haven't broken their bones.

He's like giving himself the excuse to be able to torture them a little bit.

And then immediately calls back and goes, oh, sorry, I was lying.

And it's so funny.

It's so funny with Judith's legs.

Yeah.

It's lying.

Sorry, I was lying.

Both of them are okay.

I wrote down in all caps, a bad opener from Finx.

And then doesn't Karapika go like give the phone to someone else and don't put him back on?

Yeah, and then it shows, I think, Machi like punching him in the head for being scared.

Yeah, in the background.

I just want to bounce back to the

car conversation in case there are listeners that say, well, why didn't they mention this?

Kind of an undercurrent of this conversation in the car with Krolo and Karapika is Krolo trying to manipulate Karapika into lashing out.

Krolo understands and believes firmly that his life has no value as a hostage.

Keep saying that.

Literally that line exactly.

I have no value to you as a hostage.

So if he and he and he identifies that Karapika's weakness is both his care for his friends and the sort of the knife edge that that puts him on, right?

He has to balance his vengeance with his care for his friends.

And Krolo is trying to exploit this.

It doesn't work.

It is from that tense,

upsetting scene that we go straight into Mr.

Finks' very bad series of phone calls.

And here is when the NEN contracts sort of begin.

Karapika

starts to make demands over the phone.

Do not pursue us.

Do not harm the hostages.

He talks to Pakanoda and forbids all communication with the others.

And he does it really

intensely.

And this is such a fun thing to do to a character

in a show where people are constantly talking about the information they've gained.

He says, no talking, no gestures, no writing, no signals, no eye contact.

Again, using Melody as the bluff here.

You know, if you do any of this, we're done.

And he tells her to come alone to a place he designates.

Then he puts Nobunaga on the phone

and sort of feeds back most of the information he gave to Pakanoda.

He says Pakanoda is going to come.

All other members must return to the hideout.

And in this moment, Krolo is thinking, don't hesitate.

Bring everyone.

You know,

The phone call ends, and all hell breaks loose among the spiders.

What started out as a kind of bubbling sense of disagreement now starts to move towards a potential actual fighting.

Yeah, with the sides being

Pakinota, Nobunaga, Machi,

and Korjibi on one side.

Oh, and Shizuku has like sort of switched sides.

And then Shaolnark, Finks, and Phaeton on the other.

At one point, they say,

troop members settle disagreements through a coin, and basically everyone goes, Shut up!

The coin is not good enough right now.

Nobunaga and Finks square up for a fight.

Shaolnark, taking on his role as the Phantom Troops Karapika, points out that Pakunoda

leaving opens them up to a negative outcome from a fortune because Phantom troop members are not supposed to be alone.

And then Shizuku, despite being on Nobunaga's side, knocks him out.

Yeah.

Because

she is looking out for the sort of broader stability of the spiders.

And at this point,

maybe it's a little later, actually.

It's in the next episode when Franklin has a really great line.

When Franklin intervenes, that's in the next episode, right?

I think so.

That sounds like...

Yes,

we could just talk about the

deliberation process because it can like it's going on concurrently.

Because this is the very end of the episode, right?

The only thing left is

Hiseka's little maneuver.

Yeah.

Is yeah, Hiseka calling Ilumi.

Yeah, which is a great reveal.

Just like the shot of Ilumi sort of like stand.

It's like standing over the skyline, right?

Does anyone remember why Ilumi agrees to help Hisuka trick the true?

Oh, yeah, it's so funny.

He says, sure, all right.

I've known you a little longer than Crowlo.

It's the same.

Yeah.

Ah, fine.

What if I just kill them all attitude from the Hunter exam?

Yeah.

The anthropo in the world.

The idea that he would

not do this

because he doesn't want to like doesn't really even enter into it.

It's just like, well, I have to, I'm being asked to be part of this.

Who do I, who have I known longer?

Like, that's such a weird, like, my own desires have nothing to do with this.

I'll help the person who I met first.

He is, so far, based on the information that we have seen, the weirdest of the Zelda's.

And his mother is Kikyo, and she's pretty weird.

Oh, she might be the weirdest.

I don't know.

Although she's kind of just like a boy mom.

I love my assassin boys.

Oh, God, she really is just a boy, mom, Keith.

Holy shit.

Now you nailed it.

She's got a crazy minivan with Gatling guns on it.

It's worth saying that Hisuka is kind of taking his moment because he's like, this is the perfect moment to fight the boss.

Hiseka doesn't give a shit about any of this stuff.

He's like, if I can just get this right.

Oh, and in order to make what happens in the next episode sort of make sense to the listener, if you haven't been following along, the show really starts digging into like, this is Hisuka's moment.

And it is frightening that Hisuka has decided to make this call now.

It's frightening that, in the midst of all this extremely high stakes negotiating, Hiseker is like, It's time for me to kill Krolo.

Uh, and yeah, so he calls in Ilumi for a reason that is not terribly clear.

I didn't really understand what was happening here until it was revealed, which was lovely.

Right?

Something about Illumi that I had forgotten.

I mostly thought of Illumi as

a murderous weirdo instead of another kind of weirdo.

Um,

oh, Karapika has Kiliua handed the phone.

He says,

put one of the hostages on.

And Kiliwa immediately tells Karapika that the troop is arguing about whether to follow Paku.

This is lovely.

Kilua kind of intuits that they sort of have the upper hand right now and really doesn't mind just sort of spelling out what is going on inside the troop headquarters, despite Finks sort of snarling at him about it.

I've changed my mind.

I think the Franklin thing is in 57.

No, it's not.

I wrote it down specifically.

It is in 58.

Yeah.

Okay, yeah, here it is.

Yeah, I see it now.

The Hunterpedia for this, as we sort of leave, and this episode kind of just ends.

I mean, it ends on Illumi, which is a nice cliffhanger.

It ends on, like, Hisugaris getting Illumi involved, but we are no closer to resolving this hostage situation, and it has, in fact, worsened, because now the Phantom Troop is violently bickering with each other.

The Hunterpedia is Pakinoda.

Gone and Kilua just get memories of each other learning how to use the toilet.

Yeah,

memories of them pooping and peeping.

It's really funny.

Yeah, I don't know why they do this.

It's because they're 12-year-olds reading each other's memories.

Yeah, it's such a classic little, like, here's a little out-of-character gag.

They're little goofballs.

It's a great.

These are great for diffusing things after these episodes.

Especially funny.

When, let me find the line again.

I want to find the exact line.

She says,

i extract the purest memories that are beneath your consciousness

uh it is that it is uh

it is weird to have a sort of like cheeky toilet thing happening in a show where there's like um

a murder clown who wants to like sexually murder them and then to have them with their pants off is weird

It is weird.

At the same time, I think that the show is a kind of kaleidoscope of tone,

mostly for better, sometimes for worse.

I don't think it's out of character with the show.

