Ultimate Gon's Mistake - Hunter x Hunter ep. 19-21: Media Club Plus S01E07

Hey, everybody, it's Keith.

Just wanted to let you know up top that we've got a couple of new pieces of merch in our store.

You can go to friendsatetable.shop to check out the friends of the table merch store.

If you listen to friends of the table, we've got shirts and hoodies and stickers,

a couple reprints/slash/redesigns of old merch that we've done.

If you're not a friends of the table listener, you should check out friends of the table.

But the merch is so good, you should just go look at the designs anyway.

They're fun just to look at.

You can go to friends at the table.shop to check that stuff out.

And you can go to friends of the table.cash to become a supporter of this show and a friends of the table.

As always, we appreciate your support.

Thank you.

Bye.

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

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

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

With me, as always, is Sylvie Bullet.

Hi, I'm Sylvie.

You can find me everywhere at Sylvie Bullet.

Just search for me and I'll be there.

Andrew Lee Swan.

Hey,

you can find me on Twitter at Swanjurry3000.

I decided not to do a bit.

Okay, Jack DeGee.

Hi.

I'm Jack.

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

Today is Saturday, and I need to have written some of that music by Tuesday.

Right now,

it does not exist.

I'm speaking music.

Yeah, right, that's it.

Speaking music into existence.

If all goes according to plan, this is the last episode we'll record before the show is out in the world, huh?

That's true.

And at this point, it has to

go according to plan because I've already uploaded

the episode zero that has a three or four minute explainer up top that includes, hey, by the way, an episode's going to be out on Tuesday.

So it's got to, at this point, we're locked in.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Do you think that there's going to be music?

I hope so.

Yeah, I do.

Yeah, I think there is going to be music.

We'll be fine.

I'll figure it out.

Yeah.

I am totally, you know,

I'll hum into a microphone

and just paste it on the front if I have to.

The longer we do this bit, the less time Jack has to go write the music.

That's fair.

That's true.

These three episodes are the first best three episodes that we've had so far.

I'm going to say that.

Um, I said in the Discord last night that these are an early this morning, that these are an early peak for the show, I think.

I'm really excited to talk about these.

First off, this episode has a lot of child torture in it.

Sorry, but there's no way around it.

Yes.

Episode one.

Straight up a warning for the show.

Child torture in general.

Yeah, maybe a warning.

I think it's a content warning going forward.

To balance out that child torture, we also get a big what is a hunter lord drop at the very very beginning of the episode.

Uh,

the uh, the bizarre and surprisingly cruel rules to last week's sort of mystery bracket are revealed.

It's not good.

Um, Hanzo beats the shit out of Goan, but still manages to lose.

Karapika and Leorio become hunters along with Goan.

The entire tournament is played in a flashback, except for that first round.

This is outrageous.

This is the

immediate, I love it.

It's so good.

The

Jack, for context, the tournament arc is,

I would say, a main feature of

the genre.

And to get to this tournament at the end, deliberately to do a tournament, and then to have the main character sleep through the whole tournament and then need to be told what happens.

Stop me if I'm wrong, but Togashi like popularized this a little bit too with Yu Yu Hakasho, right?

Yu Yu Hakasho is

Yu Yu Hakasho is a, to me, is a show that takes the exact opposite tact as this show.

Tract?

You take a tract.

Right.

No, you tact different.

Attacked or attracted.

Attack.

Attack.

At a tract is the weird thing that people would hand you instead of a tip at Cracker Barrel to tell you to go talk to Jesus.

An attack is how you make a boat go sideways.

Right.

Tack.

That's the tack and tick-tac.

Yes.

Yeah.

It is.

We've gotten off track of the summary.

Right.

Sorry.

Yes.

We'll go back on the summary.

Just a lot.

There's a lot of like plot beats in these three episodes.

Like lots of different things happen.

We get a massive Geacheraka reveal uh we get our first crumbs of info about uh uh gun's father jing

um

and um

maybe this isn't the end of the hunter exam

yeah we get a little a little a little teaser at the end we also get a very clear um

i'll say this at the top so we can sort of uh uh cover it and move on.

We move out comfortably of the hunter exam section.

I mean, brackets, or do we, and into our next goal.

We are given a clear goal at the end of this arc, and watching that develop is really cool.

The crew minus Killua are heading off to a mysterious mountain to rescue Killua from his assassin family.

Speaking of rescuing Kilua from his assassin family, Jack, I don't know if you remember.

You made a prediction on the last set of episodes towards the end.

Oh, 16, 17, 18?

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Do you remember your prediction?

Ooh, was my prediction something like when you make a character with the power and capability of Killua,

what you are saying to the audience is eventually we are going to show you that character troubled by something or problematized by something?

And I'm so excited to see what that is.

It was actually a bit more specific than that.

You said,

and I might be getting this not quite exactly right.

You said that Kilua was going to kill Netaro and be disqualified.

I think Sylvie typed this quote in a Discord conversation.

Great.

I have no doubt that Kilua is passing the Hunter exam.

That was when he kills Netaro or something.

Right.

There we go.

Yes.

That is the exact quote.

So it also goes to another thing that you explained in the last set of episodes, which is that you tend to be weirdly on the right path with your guesses,

but that it branches off into a bizarre

there's always a little swerve.

Yeah, it always does a swerve and like makes the character.

I think you specifically like, I guessed the right thing, but but happening with the wrong characters, which is then literally what you did later that episode.

Yeah, what is it's really fun as a viewer to have that experience because you feel like you are on the same wavelength as the show, but it is still surprising you.

You know, it's the

sisters, not twins, sort of philosophy of guessing how a show works, where I'm like, I'm having a good time hanging out with this,

but there is going to be a little swerve here and there.

Because, yes, the hunter exam, and we'll talk more about this as we get into the

uh episode 21, but the hunter exam comes to an abrupt and unceremonious end when Killiwa murders Bodoro in the middle of his match with Leorio and walks away, therefore qualifying every single other candidate and disqualifying Killiwa.

Now, the remarkable thing about this is that, oh, first of all, just real quick to get this out of the way,

this takes place at a hotel.

I never really picked up on this, but the first thing they say when they get there, they're like, yeah, this is just a hotel that's managed by the Hunter Association.

So, you know, feel free to make yourselves at home.

Yeah,

is beans there, or is that what Netero says?

Beans is

Netaro, yeah.

Yeah.

And this hotel is sort of like a classical Indian architecture.

It is a real,

I don't know how they decide when to unveil big new static set paintings, because it is always extremely cool when they do so.