It might be out of tone with what it is trying to do in its main episodes.

But this is a show where all kinds of shit is, you know, Keith...

Ten episodes ago, we were like, we have to solve the puzzle box to get the PS2 memory card, and then Killer has to go to the shop to get a PS2.

And now we're in, like, this is a high-stakes hostage negotiation in which the fate of the entire Phantom troop and their leader and our protagonist is at stake.

Is this a Shonen thing?

Playing with tone just as fast and loose as this?

No.

No, this fucking show's weird as hell.

It is.

It goes for this in a way that.

Does Jojo do this, Sylvie?

Yeah,

Jojo does this a lot.

Where it's like, they are going to sell one type of tone as genuinely

as hard as possible and then they hey i know who that is you can't pull what will have my ass jojo will be like super

deathly serious about something and then also we'll have an episode where two guys are like magnetically stuck together and it the entire time it's just making jokes about how it looks like they're doing gay stuff in public um

like it's jojo's all over the place with tone um i don't know if it's like that's an iraqi thing as much as as a like anime thing.

I don't really like to prescribe it to the whole genre.

I do think that things like it is not uncommon to have sort of like slight

like deflationary like release valves to

break the tension a bit.

But I think that

I think it varies from author to author.

I think that the like the Finx gags with the phone, that stuff is more common having like gags interspersed in between

like serious stuff

um and that goes back you know

decades um

but

I feel like Hunter Hunter takes it like further than most people or most shows not most people um

and we'll have like longer periods of that where it'll just like cut to, like earlier the season when it cut to

Gona Kilua

shopping and scamming

in the middle of the middle of, yeah.

In the middle of the chain bastard arc.

So funny.

Yeah.

Remember the bit in Dragon Ball when they went on like a full 40 to 50 second explanation of what sunglasses were and how they worked?

Yeah.

Oh, this is the first episode that we've recorded since Giratoriyama died.

I know it came up earlier, but it did record.

Yeah.

Yeah, rest in peace, King.

Yeah.

God.

That was horrible.

That's such a sad.

Which is really young, too.

Yeah.

Was he 64?

He was 68.

68.

My God.

Which is still young.

Maybe he was 64.

I don't know.

I'm so grateful that I got to experience Dragon Ball

in advance of hearing about Akira Toriyama's passing in the sense that I was able to see the news of his passing and have a much more sort of rounded feel of like, oh my god, this guy ruled.

Yeah.

I know what he was doing and it's great.

We should do that.

But you have like a better picture of the Titanic figure that he sort of, the shadow that he casts on everything.

We'll do more Dragon Ball Dragon Ball Z stuff too.

There's stuff, there's stuff that's impossible to not experience from Dragon Ball Z.

I think we like the Toriyama, even without the Toriyama news, we'd have to do some Z or

plan to do Fiddle D.

Sadly, Fiddle D.

Let's get back to the anime we are watching that.

Right.

And hey, we're making good time.

Look at that.

Pakanoda is at the meeting.

This is.

Hey, shout out to how Karapika's got Krolo chained up.

Good job, buddy.

They've paid such careful attention to how his hair has fallen in his face.

It is impossible to describe Krolo tied up as anything other than lovingly drawn.

Yeah.

They've chained his mouth too, right?

For some reason?

That is what I'm shouting out specifically.

Yep.

In the fiction, Karapika must have done

his nen chains.

He didn't do it by hand.

Hey, maybe he did.

Ah, maybe he did.

That's how I would.

What was I going to say?

I was going to say.

Well, you don't have nen.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We all have nen.

We just don't know how to use it.

Everybody has aura.

Yeah,

yeah.

Pay attention to what Master Wing says.

Krolo is not the type of character where it's like, if he speaks, you're in trouble.

You know what I mean?

He's charming and he's very articulate in terms of talking to his friends and his enemies.

But, you know, I've seen those sort of like fiction hostage situations where it's like, oh, keep the mages' mouth covered.

Otherwise, you know, they'll speak.

Or Panamalega wears the bite mask or whatever, you know?

So I do think Chaining Krollo's mouth is more of a gesture than anything else.

I also think that Krapica wants to minimize the amount of people talking in this.

All of Krapica's stuff here is so precise.

It's so beautifully animated because you can see that he is just bubbling bubbling underneath.

The attention to detail of a serial killer.

Yes, yes.

But he has worked this out completely.

They are in

airships.

They are in

one airship.

Pakanode has arrived sort of for the negotiation because

it's really clever.

He didn't just ask for a hostage swap straight away.

Karapika wants to do something.

And I don't know if he has planned.

It's Karapika.

He has.

I don't know if he worked this out in the moment.

he planned this as soon as the plan went awry and he made a new plan, right?

Yeah, that's what I think.

Because you can see him still struggling with what the plan is during Pakinota on the ship already.

Yeah, so Pakinota is on an airship.

Hunter Hunter absolutely refuses to introduce a plane.

Have we seen any planes?

I don't think so.

No, we've only seen Dirigibles, I believe.

Yeah, there's a great moment where, like, uh, uh, Crolo and Melody are kind of saying the same thing to Pakinota and Karapika, like mentally, like wishing them to see what's going on.

They both see the same weakness in each other.

Yeah, it's lovely.

Where Melody, or Krolos has figured out Pakinota.

He's more concerned about his friends and killing me to satisfy his revenge.

That is a chain user's weakness.

Meanwhile, Melody is thinking, Karapika, in the back of your mind, you sense something's amiss.

You're curious as to why Pakinota came alone.

If the troop were as merciless as we expected them to be, this hostage exchange would be impossible.

Their rules are ironclad, and their boss accepts them without question.

But what about the others?

This one appears to be different.

This woman who you despise with your whole being is driven, certainly, by the very same motive that drives you.

She wishes to save her boss, save her friends.

Speak the text into the show.

Usually when people do the like speaking the text into the show, I'm less into it.

But this, like, Takashi's just hitting home run after home run and then being like, hey, hey, check out those dingers I just hit.

I know, that's a show.

I don't know why he can just say everything.

Well,

it's what Jack said.

It is, Shounen is still, like, the target audience for this is still like younger, like, like, young teens, pre-teens.

But it doesn't always work that well.

I think that's absolutely happening here.

To me, the first is that it's for children.

And

both Tagashi and the

adapters have a real keen sense of that.

And they know that this point, that kind of

mirror hostage situation is such a beautiful idea that has been set up so nicely that they just want to look straight down the camera you know they want to just deliver both barrels to the audience as cleanly as possible to make sure that if we haven't picked up on it we can pick it up on it now.

I think the other reason it works for me is that Melody and Pakanoda are doubles.

They are both capable of

through different purposes and with different levels of success, ascertaining the truth.

And so, this this little moment of speaking

the subtext right out into the text kind of gains a fun extra resonance because it's almost like

it's like it's rhyming, you know, it's like you're seeing these two characters spell out the same thing in the same way, having got to it from the same place.