It's like they have these little establishing shots that get us into arcs, and then we're in, you know, fairly nondescript background work.

There's an absolutely incredible set reveal at the end of 21, but we will talk about that later.

But yes, the tournament begins, and this bracket constructed by Netaro is,

I will say, deeply confusing.

Yes.

It took me most of this episode to figure out exactly how this works, but the long and the short of it is that everybody has been paired up in fights.

If you win your fight, that's it.

You're a hunter.

Bang.

Done.

If you lose your fight, you are given, you proceed through the bracket.

You are given another opportunity to have another fight until you get down to one final battle between presumably two losers.

The winner of that battle becomes a hunter and the loser is disqualified.

And in what other way is this bracket strange, Jack?

This bracket is strange because it is weighted.

And it is weighted

according to three scoring categories by Netero.

And this was really cool because this was kind of the first time, well,

I mean,

God,

we're never going to be done with What is a Hunter, are we?

This is going to be

that massive What is a Hunter episode?

Yes, we will be talking about What is a Hunter until the end of the show?

Okay, because it is revealed that Netero and the crew have been scoring these people in three categories.

Category one,

physical strength.

Great.

Absolutely fine.

The most straightforward of them.

The most straightforward.

I know what that means.

Punching, running, shooting, withstanding being bitten by 5,000 snakes.

While they do this, they show like clips of past episodes.

Am I remembering that?

Yeah, they're showing a montage

as physical strength.

Yeah.

Option two.

Scoring category two,

mental acuity.

A little trickier to qualify, but still I sort of know what that that means.

You know, how well can you think of your way out of problems?

How well is Goan able to do the whole, like, I'm going to figure out how to get Hisoka's badge, all that thing.

Stuff like that.

One thing that they showed was

Hisuka learning how to catch the

former proctor's thing to kill him with.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like, that counts as mental acuity because he had to like figure out how to stop this attack.

Yeah.

Now, option three is the highest weighted.

So it is about.

If anyone wants to make a little guess, if you're not watching along, make a little guess what category three might be.

That's right.

It's

making the heaviest air quotes with my fingers.

Overall impression.

Tilt.

This motherfucker is choosing hunters based on vibes.

It's probably based on vibes.

Vibes.

Isn't good at

your book awards.

Yes, it's yearbook awards.

It is choosing based on vibes and is not not someone who should be choosing based on vibes.

I have here, this will be, this is, it's so the way this works is

those interviews, the more you are mentioned by another person,

the more chances that you get

in this bracket.

And that does not take into account Karapika's little,

you know, I'm thinking about him positively and him negatively.

This is just raw mentions, is like really how this goes.

It is chaos.

I read the hunter horseshoe theory: hunters must either be the scariest, worst person, or the kindest, most excellent saint, but also really strong.

Netarow just making this bracket like how Elon Musk thinks Twitter should work.

Oh my god, oh my god,

it's so funny.

That's what the X stands for.

It's actually cross.

This game had people get killed by a turtle.

Someone gets carried off by baby-faced birds, and we come down to the end, and it's just a man being like, oh, this guy's vibes are more powerful than that guy's vibes.

I'm going to rank him higher.

And this is important because if you are ranked higher, you get more losing chances.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

If you fail a match and you then proceed to the next bracket, you are given more opportunities to lose and stay in the game if you are better.

And this

immediately throws a wrinkle into the plan when Killiwa notices that Gon is ranked higher than him.

Oh, he did not like that.

He did not like it.

He did not like this.

This is the first real

moment that the boat gets rocked.

There's flashes of it on the airship with Netero the first time.

Oh, yes, for sure.

There is something.

And sorry, and during the Trick Trick Tower, there's flashes of it, too.

But this is beautiful because, and I don't want to get ahead of ourselves.

We'll talk about this as we get to the episodes.

This is a really important set of episodes for Killua, and

the way that they seed the tide turning slowly in this moment is so clever.

Killua just goes, wait a second, I am more powerful than gone.

Do I have less potential than gone?

What is happening here?

And, you know, it's clear that Notero...

My read on the Notero get the ball off me scene on the airship was that Notero knows exactly how powerful Kilua is.

He's just playing with him.

And I can't help but wonder if this bracket is Notero trying to rock the boat a little with Killua.

What he does not know, however, is that there are forces outside his control that are going to cause his stupid game to get rocked a little more than he thinks.

Can we...

Do you all...

I've posted the bracket in

our channel right now.

By looking at this bracket, according to Netaro, the person with the worst scores in the Hunter exam is Gituraker.

And Leorio.

Well, no, Leorio is of a different tier.

Theoretically, of the worst potential to.

Like, that was a big thing, right?

It's like the most potential to be, like, to grow.

The, yeah, the thing that part of the part of the physical strength, acuity, mental acuity, and overall impression speech is dedero saying like

because you've proven your mental acuity and physical strength simply by being here this bracket is based mostly off of the overall impression uh and then also brings in the the the interviews that's like what those interviews were part of yeah i only just bring up the potential thing because it's one of kiloa's specific complaints so it's like dom has more potential than me is that what he's saying

interesting because if you look at it just in terms of like raw numbers in terms of how many chances you get to win, Kilua and Leorio have the same amount of like chances to be in a match and to win.

But if you look at how the bracket is drawn, even though

they're the same like quote-unquote seed, Kilua's line is lower.

And I wonder if that is, if Maybe I'm just reading way too into this thing, right?

But maybe that is a sign that like Kilua has more potential than Leorio.

Possibly, we are now power scaling, isn't that what you're saying?

Yeah, yeah, we are, sort of, sort of that there's also

we're trying to analyze

a character's power scaling.

Looking at it, in general, the lines on the right side of the bracket are just higher than the lines on the left side of the bracket.

So, that may just be a thing.

You are right, Jerry.

I didn't realize that, yeah, Geek Drocker actually has one fewer shots than Leorio.

I did misread this because of the line height.

I think it's, I think that it's a trick of the just the graphic design here.

It could be yeah

I actually have a

really um

uh

non-character-focused reading of this which is I think this is a piece of sleight of hand by the show.

I think so so as this arc continues,

there are going to be big Gitaraka twists.

And I think part of why that twist functions

is that Gitaraka slides through the game

like water off a duck's back.

He is powerful, but he's not too powerful.

He is mysterious, but the terms of the mystery are broadly unclear.

He is considered a powerful opponent, but not on the same level as Gon or Hisaka.

Hisaka has drawn a lot of attention from Gitaraka.