Because the interesting thing is that Krolo is

trying to mentally deliver this message to Pakunoda, who who fully understands that the fact that

Pakunoda is Karapika's kind of

what she's taking advantage of in order to secure Krolo.

It's just that she has a different motive than him.

Yeah, so the line works for me specifically because it is these characters.

I wrote down in my notes: Melody is acting as a kind of opposite truth teller.

Karapika is making his own phantom troop.

Interesting.

He's got his own Pakunoda now.

Shout out to Melody.

Shout out to Malady.

Shout out to the goblin.

Okay.

Karapika begins to set Nen conditions first on Krola.

The first condition he sets, and when we say Nen conditions again, just as a reminder, this is the thing where Karapika stabs your heart with a little tiny chain dagger.

Right, middle finger armor.

Yeah, it does like a if-then condition on you.

Usually the then is death.

Right.

The first nen condition is that he forbids Krolo from using Nen.

This is big.

And then this is an outrageously powerful thing.

Well, his eyes are red.

He's in Sorcerer's Time.

Did we mention that he Emperor?

Emperor.

Sorcerer Time is really good.

Did we mention that Karapika can do this at will now?

Oh, I think we did in the last episode.

Yeah, we learned that he could actually do it at will.

Again, shout out Toriana.

We got transformation.

Yeah.

We got Super Saiyan.

Genie,

Karapika spent time in the hyperbolic time chamber and now could be 24-7 Super Saiyan.

And it means that there has to be a cost for going Sorcerer Time because if you can do it whenever he wants, you know.

What is the debt that needs to be paid here, you know?

Well, I know that for Dragon Ball Z, the only cost to being Super Saiyan is that sometimes you need to become Super Saiyan 2.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true.

And then what do you do?

Super Saiyan 3?

There is something that goes what it means to to go beyond Super Saiyan 2.

Yeah.

Wow.

What would happen to a normal person if they go Super Saiyan 2?

Well, a normal person couldn't go Super Saiyan 2 because they're not a Saiyan.

A normal Saiyan could go Super Saiyan 2.

Wow.

Maybe.

The Saiyans are aliens, right?

Yeah.

Yes.

Are there normal aliens on their planet?

Is there just like a...

There were.

Yeah.

And who's the they?

The Tuffles?

The Tuffles?

What are they called?

Oh, the Tuffles.

The Tuffles.

Yeah.

Oh, so all that's left left are the sort of superpowers.

There's a couple.

The Tuffles are really important for GT, so Sylvie knows all about the Tuffles.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The Tuffles.

The Tuffles are scientific geniuses, and they build a super-powered robot that

you mean the Neo-Machine Mutant Baby?

Yeah, the Neo-Machine Mutant Baby.

And then Baby acts as a sort of vehicle of revenge for the Tuffles against the Saiyans,

absorbing and infecting the

protagonists and trying to to take over.

No one's going to be able to do that.

Plus we get a bunch of curatoriums.

Yeah, we get a bunch of wiki pages about baby Vegeta and baby Gohan.

Listen, baby is one of the best Dragon Ball villains, okay?

No baby disrespecting.

The baby arc in GT is great.

It's fantastic.

There's a concept that I've never forgotten, which is that,

is it like Nietzsche?

Is it like Android Giraud who built?

Who's the android that builds

Giraux?

Is it Giroux?

Oh, no, no, no, no, no.

Girau is the one who makes the other androids.

Yeah, but I thought that maybe they brought him back.

No, hold on.

I can't remember who's going to limit it.

Baby was made by Dr.

Mew.

Dr.

Mew.

Okay, so Dr.

Mew picks Baby, and then like when Baby starts to turn on Mew, Mew is like, hey, I fucking made you.

You can't kill me.

And then Baby reveals like, no, like,

I made you.

I made you.

And then to make you make me.

And this bizarre, like, he, like, infected Jarot and gave him the knowledge to invent him or something like that.

Something like that.

It's something like that.

It's crazy.

Okay, we should watch Dragon Ball GT instead of Z.

That's not, we shouldn't.

No, we should.

But I will play Dragon Ball Denger Global Global Global GT question.

I got you with the baby image.

A little

goop freak.

Looks like toothpaste.

Karapaka is shook.

He gets halfway through setting this first non condition, and then he

the sort of the dilemma hits Karapaka hard.

You know, know, it's hit the viewer before, but he really is in this moment of like, I have to make a decision.

You know, I could kill Krollo in this moment.

I could kill Pakinoda in this moment.

You know, I would

strike a real blow.

But he says, you know, Krollo is right.

The spider can live without a head.

He is confident that he would not be able to take the kind of perfect revenge that he was.

wanting and it would cost the lives of his friends.

He can't see a way out of this bind and he says, this is what I have to do.

And you get images of him thinking of Gon and Kiliua and then another boy dressed in a kurta rope.

And he says, I've lost too many people already.

And this is great because it kind of synthesizes his.

This is not just about...

Rather.

Deciding not to kill Krolo and sacrifice Gon and Kiliua is not just about the loss of Gon and Kiliua.

It is about a kind of disavowal of

losing people people close to you, right?

It's not just because it's Gonan Kilua.

It is like, I can't stand to see any more people that I care about lost.

Like, I can't go through this again.

I can't lose

the people I love in my life a second time in the past.

Like, because the Kerna Clan massacre was less than a decade ago.

Like,

it's pretty recent.

Yeah, it's still pretty fresh.

Like,

um.

And I think that like I don't know I love this bit.

This bit makes like Karapika work as a character for me.

It is distinct from it is a different thing than I don't want Gonan Kellya to die, right?

It broadens it out ideologically.

Yeah, but it is bringing forward the I've been blessed with good friends.

Yeah, totally.

And just saying, I've been blessed with good friends twice.

Yeah.

You get the impression that, you know,

this is a generous reading.

I don't think that this is necessarily, you know, what was being said in the show, but it's like...

Maybe Karapika feels that becoming friends with Goan and Kiliwa and Leorio was sort of an accident.

You know, that's sort of something that just happened to you, rather than the kind of connection that he had with his community before they were massacred.

You know, when his community were massacred, he sort of thought, well, that's it for connection now, you know?

No coming back from that.

And my connections with Gonon, Killier, and Leorio, well, that's sort of, you know, hey, it's nice to make some acquaintances or whatever.

But by linking these two together, by saying,

it is still possible for me to exist in a world in community with other people.

And that can be something that motivates me just as strongly as my desire for revenge.

Really elegant writing.

And now we're back with the Phantom Troop, kind of still debating.

Oh, no, not quite.

Time for more Nen conditions.

Oh, okay.

Krolo's.

Oh, you've only said the first one.

Okay, got it.

Yeah.

First nen condition on Krolo.

No nen.

Second nen condition on Krolo.

No contact with any members of the troop.

Presumably after Pakunoda leaves.

Krolo's heart is set with these conditions.

Did you have something?

Oh, no, I was just going to say, I don't think he speaks to Pakunoda, like, regardless of while she's there.

I think that does still work with, like,

I think Karapaka's line is he forbids all contact, and I didn't know if, like, being in a room with her.

Yeah, that's fair.

Um, Krolo just sits impassive and disappointed as Pakinoda sort of accepts these conditions.

Then, nen conditions for Pakinoda: release Gonan Kilyua, condition one, don't tell the troop any more information about Karapika, condition two.

She accepts, and her heart is shackled.

And then Karapika says,

There's something I want to say to you.

And as he starts to speak, we lose audio and hear his heartbeat as Melody sort of reads

that there is loyalty within the troop, that she wants to save Krolo.

I can't tell whether

the next lines we hear Karapika speak as he sort of says goodbye, we're done here, you know, here's how the hostage handoff is going to work, is what he said in that moment, or if Karapika's little speech to the troop was being obscured.

We were consciously not given that.

I don't know.

I don't remember.

Now do we want to get back to the Phantom Troop?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Back to the troop.

This is when...

Is this when Paku comes back?

Yep, Paganota keeps back and keeps her mouth closed.

Finx is not happy about this.

My note here just says major disagreement among the troop.

Everybody gets ready for a fight.

And then we get the this is the really good I have enough bullets for the founding members, right?

No.

No, this is later.

No, that's later.

What we get here is the beginning of what we discussed earlier, as both sides are now beginning to suspect,

not

without reason, but not necessarily, based on how we know this is going, that the hostages are being controlled by manipulators.

Both people are like, what if they're under the chain user's control?

Feitan assumes that Pakunoda, Machi, and Kotopi are somehow under the chain user's control rather than vulnerable in their care for Krolo.

And this is kind of Krolo's blind spot being laid out extremely clearly.

Yeah.

Phaeton is really like the mini, like the worst Krolo.

They sound similar.

They're both kind of goth.

It's real like, oh, you can tell this kid really worships Krolo.

Yeah, he's to me.

He's also way shorter.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Goan, of course, can see what's going on.

And he is

great where he stands for a bottle.

He says, they want to save their friend from danger.

And Fink says, you're only saying that because you want to be free.

And Goan just effortlessly breaks his chains and stands up.

You know, I said this earlier, but Goan is so stuck on this idea.

You know, Gohan is so stuck on the idea of the transformative power of friendship and the realization that quote-unquote evil people can

feel these feelings legitimately that he just can't stop himself.

Well, as much as he doesn't get why they can care about each other, but not have empathy for the hundreds of people that they've killed, even more, he doesn't understand how like Phaeton and

Finks can not even care about each other.

I know.

He hates when people do friendship wrong.

Yeah, he does.

And who decides who does friendship right?

Goon Freaks.

Going Freaks does, of course.

This little 12-year-old who is only now discovering the the wide world.

It's so funny.

And who never even had a friend?

No.

Until very recently.

A lot of friendless loser over here.

He's figuring it out.

He's doing this.

It's so funny.

Kilua resigned.

He says, Yara, Yara, and breaks his chains.

He also just like, I guess we're breaking our chains.

He's like, this fucking guy.

Yeah.

They're briefly surprised that they broke the chains.

Then I think they remembered, like, oh, yeah, they're nenus.

They told them that.

Oh, right.

I wanted to recruit you to the phantom troop.

That's right.

It's just Killiwa's resignation of like chain breaking time now, I guess.

Yeah.

So funny.

And then, yeah, Gones doing his like his Gones mistake move of,

I think it's things that's like, if you take one step, I'll kill you.

Like, then I won't move.

So funny.

So funny.

I'll just stay in here.

You're going to get in and out.

Yeah.

And I think.

And this is where they're going to come to blows again.

Is this Franklin's synthesis?

Well, so Goan has a little line where he says, no matter how much Karapaka hates someone, he won't break and kill them out of anger.

Karapica just sort of speaking out into the world.

Yeah.

Why they can trust this

hostage exchange.

And then, you know, it comes to blows again.

It's great.

It's

something that I love in

arguments in fiction

that I think is representative of the way arguments can sometimes go in real life is the way that it sort of ebbs and flows sometimes.

You know, the argument will come to like a point of understanding or come to like a moment where tension is released and then will begin to turn again.

And you get to see these characters go over essentially the same

ideas that they're stuck on over and over again in these little different sort of variations as yes, this argument rises up again.

and Franklin says you know look and he he speaks with a real confidence and a real sort of authority he says the worst case scenario so the troop says well the worst case scenario would be that that

they kill Crowlo and then we have to sort out a new leader you know and the kids

and the kids escape Franklin says that is not the worst case scenario you children the worst case scenario is that everybody dies and the spider perishes keep bickering like this and it might just happen

If Paku and the boss don't return, this is such a great line from Franklin.

If Paku and the boss don't return, we will kill the members who are being controlled and rebuild the spider.

Gotta be real.

At this point, Franklin's probably gonna be, if they needed a new head of the spider, I would put for Franklin.

This is such a good head of VP for sure.

It's such a great thought.

It's like a solution that never would have occurred to me if I was in this position as a spider.

That it's not just the people that want to save Krolo that are valuing him too highly, but also the people who are trying to discard him.

It's just a different part of him that they're valuing too highly.

He is taking a genuinely pragmatic middle ground here that, in theory, allows for everybody's position.

If let's let Pakanoda and the boss, Pakanoda go out to get the boss, if they don't come back, here's what we do.

That must mean that Machi,

Pakanoda, and who's the third one?

Kotopi?

Are being controlled, so we'll kill them.

That is the three.

And then we make the spider again.

It is

keeping the sort of unity of the spider as like a single ravaging entity is so important to the sort of the spider ideology.

And Franklin has laid out a way that they can do that.

Especially because we know that they've had to replace members before.

Yeah.

Jizuka's a new member.

Hisuka's a new member.

Like, we have two of them that

have clearly replaced someone.

Who wants to talk about more phone business?

I'll take this one because it's fucking great.

Karapica phones Shalnark

on Krolo's phone, I think.

That's how he's called.

Oh, right.

Yeah, takes Krowlo's phone and calls Shalnark's phone.

Yeah, because they have caller ID and they're like, it's from the boss's phone.

What's Krolo's phone background?

Me.

His loving girlfriend.

Oh, I see.

I see.

Yeah.

Karapica, I don't know if Karapica says put Finks on, but Finx needs to go on the phone.

Oh, you know, Finx asked for the phone.

Finx is like, give it to me.

Finx is trying to be the good phone boy.

The problem is he is not.

He talks for a bit and then asks for the phone to be passed to someone else.

And

Finx just throws Shalnark's extremely powerful phone, and Shalnark is just like, don't break it.