And Gitaraka's whole vibe is really:

there is something weird about this person, but not so.

Our focus is pulled elsewhere, deliberately.

And I think that on some level, if you were to look at this bracket prior to knowing what happens, you would go, yeah, that looks about right.

And I think it would make this moment that comes in 21, oh, sorry, in 20,

hit so much harder, given that he has been staged as a very specific kind of

foe.

Let me see.

Rules, quick rules.

Important to go over the rules here.

Weapons are allowed.

So you can use the sword.

No cheating, says Netaro.

Of course not.

Big talk from the vibes-based examiner.

It would be like if you asked for your high school rubric, and well, I suppose this is kind of like a high school rubric.

It's just sort of like good student question mark.

And also, if any, so you're not allowed to kill your opponent.

If anybody dies,

the exam ends, and everybody left passes.

First up.

Yeah,

although legal killing was the last game.

Jack, you have left off an important rule.

Oh, yeah, go ahead.

What happens if you just knock your opponent out?

Oh, yes.

This is a critical rule.

That does not count.

The match is not over.

Your opponent

has to audibly surrender.

So if you knock someone out, then you've all got to sit there and wait until they wake back up.

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

That seems to be the implication.

Yes.

Now, if you watched the Trick Tower arc,

in which characters said something like, I am going to torture you for 72 hours,

you might have an idea of where this is going.

I do not.

And I will say that episode 19 was a

unpleasant experience.

I really can't stomach Gerald.

I got to the end of episode 19.

And I'm not making like a moral objection to this.

I think it's good television.

I think it's like, you know, the show is doing what it sets out to do.

It works fine.

It is such a

flat,

brutal,

simple episode of television that I got to the end of it and sort of went, well, I haven't really gained anything or learned anything.

That was just miserable.

And the show makes up for it by 20 and 21 being so brilliant and following on so cleanly from what we see here.

But this is a really

singular episode of Hunter Hunter so far because the first match is between Hanzo and Gon.

There's a few really interesting things that happen right at the beginning of this.

The first is that we see Hanzo recognize the issue with these rules immediately,

but then doesn't hesitate for even a fraction of a second

to exploit the rules.

We also see at the same time

Goan completely misjudging his opponent.

Yes.

Goan thinks

And I think as the viewer, I also thought, because we've seen Hanzo fall on his ass a few times.

I mean, Hanzo is...

We've talked in the past about Hanzo is an extremely funny character in digital.

I mean, I think straight up, we spent a good chunk either last episode or the episode before this one talking about how much we loved Hanzo's shenanigans.

Right.

There is a truly brilliant Hanzo shenanigan at the end of episode 21, but in order to get there, we have to get through this.

Well, and it is, it is sort of a wildly magnified version of the thing that makes Hanzo, uh, you know,

such a fun character to watch, which is like the first thing that we see is like him going around introducing himself to everyone, being like, Hi, I'm a shinobi, I'm part of a secret clandestine, I'm part of a clandestine organization, blah, blah, blah.

Like, it's so funny, and then become very serious.

It's like, no, my rules do not allow me to accept this poison drink from you.

And

we've seen him have these like moments of seriousness next to moments of absolute, you know,

I don't know, what is a word for what he does?

His shiny.

He's a goofball.

He's a goofball ninja.

So,

oh, but just before the fight begins,

Hanzo looks at the referee, who is a man called Master or Master, and says,

oh, I know who you are.

You were tailing me on Zevil Island.

And this is brilliant because we get this sudden reveal that there were examiners on the island the whole time assigned to the individual characters.

And then we just get an extremely good classic hunter-hunter joke as it is revealed that

Huzzah noticed his,

Kurapika noticed his, Killiwa noticed his, Leorio and Gone did not.

Gone is unfazed.

Gone's totally unfazed by this.

Leorio is like mortified.

He's the best.

And notably, the viewer also did not notice this.

We weren't even given a hint of this.

No.

No hint of this at all.

Which is actually kind of surprising knowing Gun.

Yeah.

This is

just a nice trick that the show has played on us.

This is a bit like the

badly written I like it here, but it's a bit like badly written detective stories where all the really critical clues are actually withheld from you, so you can't actually solve the mystery.

But here it works out really well.

This is like this is,

you know, this is a skill issue.

Yeah, we are not the,

what are they called?

The hunter committee?

What is this group of weirdos?

The hunter exam committee.

The hunter exam committee.

So the fight begins and Hanzo starts beating up gun.

Immediately beating up gun.

There is one phrase like, you know, there's one like, hey, you thought that you had something, but you didn't, you know, pretty good for a kid, I guess.

Hit you in the neck, and you're already on the ground.

The next thing that we see is like Hanzo straightening his spine back out because he crumpled it too much to be like, we need to, okay, now I'm going to hit you again.

You know,

and we get some good Killua.

Killua is mad because he's like, I could have dodged that.

I'm more powerful than God.

He's deeply in his feelings about the bracket.

Such a salty little shit.

The Killua characterization in these three episodes, I'm so glad we get to because I've been banging my Kilo as my favorite drum for a lot of this show.

And now I get the point.

The reasons why.

These three episodes clearly display Kilo's two wolves.

And Kiliwa is looking at the wolves saying, I can kill both those wolves.

Hanging on both these wolves.

No problem to me.

I've killed 46 wolves.

I'm 12 years old.

I love Kiliwa so much.

But, and so Hanzo says, Gone, surrender.

You will be able, if you surrender, you will have another chance.

You'll have more than one other chance to fight.

And Gon doesn't surrender.

No.

So, Hanzo...

I mean, there's no way to sugarcoat this.

Hanzo tortures him for 15 minutes of the episode.

We don't even have to sugarcoat it.

This is the word Hanzo uses to describe what he's doing.

Yeah.

He does.

He

we've put content once a warnings on this episode, right?

We mentioned it earlier as well.

Yeah, we did right.

We haven't

mentioned it.

We haven't this episode, but I mean, I want to talk about the way this scene is shot.

There is like a lot of blood for this show, starts kind of being put on the floor.

And then in just some really great art direction,

we see the blood fade and dry.

It's not all fresh blood.

And so there's this

clear visual image that he has been tortured for a lot.

He is barely able to stand.

In fact, he spends most of this episode on the ground.

At one point, I think Satots turns to one of the examiners and says he can't even vomit anymore.

Which is a fucking terrifying line to put in a kid's show.

This is a, this is.

So the character that says that's the martial artist, but what is his name?

Bodero?

Bodero.

Bodero.

Bodero, yeah.