Don't do that.

To Killua.

And then Killua, no, to Finx.

And then Killua throws the phone.

Finx throws the phone to Killua.

Yes, and Shalnark reprimands him.

And then

Killua throws it back to Finx and Shalnark reprimands him.

It's such a good bit.

And it's great because it's not, you know, Killua is also getting scolded here.

The A bit of the joke is Shalnark is precious about his phone, but the B bit of the joke is that every time Finx has picked up a phone in this episode, he has botched it somehow.

He's botched it.

Someone's yelled at him.

He's made something harder.

Yeah, he can't get the phone thing right.

He keeps answering it because he wants to be in charge of the hostage thing, but Kropica keeps asking for someone else.

He just grunts and hands it.

All of this, in combination with where Finx gets by the end of this episode, which is a kind of place of,

insofar as the Phantom Troop can, understanding.

Unbelievable.

He really sells me on Finx.

Two episodes and i'm like phinx is fucking great yeah he's shot up my power rankings a lot on this watch through

um it's time for the hostage negotiation rain falls near silently uh as as as pakanoda approaches with the hostages and with them here comes uh hisuka calling karapika and saying i'm gonna fight krolo uh uh

has already been told by lumi hey hurry up because i can only hold this form for four to five hours with no needles and then we see this flickering kind of jittery looking he's got he's rattly no pin man uh yes

they've been using illumi as uh as a double it's very funny the show has sort of um spent its gitteraka card very early now gitiraka's trick has been revealed the show can't pull the same trick twice because if we see a guy with needles in his face we know it's

yeah we know that's illumi so they sort of have to awkwardly say well i can only do do this for a bit because I can't have my needles and I can't have my needles.

Otherwise, you'll know it's me.

We've seen 17 good episodes of Radley Pinman.

We do.

It's great.

I love Gitareka.

I want to see Gitareka again.

I would love

a little Gitaraka reprise for some reason.

Hiseka basically says, let me go ahead with this plan to kill Krolo.

I want to

ride on the airship with Pakanoda.

The way this is going to work is the two airships fly off to a neutral location and they do like a classic sort of

Bridge of Spies hostage switch.

And he bluffs that he's going to kill Gunankiliua if

Karapika doesn't let him.

Preying on the fact that Karapaka is in this real heightened state of, like, I'm working to keep Gun and Kiliua alive.

I'm sticking with the plan.

I feel confident about this.

Meanwhile, Karapaka knows that there's no fucking reason that he shouldn't let Izuka on the ship because Krolo's already Nedless.

Although I hadn't put that together yet, so I was setting up for a fight.

I was setting up for a really exciting fight.

It is kind of subtle.

I could see how you could not add those two numbers up from the way that they show it.

This hostage exchange is lovely, and it plays out exactly the way you think it does.

The people impassively walk next to each other, and then at the very end, Gonan Kiliua give Leorio a high five.

Krolo makes no eye contact with Pakanoda, doesn't speak to her.

And then in voiceover, we get sort of the culmination of Karapika's plan.

Tonight, he says, if you make contact with a troop member, you die.

Now you'll know the pain of losing your home.

And this is a real, you know, Karapika has gotten a kind of W here.

He has figured out a different kind of revenge to exact.

You know, previously his revenge was, I am going to kill the Phantom Troop one by one.

But boxed into a situation where he couldn't easily kill the Phantom Troop, he kind of elegantly worked his way around to another kind of revenge.

Yeah, he got a, it's a very satisfying

alternative to just killing them.

It's great.

It's really good.

I was briefly confused about

I thought Pakinoda had been forbidden from making contact with the troop.

I thought he'd also exiled Pakinoda, and I didn't understand why she hadn't died when she went went back to get the hostages.

But now I reread through the nine contracts.

That makes sense.

It's time for the great match.

Hiseker versus Krolo.

Krowlo sort of intuits that something is going on as Hisaka takes his shirt off and then peels the Phantom Troop tattoo off his back.

Hisuka is going all in.

Hiseker is like...

Going undercover in the Phantom Troop, that's done.

This is it.

Here is the fight.

This was the goal, right?

This was always the goal.

Right.

Was to fight Crowla.

That's why he joined the Phantom True.

And

this is what he has in his mind when he enlists Karapika way back at the very end of the Hunter exam.

This is also a kind of

demonstration of the apotheosis that he wants, you know?

This is like what Hisuka sees as the end goal of his kind of pervert plan.

Yeah.

Right?

Is this kind of like highly orchestrated ultimate fight?

And we're getting to see that play.

Oh, we saw it with Castro, I suppose, was the actually.

We saw him do that once before.

And Crowley says, Well, look, okay, fine.

Since you're not a troop member,

we can talk.

This is fine.

Here's the deal:

I am simply not worth the trouble.

I can't use Nen anymore without dying, so I am not a fair fight.

And

we get get this shot of Hisaka's face.

Hisaker is like extremely, he's like psyched up.

He's ready to go.

And then when Kroller reveals this, he just like turns into this impassive, sheepish, black and white

manga drawing of Hisaka.

Let me tell you, this is the hardest I have laughed at the show.

Yeah,

I think it may be, there's like a goofy sound effect.

It's like it just plays a sound.

The thing is, it's not even a goofy sound effect.

It's just a single drum beat.

Part of the reason it works so well is that it's just this single big drum and Hisuka's entire demeanor changes.

It's so funny.

Stunned Hiseker, I wrote down, the showdown failed.

He just leaves.

He just leaves.

Oh, he says, I have no interest in broken toys.

It's so funny.

I can fix them.

I feel like Hisaka saying, I have no interest in broken toys and trying to get his little, you know, his little perfect game going again here.

Is some real I'm not owned.

Yeah, 100%.

Absolutely.

I have an addendum to this, to the Hisuka black and white manga drawing thing.

There is the big drum beat, and then what follows is a half a second of silence, and then like the wind that you would associate with a tumbleweed.

It just kind of goes

very funny.

You can hear him deflate.

It's good.

It's what he deserves.

It is what he deserves.

And it's so great that, like,

even in this moment of absolute abject weakness,

of being removed of all his power, of being isolated from all his friends, Krowlo is able to get one over on Hiseker without even trying.

Yeah.

Because what would happen would be Krowlo would die in that fight, as it stands, right?

Either he would try and fight Hiseker hand-to-hand with no Nen, and Hiseker would kill him reluctantly, or he would use his Nen and die immediately thanks to the Nen contract.

And all of this is a fight that Hiseker doesn't want to do because he's not Sikko in a way.

Right, he's now

he's now

sort of de facto committed to getting Krolo his Nen back.

Yeah,

yeah, he is.

Uh, he said, it's so funny.

Uh, this is kind of like an inverse of I have to become strong enough to fight Hiseker.