And what happens right before that is we get a couple minutes of the beginning of the torture, and then we get a cut and a you know a fade out and it fades back in and someone exposes that it's been three hours.

This has been

three hours.

We have this deeply cruel...

I mean, this is this is...

And again, I say this without...

I want to be clear that I'm not making a moral judgment on the making of the show, at least in this moment.

There are points where I will make a moral judgment.

But this is exploitative, right?

This is exploitative

television.

You know, we are watching a character who we have grown to love be

just dismantled

violently and on screen

for a lengthy amount of real world time in the episode.

And the thing this does is it gets us to the place as a viewer that Leorio and Karapika

get into over these three hours of torture, which is they are like, oh, we're going to step in.

So first they try and persuade Gon to surrender,

and Gon will not surrender.

Then they threaten to step in and are told that if they step in, Gon will be immediately disqualified.

And I think they will also be immediately disqualified.

And

I think it's just Gone.

If you interfere, you're only hurting the person you're trying to help.

Yeah.

Assuming you don't like kill somebody.

And then

so then we get an exterior shot, like an establishing shot of this hotel, just with the sound of Gon getting beaten up over it.

There's very little music in this episode.

And then, well, and then, and I love this so much, Karapica and Leorio say,

so Hanzo breaks Gon's arm, and Karapica and Leorio say, if he does more, we are going to step in, disqualify Gon.

He can come back if he wants to.

This is not continuing.

And in fact, it's done in a really lovely way.

Leorio says, Karapika,

don't stop me.

I am going to step in here.

And the camera pans over to Karapika and he says, don't worry.

He says, I wouldn't stop you.

I'm going to do the same.

And then his eyes turn red.

And it's like, red irony, yellow.

That's so good.

Brilliant.

I think I've talked about this every time Karapika's red eyes come in.

But what a great thing to have a character do in your show as a way to so cleanly.

It becomes an event every time Karapica's eyes turn red.

And it says so much about his.

We have been told the circumstances in which his eyes will turn red.

And so now, whenever we see it, we're like, all right, Karapica is in this mode now.

It's great.

They also, this does a really great job of like, you know, it's easy to say,

like, oh, yeah, it's been three hours.

We did a big cut.

You know, that was, there was three hours of torture that happened in that cut.

So they do a great job here adding the weight of like having to imagine these two are also watching this the whole time.

That I mean, I don't think anyone here is having a pleasant time.

I think there's a few characters who don't care

or are unaffected by it.

Lario and Cropic are like clearly having the second and third worst times out of anyone here.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I

the other.

Oh, sorry.

Go ahead.

Well, then he says, I'm going to cut your legs off.

Yeah.

There's one real quick joke that I think it's a joke that happens either right before or right after the Krabby Guy Eyes Red moment is that Hanzo takes some time after these three hours of torture to like drop some backstory.

He does a handstand and then goes, let me tell you a bit about my home.

And it's basically like, I was trained from a young age to be a ninja, so I'm really good at torturing.

By your age, I'd already killed he says cut to killua who says not a big deal

i love killing so many people i don't care i love them so clearly laying out the parallels between uh hanzo and killua after um hanzo spends all this time just like brutalizing gone and also like while killua is having his little insecure moment about like i'm way stronger than gone i have way more potential than gone it's also amazing because it gets cut off by gon sweep kicking his fucking arm out from under him, right?

Yep.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Gone with a broken arm kicks

the shinobi, kicks Hanzo out.

Hanzo, yeah.

It kicks him like across the tournament stage.

Yeah.

It's like it's a good kick.

It doesn't mean shit.

You know, Hanzo is like, I let you kick me because I wanted to let you kick me.

And in a really lovely moment of levity, we have

Hanzo in focus in the foreground saying, I let you kick me because I wanted to.

And completely out of focus in the background, we can see Leorio jumping up and down and shouting, you're a liar, which is really.

Oh, yeah.

So when he goes,

yeah, it's so funny.

Oh, my God.

That's so funny.

And it's true.

That's a lie.

Is it a lie?

I think it's definitely a lie.

The delivery of the line to me, especially if you hear the dub, like I've always felt like, oh, because why would he do that?

Why would he let him kick him?

He's definitely like, I allowed that to happen.

Yeah, it's very

theme kicking in.

Did we did it?

Did I miss this?

When is the thing?

When did

I completely botched saying that?

When does the theme kick in?

So I think that it's during the kick.

Like, Ghon's on the floor.

He's been on the floor for hours.

We haven't seen anything besides like Hanzo manipulating Ghan's body into positions to further attack him in, you know, specific bones and muscles or whatever.

And

as Hanzo's delivering this backstory, and then we're getting some chatter from the crowd, like

we

sort of see Hanzo's face just get kicked.

And then it's like, oh, Gone kicked Hanzo in the face, flew him across the room.

And then we see that he's up, he's kneeling, he's like panting, and his theme kicks in.

And then he's like, ah, your story made me so bored and annoyed

and it is a absolute total shift in the vibe in in one second yes because this is where the episode turns um

so first uh hanso says i'm gonna cut off your legs uh and we're back to the i'm gonna torture you for 72 hours plotline again the fact that this has come up twice in one arc makes me think that the show we're gonna come back to like this idea of just like like making someone either physically or mentally so miserable for as long as you can that you sort of bend them to your will.

This seems like a recurring theme.

And Gon says, and

this is where the episode turns, Hanzo says, I'm gonna cut off your legs.

And Gon says, well, that's a problem.

We get this beautiful little hand-drawn black and white shot of the spectators being like, whoops, and everyone laughs.

Hisoka and Bodoro share a little chuckle, and Bodoro says, Oh, I'm so sorry.

Because

what we have sort of figured out here is that Ghon

is not only not going to give up, he has not been quote-unquote broken by the events of this, and in fact, seems fully prepared to Ghon's mistake his way out of the situation.

I wrote here, I wrote ultimate Gohn's mistake, is what I wrote.

Like, like, brainstorm a solution to a problem so arbitrary and like pure-hearted.

Well, Goan has a point, which is like,

nothing you've done has worked.

And if you cut off my legs, you'll lose because I'll die.

You can't cut off my legs in a way that won't have me bleed to death.

Yeah.

And Leorio says he's so stubborn.

And at this point, Ghan's stubbornness really just drives the rest of this episode.

Yeah.

It really does.

I think that,

like Goan.

So the thing that they show is that Hanzo has understood the stakes the whole time and has understood the rules to the game the whole time.

What makes these rules particular and weird and cruel.

And the reveal here really is that Goan also understood those rules from the beginning.

We just didn't show.

We just didn't see him formulating this plan to exploit the rules.

Because he basically,

as soon as he gets attacked like this, I think he goes, like, oh, as long as I don't give up, then I can win.

Yeah, yeah, he's like, this is fine.

Yeah.

And then he tells that to Hanzo.

This is the reveal of like, he's like, you can't do that because then I can't give up.

And if I can't give up, then you can't win.

So you might as well let me win.

There's a really good, once again, kill a moment.

Ding, ding, ding, kilowa moment,

where people start laughing at Gon's just sort of like,

I don't know,

bullheaded confidence is what I'll go with.

They didn't hear Ghan's theme changed like we did, but they still all felt the same thing.

Yeah.

Like, that's the sound Goan makes when he's very brave.

Oh, it comes out of him.

It comes out of his anger.

Yeah.

There is a.

It's just like Kiloa thinks, um, why is the mood shifting in here?

The stakes, the situation hasn't changed at all.

Yeah.

Um,

He said, gun hasn't gotten any stronger.

Why has the brutal atmosphere gotten so much lighter?

Yeah.

Really, really cool.

And again, this is just all of this is

work

to get the viewer and to get Killua to the point where he needs to be.

for the next episode to hit as hard as it can.

This is some really, you know, I'm always so reluctant to just be like, I'm going to just look at the story as a piece of structure because

I think it's Le Guin has this really great passage where she talks about a resistance to the idea of stories as simply being like a beautiful box wrapped around a message.

You know, is all a story, is like the box and the bow around a message.

And she's like, well, no, of course it's not.

A story is a whole bunch of other things that beyond just it as a container for something else.

And so whenever I'm like, oh, it's just, this is just how the structure works, I'm like, the show is also operating on other levels.

But the Kiliua work in the next two episodes comes as a culmination of a bunch of really particular moves,

primarily in this episode.

And I think Killiwa being the one to set himself apart from

everybody else in the room and go,

yeah, everyone's laughing, but like...

Nothing has really changed here.

And I just saw someone that I love very much get tortured for three hours.

Yeah, I wrote this story in the next episode

as a note for

something that happens kind of early on.

But I wrote that Kilua has had a totally different emotional experience during this fight than anybody else.

Like

the difference between

how

Kilua versus Leorio and Karapika are reacting to this.

is so obvious that even Karapika and Leorio notice it.

They give him like this really awful look and suspicious look

in the next episode when Kilo is talking to someone.

Hanzo.

Kilo's talking to Hanzo in the next episode.

It sort of comes down to a final moment where Gunn has got Hanzo to sort of freeze and really

think about how this is going to go.

Hanzo is pointing his blade.

He pressed it into Kilo's forehead.

We have this great visual of like

two

strands of blood running down either side of Ghan's nose.

I know he did it again.

And I don't remember the question that is asked, but Gon says, I'm going to go and see my dad, which is just brilliant.

You know, this revelation that he doesn't just want to follow in his father's footsteps or understand why he left or understand what made him be a hunter.

He just wants to see him.

And he believes that being a hunter is the thing that will get him there.

It's so crushingly sad.

And it is also,

in the way that Ghoen so often is, such a

pure-hearted statement of hope and desire, of speaking something into the world that you care about.

It's just an all-time gone moment so far.

Well, there's another aspect to it, which is that he says

that he has a really bad feeling that if he doesn't do it now, he'll never see his father.

which is like

it's so brutal because it's like watching Ghone be sort of trapped in by the fact that he's the main character of this story.

Like,

the, this like, hopeless, this, like, is he sort of, he sort of feels like he's hopelessly fighting again, like, uh, to like keep up with his own story.

Like,

he just traded four hours of torture for this sort of like idea he has that this is his one shot to to see his dad.

That is like a miserable trade.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's, and it does feel, it does feel like it's like, it is out of a place of like, you know, hopefulness, but but also despair of like,

I, it has to be now.

So it doesn't matter what happens to me because I have to keep, I'm already locked in.

I want to shout out Ghan's performer, vocal performer.

Who is Goan's performer in the Japanese

cast?

They are doing such a great job in this scene.

Yeah, yeah.

I believe that's Mega Mihan.

Great.

Yes.

Yeah.

What's her name?

Yeah.

Fantastic performance.

Has done a lot of.

I'm looking at her

filmography right now to see see what other people would know about it.

A lot of the major roles she's been in,

I don't really know.

Oh, she was TK in Digimon Adventure in the Japanese version.

So

she's been in a ton of video games.

She's been in a video game, actually.

So not the show TK.

Oh, she plays Jill in Final Fantasy 16.

Oh, yeah.

You've been playing that.

But yeah, her performance here is just brilliant.

Completely in tune with where the character needs to be in this moment.

And then, you know, it actually wraps up really quickly from here.

Hanzo kind of hears this and says,

okay,

I surrender.

Game over.

And going to accept?

No, he does not.

Well, he gets so grumpy about it.

Yeah.

He straight up says, I won't accept that.

Yeah.

And it says, fine, then you surrender.

And he's like, I don't want to lose either, but I don't want to win that way.

And it is, oh, he's great.

Those sort of flexible like character traits here really working.

Uh, he's like totally able to grasp the ridiculousness of this situation.

Like, immediately, it picks up on like, wait, so you want to win, but you want to win in a way where I lose, not just give up.

He goes, like, yes.

But you can't beat me in a fight.

He was like, no, I can't.

Yeah, he says, he says, Hanzo cannot, and I think he's right.

Hanzo cannot see a way that he wins this particular fight.

And so he says,

I'm simply not going to do it.

Goan

says,

let's work together to figure out a way.

that I can beat you, which is just, come on, Goan.

And Hanzo responds to this by knocking Goan out, punching him really hard.

Hanzo eventually taking the option that he initially offers to Goan of like just win the next fight, which

I think says a lot about Hanzo that it took him this long to accept that deal.

Like

it,

you know, I can't, let me look at this bracket.

It ends up being Pacle that he fights.

That match goes, that much is really fun.

No, no, no, no.

It would have been Kilua.

I am wrong.

It would have been.

no, he fights Paco.

He fights Paco.

It's a really funny outcome.

So, like, if he had, if he had looked for one second at the board, it would have been like, Hanzo knows that he could take Pacle.

I guarantee that this is true.

Yeah.

100%.

And, and so, like, no, he

opted for the four hours of torture.

Uh,

for I can't really imagine a reason why.

It maybe just not even occurring to him to lose.

Uh, well, he's he's he considers himself to be.