Hiseka now wants

krolo to get his nen back so he can fight him um

he reveals his true fortune to pakanoda and again sort of speaks to the fact with a little more um understanding of how the fortunes work than than krolo he says that the the fate is changing you know um

it's kind of a weirdly reassuring thing that he did

uh the the what that

that his did because hisuka's like hey you know a bunch more you were supposed to die so nice job.

Yeah,

his exact words are something like, I was supposed to have a date with the boss on Tuesday.

It's not going to happen.

And by the time he left, the troop's numbers would be cut in half.

And they weren't.

Pekinoda walks quietly back to the Phantom Troop headquarters.

As a quick reminder, Pekinoda's Nen contract is that she has to return God and Kilua, but she's done.

And she can't communicate to the troop anything more about the chain user.

A white cat kind of slinks out of the wreckage in the rain and meows at Pakinoda, and she meows back at this cat.

It's kind of a sad, sad little moment.

I didn't know exactly what Pakanoda was going to do, but I knew more or less what was going to happen.

You know, the writing is on the wall for her.

And just having this little moment of connection with the cat was really nice.

And as she walks in.

I don't think I saw this coming the first time.

I kind of like wasn't sure

what was going to happen.

Okay, so here's what happens: Pakinoda says, I can only shoot six bullets at once.

Obviously, she could shoot more bullets if she could reload her gun, but she knows that what she's about to do means she is not going to reload her gun.

Yeah, she

chooses the six founding members.

This is lovely.

We get confirmation on who the six founding members are.

We've said it before in the episode, but I'm going to say it here just in case.

Feitan, Finks, Machi, Nobunaga, Shalnark, Franklin, and then presumably Pakinoda and Cro

and Uvo.

Yes.

Right.

R.I.P.

Big Man.

And there's a kind of moment on the.

She says, trust me

to the Phantom Troop and says, all my memories, my soul, I give you anything.

She shoots them.

The den contract pierces her heart.

And as she dies, she says, please let me be the last.

And, you know, we just get a flash of of everything that she saw.

And Pakinoda was in a position to see a lot over these last few episodes.

And Finks says, now we know.

She did this because, and then he trails off.

And I wrote down,

you know, because of her care for the boss, of her love for her friends, of the fact that she knew there was only one way out of this that would let the spiders kind of continue to work with latitude or with leverage, and it required her to die because she saw this as a way to prevent other spider death.

I love that we don't get Finx's answer to this, and it helps sell Finx's understanding.

This is a moment where

we actually

would lose out if we saw the character spell out exactly what we learned.

You know, by seeing Finx realize this in silence, by seeing him sort of come to this conclusion in his own head, it sells Finx as a character who comes to his own conclusions, you know, who learns things.

I got sort of, this is the moment I got sort of misty over this.

I was, it was, they do it such a really well done job.

It's really well done.

And just the,

you know, the line,

all my memories, my heart and soul, I give you everything.

You know, fucking impeccable.

It's impeccable.

And there's just this like real beauty to the idea of giving someone

exactly what you thought and felt about things.

Like,

you know, something that is a total fantasy.

No one could ever do that in life.

And to do it to these, you know, these characters, they've been lifelong friends.

They've been fighting all day, high-stake situation.

They're all worried about

the boss and the troop in their own way.

And to have

simultaneously

been able to perfectly,

in you know, sci-fi perfect, communicate your perspective but at the cost of your own life is like wow it's so sad it's horrible but it was really good I don't know if you remember Dre

we did this in the dream askew game at the end of Bluff City we had a similar not with a death I'm not spoiling something

we had a similar arc about like what would it be like if you could communicate perfectly absolutely perfectly with with people you cared about.

And in much the same way as it is here, it was immediately sad and

extremely heavy to have to deal with.

It opens you up to a lot of

problems and concerns that weren't there.

necessarily beforehand.

But yeah, Pakanodo falls and almost immediately the sun comes out in York New City.

The show is so good at moving towards the end of an arc in the micro level.

You You know, its pacing is generally brilliant, and as there's a lovely sense of like rising action and then falling action as we come to the end of an arc on like an episode level.

But literally, in the last episodes of each of these arcs, the last, you know, five minutes has been paced so beautifully just to like ease you out of one arc and into another.

And, you know, the sun coming out on York New City here, Gon and Killua are eating snacks.

Killu was dressed like me in 2001.

Caro shorts and a t-shirt and like a button-down t-shirt over that t-shirt.

There is, we get this line from Gone where it's like, I'm kind of glad, I hope Karapika's fever never goes away.

Yeah.

Because

I don't want him to be a murderer.

And I'm like, bro, talk to Uva about it.

Yeah,

it's a little

cute.

That's self-defense.

You could murder a little bit.

Yeah, that one didn't count.

Everybody gets one.

Everyone gets one.

That's not true.

That's not true.

By the way, if you're listening, that's not actionable advice.

Don't do that.

Not everybody gets one.

To be fair, Uvo was out there killing hundreds of people.

Often on screen.

And Kilo, not Kilo.

Krapiga was there for that.

It's hard to call it self-defense, but

it was definitely more fair than kidnapping Krolo

and then

doing whatever

um there's a nice little bit of line of dialogue where there's a nice little bit of line i'm so tired

of line in this one where it's 11 15 p.m while we're recording this so sorry if we're a little fuzzy and also a little rushed

uh uh

gone says you know if all he he sort of thinks karapaka chose his abilities for more than one reason you know if all he wanted to get was revenge then he would have taken different abilities uh And Kilo says, I don't think that's the case.

I think

his ability was created solely for revenge, you know, and specifically for the kind of revenge that he wanted to execute.

The implication being, if he just wanted to execute on a kind of immediate murderous revenge, he would have chosen one kind of nen ability.

But instead, he sort of, in a very Karapica way, built himself out a tool set for revenge.

And where Goan's argument is, well, he chose those abilities surely for things other than just revenge killer says no no no no he wanted the full palette you know he he wanted he wanted top-to-toe comprehensive

revenge

and and something that would let him think his way through the kinds of binds that he knew he would get put in it's it's it's um it's very curapico to to develop an extremely complex uh interlocking set interlocking set of abilities um you need a powerpoint presentation for them you know yeah And then to give yourself a condition based on, like, I can only do it when my eyes are red.

And then to like, then teach yourself how to make your eyes red,

sort of overcoming the self-imposed limitation.

It's great.

It's so good.

Gona and Kiliwa go to the auction dressed up in fancy clothes.

Goose plan

hasn't been revealed yet to

break it.

But it has to Kilua.

Kiluwa call it realistic and sound.

Just like that.

Yes, 80% chance.

80% chance.

It's gone up 30%.

And Zeppile's there as well with them.

Yeah.

Leorio's there, right?

I don't know if

I don't remember seeing Leorio.

And then we get

oh my god, it's so fucking funny.

They are just like walking down the staircase to like their seat, presumably.