I was about to say honorable, but there's no honor in what he did.

He is

still considering himself to be honorable.

Yeah, that's true.

He's still capable, I think, is more it.

I think he just thought he could

get this taken care of in the first round.

Like, once you've been torturing him for a half hour, it's like, surely not another half hour.

And then it's like, well, it's been three hours.

It's got to be just right around the corner.

There's like a pride thing to it, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

yeah.

He gives a little speech.

He says, when Goan wakes up,

he's not going to want to accept, but he's going to have to.

Them's the rules.

And he also basically says, like, watch out for Goan.

Let him go on.

Because if he doesn't sort of...

Basically, the whole game breaks if you play it like Goan did.

Right.

Yeah.

I think that the.

Oh, so we're in episode 20 at this point.

We have sort of jumped ahead.

So I do want to make sure sure that we get

something else that I want to set this up real quick and then we can rewind a little bit.

Gone gets knocked out by Hanzo, wakes up in a hospital bed with Satots.

Satos, I believe, immediately.

Oh, so

we...

Sorry, go ahead.

There's like a dream that Gon has before this that I do think is like kind of good is him chasing up like

what he assumes to be his dad at the top of the stairs like we know it's his dad because we watched the show but also I don't know how Gon knows what he looks like in this dream uh and

oh right gon does have a picture of him never mind um and then the like stairs he's going up crumble away and I think that's just a good way to show that gon gon's anxiety over having possibly lost the hunter exam yeah because he doesn't know

uh so it's back satan's is like no the hunter exam's over.

Gon's like, can we go watch the rest of the thing?

He's like, you've been sleeping for a day.

Everything's done.

Is this where he explains who wins and loses?

He says, like, Kilua passed, or Krabika passed, Lario passed.

Unfortunately, Kilua killed someone and was disqualified.

What he says is

Kilua failed.

And then we get a series of images heavily implying that Kilua has killed someone.

We see that shot of Killiwa leaving through the door.

And this is what we were talking about at the beginning.

This is just so wild to me.

Where we left off

was me saying that

Yu Yu Haka Show does the kind of opposite thing, which is that it takes this idea of a tournament, really blows it out into like, oh, this is now like episode, episodes or full episodes are happening in and around this tournament that are like

not that not

in any way tied to what's normally happening in a tournament arc.

This is like kind of a denial of having a tournament arc at all.

Beautiful.

We see the one fight, Goan faints, he wakes up, and then is told.

It's sort of like a horror movie where they show you the monster at the beginning, and then the rest of the horror movie is narrated from the one survivor who says, Yep, I'm the one survivor.

Let me tell you how it happened.

Yes.

Yeah.

It's so bizarre.

It's just brilliant.

Just before this happens, we get a really nice sort of firm bit of the rules.

Someone who has passed the Hunter exam cannot subsequently fail.

You know, it cannot be retroactively set up so that they fail.

And they cannot ever retake the exam.

Right.

If Gon...

He says, you can't fail after you've passed any more than you can pass after you've failed.

Yes.

And if Gon doesn't actually want his license, he can sell it.

Although, quotes, and I'm going to come back to this because I don't really understand this.

We'll get more information about this.

He says, if you sell it, it is of no practical use to anyone else.

It essentially just becomes a trophy at that point.

There's a few other really great lines.

Sorry, Jack, do you want to finish what you're going to say?

Yeah.

This is so sad.

Goan is in bed wearing a sling.

I'll come back to this as we figure out more about what went down.

But is this how Goan thought it would go when he was running through the tunnel?

You know, the sort of the apotheosis of becoming a hunter, the joyful award, and it's just sitting next to you in a bed after you wake up, didn't even see the end result.

It happened to him while he was asleep.

He won while literally not even being aware of it.

It's sort of the...

It's sort of like insult to injury on top of the Hisuka Badge situation.

Yeah.

And he says, Satot says,

due to the efforts of our predecessors, hunters are treated quite well.

And as a result, they want to pass everyone, everyone who applies.

But there are so many villains seeking to apply to get a hunter license that they have to do these games.

And I wrote down, hmm, because how well has this worked out for you, Satot?

It's not working for you.

It's not working.

And like we said at the very beginning of the episode, it almost seems to filter in the worst of the villains.

That's what they say about using hand sanitizer too much pre-the COVID pandemic, right?

Where it's like, oh, all we are doing is

basically selecting for the one super bug that cannot be killed by hand sanitizer.

By playing the hunter games, all we do is we make Hisaka and Gitteraka.

This is the situation they've set up.

Okay,

all sand

has inherent morality.

They're either good or evil.

The size of grain has no difference in whether you're good or evil.

And in order to sift out all of the bad sand, you've made a sifter, and then you're only going to allow in the biggest pieces of sand.

And it's like, but you've already established that the size of the sand has no bearing on whether or not they're good or evil.

Yeah, but it's all the biggest ones are the ones we're taking.

We want, look, now, look, now, look.

We don't want the person who robbed the liquor store.

Absolutely not.

They might use the hunter for ill.

Oh, murderous.

Exclusive?

Yes.

Please, please go and welcome in.

Yeah.

Step one of the hunter exam.

A man disintegrated another man's arms.

And at that point, Satot said, I'll keep playing.

Well, you've come along now.

This does not work.

Then Satos gives a little be a good hunter speech.

He He says, you must decide when to use this card.

This is curious to me because

we still don't know what this card does.

Right, this mentioned the first appearance of the hunter license.

Did you know there was a license?

They've talked about a license before, but I had thought of it a bit like a birth certificate or a license to kill.

Well, no, I thought it was a physical thing.

I have like a piece of paper form that is my, like, here's why you can stay in the US.

And it is not a card.

It's not like in my passport.

It's like a piece of letter paper.

And I thought it would be something like that.

You know, like frighteningly flimsy, just something written down to indicate that somewhere, someone else has made a consequential decision.

Yeah.

Can I read some quotes here, please?

So Sidotes takes out, after explaining we would accept everyone if they were only good, if there were only good people in the world, is basically what he says.

Unfortunately, there's villains, so we have to figure out which of those villains to allow in.

He takes out the hunter's license.

He says, Most professional hunters consider this card more valuable than their own lives, yet no more than a worthless scrap of paper at the same time.

The important thing is what you accomplish once you become a hunter.

I'm ringing the bell hard.

This is a this is a

uh this is a full thesis statement about hunters here.

I feel like uh

is it clear?

No,

I'll

tell basically what he's saying is that

even though this card is the thing that allows you to be a hunter, it's actually the ability to become a hunter that allows you to be a hunter.