No, and they take their seats.

Oh, they take the seat.

Okay.

They look next to them, and there's Phaeton and Finx in suit.

Phaeton wearing the same

thing.

He killed all those people with Franklin wearing the same suit and they look at them and just bolt.

They just fucking run.

This is comedy.

They're doing more comedy.

It's so funny.

And they chase that.

Finx and Pheton chase after them like Looney Toons.

They do.

Both.

The animation on this is actually really well done.

They're running around.

And we get this really good confrontation in the hallway where I think it's Finx who assurism is like, we're not here to hurt you.

We're not going to kill Krapika because they can't kill Krapika.

I have the quote.

Nen does.

Oh, please.

I would love to talk over some music.

Nen doesn't necessarily disappear when you die.

Nen that's driven by hatred and regret can persist a long time after death.

That Nen will direct itself toward the target of those emotions.

Residual Nen can be quite fearsome.

That's why we can't kill the chain user.

It's like I cut out a little bit in the middle there, but that's the important stuff.

And

this is, I think, like the first time residual nen has really been a thing.

We kind of, we had like a hinting at, not necessarily a hinting at it, we had something similar to it with the snake incident, honestly, is immediately what I thought of.

Oh, the snake incident.

Oh, yay.

Oh, for ever ago.

And it's just that, but on a bigger scale, right?

Where it's like, nen can have

your aura can be implanted in something so powerfully and so deeply, especially when tied to these strong emotions, like he said, that

it can go on after your death or have unforeseen circumstances after the user's death.

Squalid dogs pushing food carts around.

Yeah.

Exactly.

The one having human eyes in the back of the car looking sadly at him.

That

I love this because

it turns nen into ghost stories in a lot of ways, right?

Where that, like, it's, they, Nen can have unfinished business.

Yeah.

Um, and can't hang around a theory that accounts for that.

I wonder.

Maybe some sort of like ghost world theory or something.

I think Nen having unfinished business is actually a much more elegant and kind of expressive way of thinking about it than Demon World Theory.

The idea of like it actually being a sort of,

yeah, it's unfinished business.

It's an expression of a ghost is...

Yeah.

I can see how Demon World Theory does actually dovetail with this, but I also thought I was going to be like, this is a moment of demon world theory.

But I do think that your framing of it as as almost like a haunting

is much cooler.

Thank you.

I have some questions about this.

I love this idea.

I think it's really, really fun.

And I, you know,

this is clearly going to be consequential.

We're going somewhere with this.

But

wouldn't this have been a problem if they killed the chain user earlier?

No, because no one was under.

Oh.

No, it wouldn't have been.

It wouldn't have been because they wouldn't have cared if the boss died.

No, it's so my read of this was that the pain and the regret was Karapika's pain and regret, right?

Right.

Yeah.

I think Karapika's pain and regret would have still been present, right?

But he would have needed to cast some bit of Nen

to carry on.

Sure.

And so that is what I'm talking about is what Fink says is since the boss can't use Nen himself anymore, he's all the more vulnerable to that kind of

assault.

Scary that residual Nen.

That's why we can't kill the chain user.

So

the worry is that if they kill the chain user, instead of the Nen dagger disappearing, it would actually activate.

And

would kill Kroller.

And

we are to sort of read that

Finx and Phaetan have come around on not killing Krollo now because of the sort of, and this is very gone-like, the sort of the transformative power of Machi's, of Machi, of pakunoda's memory yeah yeah

uh they have essentially been brought brought around to

we care about this flashback is we i love this the flashback is incredible cheered up again on at this one yeah this is one of my favorite moments uh of this arc is pakunoda marching uh or like walking with um

Gone and Kiloa to like bring them back to Karapika.

And it's like, you know, we could just run.

Like we could...

I think Kiloa says that, right?

And she's like, Yeah, but Pakadota says, Pakadota says, Why don't you run?

I'm injured.

With my injuries, you could escape easily.

And they, and Gonikila both go, like,

well, why would we do that?

That would make

Karapiga have to kill Krola.

We'd rather get out of this with the exchange if we can.

Yes, right.

Thank you.

They say we don't want to turn him into a murderer.

Yeah, again, to talk to Uvo about it.

Which is great.

And then, so now Finks has this memory, which gives him this perspective of, like,

oh, like, they really, they were nice.

And they kind of saved Crolo, like, on purpose.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so he says,

Paku was very thankful to you both.

Yeah.

Thankful he would have seen this, right?

You can see him being kind of like moved and also kind of confused by his feelings towards them now.

Yeah.

It's very strange.

And it has transformed the Phantom Troop.

It has.

Or it's transformed the Spider as a kind of ideological object, right?

In that they no longer have this kind of ship of Theseus out in the way that they did before.

And if they feel that way about Krolo,

they probably feel that way about other troop members, too.

And so there has been a real sea through Pakanoda's sacrifice, there has been a real sea change in...

I think how the troop is going to think of themselves going forward.

And I think that's part of what Pakanoda was saying when she said, please let me be the last as she died.

You know, I think on, you know, she was talking about the fortunes, she was talking about the deaths of the troop, but I think she was also saying, you know, can we have a phantom troop that

doesn't just take out its own members?

Stop being a phantom troop and start being a family troop.

Wow.

Wow.

This motherfucker.

Well done, Keith.

Yeah, that was masterful.

It was.

And, you know,

on some level, I'm like,

this is a kind of stable resting place.

I'm a little disappointed that

the ball has stopped rolling, as it were.

You know, hearing the Phantom Troop say, we're not going to kill the chain user right now, and we have no quarrel with you.

Gone and kill you.

Or I'm sort of like, but you're the phantom troop.

You know, come on.

You got to be in here in the story, causing a ruckus and putting our heroes in nightmarish situation after nightmarish situation.

But this is Tagashi, you know, I don't think that Tagashi is short of ways to trap his characters in

interesting problems, and it makes for a good ending of an arc.

You know, having this kind of resting point come, having the Phantom Troop and everybody come to a sort of disagreement, a disagreement, come to a sort of stillness and agreement.

I think it's good.

The only bit of me that rankles a little is the one going, I want to see the Phantom Troop kicking the shit out of people and causing problems for our heroes.

Yeah, I get you.

That's the end of the episode.

The only thing that happens is we announce what's that?

The narrator saying, next time, the Greed Island arc begins.

Yeah, that's the arc.

The only thing left is the announcer announcing the next arc.

The announcer has suddenly remembered that he is under contract with the producers of Hunter Hunter.

Usually he's like, I have a fun question about what Gunn might be thinking.

And then he's like, shit,

the next arc.

So yeah, he explicitly says it's time for the next arc.

I I think I said off mic that I was sure we were getting ready for ants, but no.

No.

We got Greed Island to do.

We got to do big gamers first.

Yeah, we got to be gamers.

Feitan and Finks say that they're there to enjoy the auction, and we know from the Hunterpedia that Feitan is also interested in Greed Island, so I think that they might have some problems with the bidding.

The Hunterpedia is Krolo,

who wields, despite no longer...

Oh, no.

Oh, we missed something important.

Krolo, standing in a wasteland, says,

time for me to head east.

East, huh?

Yeah.

What did Krollo's fortune say?

It's a friend of mine.

It's

a friend in the east.

Yeah.

Or is it like the one you seek lies in the east?

I think it depends on the translation.

Yeah, it's Hanzo to join the

Phantom Troops.

You nailed it.

Yeah.

It's cool.

Hanzo said

if you're ever in the East, you know, look for me and we'll meet again.

And I think if Gunn and Kiliwa do head East for some reason.

Krello.

Krello says East, huh?

With a kind of resignation and

a kind of resigned confidence, right?

Of like, well, this is the way we're going.

And I can't tell whether that's because he knows something about the East or whether he is like, all I have to go on now is the fortune.

I think, you know, mix of both, right?

Can Krowlo open his book?

Or the latter, but no, Krowloo can't use none.

Can Krullo open his book?

I think the book is part of, like, I think that would count.

I think that would be trying to use none.

I don't think that's the only thing that's not.

I think that the book is real and that he could open it and it would be fine.

He has to sort of cast a spell, as it were.

That's what I think.

But I think it's obviously open to interpretation.

Oh, something that's really cool about seeing the Nen contracts fire on two separate people is that it kills you instantly.

The stakes of if Krollo uses Nen, he's done.

Oh, it's worth saying that as an addition to the

residual Nen,

Nen with unfinished business, Fig sort of intimates that very few people can actually remove Nen from somebody.

So there's a way that we could maybe sort of angle our way out of this situation.

That's something that people can do.

But other than that, I think that's all I I have to talk about for these.

This was such an episode chunk, Keith.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well done with the pacing.

And also, I'm just so happy that we've watched this and I can freely talk about the Phantom Troop arc with my friends.

I know.

Yeah.

You're unbound.

I'm unbound.

You are unlike Carlo.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's fine.

He's heading east to Canada to find me.

It really does have everything Sylvie likes in it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, this is like I said, this is probably my favorite arc.

I should be wondering if that'll hold up after we watch through the rest of the show, but I love the fan.

This is a lot of people's favorite arcs.

There are people who we just watch the best, you know,

15 episodes of a show or whatever.

Yeah.

Jokes on them, though.

I'm watching this whole thing because I'm invested in it and I'm being paid to.

And both of those are

real powerful motivators.

Next time, we're watching another four.

Another four.

Keith, when are you going to free us?

After the next, after the next, next one.

So we're watching four and then four again, and then we're back to threes.

Okay.

Okay.

Fine by me.

Cool.

I mean, I trust you.

I think you're Hasor Hunter.

Oh, no.

What are we going to do?

I'm going to take a look at the next season just to make sure everything is good, like I do for every season.

The only season that so far has been a problem was this recent one.

So just to make sure that I'm not wrong, and that four and then four and then three is it is I wonder if we're gonna get an interlude

before we go.

I would just like to do two bits of business here.

Okay, should I can I say the names of the episodes we're watching?

Actually, I forgot.

Yeah, do that, please.

Bid and haste, end and beginning, invitation and friend, and reality and raw.

Ooh,

all right,

what's your biz?

My biz is related to Apple Podcast reviews, which you should go leave us a five-star one, and I will read it on the show, like the one I'm about to.

Only doing one this week because it's very late and I want to go to bed.

There's a cute one that I'm going to save for when we're not in a rush.

But also, I need to apologize to people who aren't in Canada because it turns out I was only looking at the Canadian reviews for this podcast.

So funny.

So shout out to those, shout out to all my fellow Canucks.

And also, we need more of you to be reviewing the show.

We've only got like 50-something on there.

Let's come on, step up.

It's funny because the same thing happened to me like three months ago or something, and I realized I was

a VPN.

Yeah.

And the review for this week that I'm going to read is a five-star review from Whip Painters, I think is how you read that.

One more time?

Whip Painters?

W-I-P-A-Was-R-S?

Like Wisconsin Painters?

Because W-I-A is the abbreviation for Wisconsin.

What's a Painter?

Guys, we don't have time.

I'm sorry.

I'm putting my foot down.

This review is titled Revolving Gorillas.

The cast does a great job of breaking down and reviewing everything that makes Hunter Hunter work.

The cast has also cursed a member with the knowledge of a gorilla, which slowly rotates through that cast member's mind, appearing when you least expect it.

It's true.

It is true.

It is.

I'm going to be so excited when we see that guy.

Yeah, Jack has no clue.

If you had to guess, how many episodes till we see the gorilla?

I couldn't guess.

I couldn't guess.

At this point, I don't know if we could make Jack guess.

Let's see.

Okay,

it's not Greed Island because Greed Island is primarily going to take place inside a video game.

And,

well, I don't know.

Yeah, that's...

No, you know.

You know what I think Greed Island is?

What do you think Greed Island is?

What's up?

Yeah, let's do it.

It's late, but this is important.

Okay.

Because we're about to learn.

Yeah, this is...

Greed Island is

Okay, two things

Greed Island is Tagashi's funny little game.

We're gonna go in and we're gonna play a sort of

bizarro video game on the equivalent of the 3D model from Yoshi's Island.

You know when you select levels on Yoshi's Island, you get that little rotating 3D model.

Greed Island is gonna be this like this like

it's gonna be a RPG city block.

It's going to be it's Tagashi, so it's going to be extensive and there's going to be lots of cool stuff hidden in it, but it's going to be this little area that you go into.

Greed Island in actuality is a trap.

It is something built to entice hunters and fucking get them for some purpose.

Lure them into a game.

Like a Venus flytrap.

Like a Venus flytrap.

It is a men Venus flytrap.

Who made it?

I don't know, but they have fell intent.

What is it?

It is a

puzzle box.

It's like a puzzle box level of a video game.

Sure.

Now, what else do we know about other media franchises where puzzle boxes show up?

Dre, what are you driving at?

I'm impatient.

You're right.

This is just a joke about Hellraiser and Demon World Theory.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Demon World Theory.

They're going to solve

plugging the 999 Twitch streams.

Oh, I'll say that.

Yeah.

Thank you for your reviews.

And thank you for listening.

Thank you so much.

Please leave more.

I promise I will read more next time.

This was just an almost four-hour recording session for us.

Oh, for sure.

Yeah.

We're doing great.

Yeah, we're doing.

Remember what Jack said at the beginning of this episode?

We nailed it.

Hey, we did get it.

We almost hit 11:30.

It's 11:33.

Yeah.

So we got really close to ending.

We got really close.

Have a good night, everybody.

Good night.

Thank you for listening.

Goodbye.