And so, this card

was the friends you made along the way type shit.

But, but it's

the real, it was the power that you obtained along the way

because it's it's sort of like,

yeah, yeah, the anyone who's a hunter is a hunter because of what they can do, not because they have a stupid little card that for some reason is really, really important to not lose.

Card has a magnetic stripe.

Goan says that he will use it once he's paid everyone back for the favors that they did to him over the tournament.

And he says, oh, the tournament's still going.

And then we get this.

It's good that these...

It's good for Leorio that these conversations that Ghon has about being unworthy because he's received help along the way,

that he, that Lyra is not there for those because I'm sure they would make him feel extremely self-conscious.

Yes, Goan is worried about getting too much help.

Okay, so we have this perspective shift.

Yeah, we jump back.

This is where we were before I remembered to set up the episode.

We jumped forward.

Now, Sato is explaining to Goan all the things that happened while he was asleep.

And it starts with jumping back to Hanzo after the fight has ended.

Yeah.

Dre or Sylvie, do you want to recap this next section?

I know that Keith and I have been talking a lot over the last section.

That's true.

One more quote.

I have one more quote.

This is tied to what...

This is the, sorry, this is tied to what we were saying right before I insisted that we jump back in time.

This is how I remembered that we needed to do that.

Hanzo's trying to make sure, definitely for sure, Goan wins and I lose this match.

And what Netero says is, if Goan were to throw a fit and kill me, we still wouldn't be able to to revoke his license, is what he says.

Yep.

Fucked up.

Your system doesn't work, Matsaro.

Yeah.

It's so busted.

It works for him.

It's working for him.

Yeah.

And I mean, I think this is

the back and forth of Netero that we've kind of had hinted at so far: is that most of the time, Netero just seems like kind of a goofy old man.

And then we get these little bits and pieces where people are like, no, man, Netero's like fucked up.

Yeah, Menshi calls him cruel like three or four times in this season and has that

he's a total but he's so likable he's a listen there's a lot of fuckers who are real likable you know

it's i it is but it's so bizarre how

like uh

he seems perceptive attentive and kind but he's not he's cruel and horrible

well he's the head of the search committee people contain multitudes keith yeah he works for hr basically wow

It's very nice, and then also just doesn't actually really have your best.

He's going to fucking get you, yeah.

All right, so how does how does uh how does the rest of the scene play out here?

Um, um, did we talk about Hanzo saying the thing about like Goan's eyes?

We should stop him.

No, we didn't, which is a great place to start.

Do you want to take that, Dre?

Yeah, sure.

Uh, I mean, I don't have the play-by-play written down, but basically, like, Hanzo is, uh, I think it's it's Kilua, right?

Kilua says, like, why did you let him win?

Right.

Like, very, like, dripping with venom, you know, from this place that we have seen Kilua kind of slide into.

It's a very bizarre takeaway from what we just watched.

Yeah.

But, I mean, again, that's how Kilua sees things, right?

He sees this as a contest of strength.

And in that context, Goan is hopelessly outmatched.

And, you know, he sees that, and he's not wrong, Hanzo could have just kept torturing Goan forever.

forever um

but hanzo explains that like you know normally when you torture someone the only thing that like lets me live with torturing people is that they look at me with like hate and anger in their eyes and that allows me to like compartmentalize or something but whenever i looked at gone's eyes even after i broke his arm there was there was none of that like negative emotion there was no fear there was no rage there was no like malice towards him.

And he basically says, yeah, and that won me over.

So I decided to to

just let it happen, to let it go.

He said,

I had broken his arm, but I could tell he'd already forgotten about it.

Jesus Christ, Goan.

Goan.

Goan, remember.

Goan.

I broke my wrist when I was five or something.

I fell off a table.

I don't say that I think about it a lot, but I tell you what, I have not forgotten that I did it.

I remember having to wear that little cast

wasn't pleasant.

Garn's got goldfish brain, that's fine.

This is where Kropica and Leorio and even Pacle are eyeing Kiloa really suspiciously.

Yeah, uh, they cannot believe that he's asked this question.

Like, they are so

like

they're outraged by this, by what happened.

And Kilua's like, Why didn't

you

get him better?

I fucking love every time Killua, like

Killua's lack of social grace comes out.

Like, it's always been a thing that Killua's kind of just like a bratty little shit, but then

just being open about, like, hey, you could have beat up my best friend better.

How come you lost to my best friend, even though you were kicking his ass, loser?

It is.

And this, you know, we have seen, like you say, we have seen Killua in this mode before.

And by the end of this episode, we will know why.

It makes sense.

And we're going to talk about that, but I want to put a pin in this for the listener.

To when we get to that, think about this moment where we're like, Killua has this capacity to

just be it's beyond tactlessness, it is a kind of violent, um,

uh, calculated detachment,

very callous,

yeah,

it's it's wild.

Uh, next fight:

Karapika versus Hisoka.

Yeah.

And

nothing weird happens during this one?

Nope.

It's super normal.

They just sort of fight.

They dodge each other a lot.

It seems like no one can really get the upper hand.

Hisuka gets real close and whispers something in Karapika's ear and surrenders.

A normal fight.

It's

Karapika.

Yes.

Sorry.

Karapika surrenders, Sylphie?

No, sorry.

Hisuka defenders.

Hisuka defenders.

Oh no, it's the He'saka Defenders.

Sorry, Hisaka surrenders.

Really weird.

Karapato is stopped in his tracks.

He'saka Defender's DNI.

Hisaka Defenders DNI.

Okay, that's the end of that fight.

I want to talk about this one because it is a visual gag or just a plate gag that is so funny.

Now it's Hanzo versus Pockle.

Hanzo begins the game that he played with Gone that took four hours and Pockle surrenders immediately.

It's just so good.

Pockle sees what Hanzo is about to do and goes, no, I'll take my chances with someone else.

And this is great because it takes Hanzo out of the game.

Hanzo can no longer play his, I'm going to torture you until you surrender game.

Hanzo is now officially a hunter.

Next fight.

Hisaker versus Bodoro.

This

he beats him up.

He beats the shit out of him.

And similarly, he ends the fight by whispering something to the opponent, but this time Bodoro surrenders.

And

I do love us narrating through this because this is also the experience of watching it.

I cannot explain how weird it is that they're showing this through flashback.

I love it so much.

Satos is narrating over montage.

It's brilliant.

It's because it's it's a kind of like a kind of an alienation from the tournament itself.

I think that if we were in the tournament, we would be, all we would be thinking about would be, you know, how are these fights going to go?

How are these matchups going to play out?

What are the moves that people are going to use against each other?

How is it going to build up to Goan, who should fight last?

Yes, yeah, exactly.

And

with this alienation, it pulls out all that

tension, all that wondering, and and cuts right to

the most interesting, most sort of raw moments of each fight, the most consequential moments of each fight, in terms of how it is all going to go forward.

And it lets it say that the important thing

isn't the tournament, and it's not who wins and who loses.

It's actually Gicharaker and Kilua.

Yes.

Yes.

This is

kind of,

I'm so wary of pinning this straight onto it.

This is like a theatrical technique on some level, pioneered by Bertov Brecht, who was a German playwright who showed up in Friends at the Table quite a lot

in various ways.

Brecht

has this technique called the distancing effect or the alienation effect,

which

he is using it to try and separate the audience from

feeling one with, or identifying with, or following directly along with the characters.

Brecht doesn't want you watching a play and going, oh, oh, I feel these guys' emotions.

This is me.

When I see the fight on the stage, I'm thinking about what it would be like to fight.

You know, he wants you to have stepped back and to be sort of looking at it on a structural or a symbolic or a

more direct level.

And this is sort of what is happening here by saying, we don't need to watch a tournament arc.

We need to see

how this plays out in the sense of the sort of broader structure of the thing and gets us to the fight that we are working towards.

Which isn't the next fight.

The next fight is Killiwa versus Pockle.

Killiwa surrenders immediately.

He says, I'm not interested in fighting you.

Walks away.

So good.

Yeah.

Literally, exactly

what he said in the interview, too, which is like, I don't want to fight Pacquiao because it wouldn't be interesting.

And what,

what

an error this was.

What an error it was.

Because also how differently things could have gone.

Doing the John Madden Telestrator circling Killua a bunch of times, being like, and here's where he messed up.

He is a.

he is the most Killiua-ass Killiwa in this scene, right?

He even does the little hand flip as he walks away.

There's this kind of very calculated nonchalance from Killiwa.

And this is the...

This is the farewell to a kind of Killiwa.

I mean, we might see him again later in the show, but I have a suspicion that we will not see this Killua for a while.

Or maybe we will see a more...

more direct, a more unvarnished version of this Killiua.

But But Killiua is about to go through a transformation.

And this little moment of him flipping his hand and walking away and saying, yeah, sorry, I'm not interested in fighting you, is a goodbye to the breezy, casual, skateboarding murderer, Killiwa.

Goodbye, my friend.

I hope to see you again one day.

Leorio is up now.

He's going to fight Bodoro, but Leorio,

in a move that I can't tell whether or not it's because he doesn't want to fight or because he's a doctor, says, I will not have this fight until Bodoro is fully recovered from his fight with.

I really like that moment.

I really like that moment.

It's another point in the, like,

um,

like, the weird nobility that Leorio kind of treats people with.

Like, he, this motherfucker loves being chivalrous is the vibe.

And, and that's another, you know, Dr.

Leorio moment, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

That's true.

So true.

Uh, what's his last name?

Paradonite.

Paradigmite.

Oh, yeah.

Paradonite.

Uh, I'm just making sure that I have a backup going.

Okay, great.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Start recording.

Make sure I don't hit start streaming.

That would be very funny.

That would be very funny.

And then all hell breaks loose.

Because, and the show presents this so casually.

Alright, it's time for the next matchup.

Gitaraka versus Killua.

Every time we have seen Kilua actually fight someone, it has been an absolute bloodbath.

So I suspected that it was either.

I went into this fight going, ah,

this is going to be consequential.

You know, something is going to happen here.

And Killua begins the fight.

And in one of the most frightening, great pieces of

use of visual language I've seen in a long time, Killua begins the fight by using his shadow step that we saw him use against

the serial killer in Trick Tower before tearing out his heart.

and we saw him use it against Netaro during the ball game.

That's the shadow step where we get this music cue, the screen dims to purple.

We see Kilua walk in this very

stylized, deliberate fashion, sort of step by step,

except there is absolutely none of the visual or audio ephemera associated with it when it happens this time.

There is

Kilua tries to do his shadow step at Gitaraka, but there are no effects or music.

No whooshing, no shadows.

He just walks slowly towards Gitaraka.

And this is great because, you know, sometimes I think there would be a way of framing this scene where that would be scary because it would be like Kilua is hiding what he's doing.

It is.

No, it looks weird.

It is immediately clear that something is wrong.

It is like watching the person...

Oh, I'll tell you what it feels like.

It feels like watching someone in a show pull the trigger on a gun and it go click.

Something has malfunctioned here or is not working.

It also helps, and then I think Sacho said right before this was like, and this is where Kilua makes a big mistake.

And then Gizaraka says, It's been a while, Kill, and removes the pins and transforms into

the dark-haired figure with a different vigor.

The one that goes to bed by digging out a big hole in the ground.

And I had one of the anime Twink who's a tuber.

Like in a potato sense.

I had wondered as we saw Gitaraka start to transform

whether this was going to be

a new body.

I didn't know whether or not something Gitteraka can do is like shapeshift more broadly, and the dark-haired figure we saw earlier was just the body that he was using at that point.

But that character art is so good.

We talked about it in the last episode.

The last, yes, maybe the last episode.

The big, wide, black eyes, the long dark hair.

And it's this character.

And Satots, I think it's Satots, says,

this is Killua's big brother.

And we hard cut two commercials.

It's just like, this is good writing for television.

Knowing exactly where the points of tension are in your episode, just cutting the audience off at its most exciting point.

They paced these really well.

Like,

I know this whole episode has been us being like, these are the three best episodes we've watched so far, but these are the three best episodes we've watched so far.

Yeah.

We come back from credits and we learn this character's name.

This is Ilumi.

Is that how I say it?

Ilumi.

Ilumi, I think it was.

Ilumi.

Killua's big brother.

Is this the same vocal performer as the person who has been playing Gitaraku?

I must look that up.

So I think that it's like a voice changer because Ash,

as the disguise is like transforming away,

you get them in chorus, and I think it is the same.

It is the same voice actor, yeah, yeah, okay, and with a processing on it.

Yeah,

uh, great, really, really cool transformation in just affect from this actor.

Um,

God, how do we begin to talk about this?

Okay, here's what I'll do: I will say how this scene goes in the broad sense, and then we we can dig into it so we don't feel like we have to do an extremely granular play-by-play.

Ilumi confronts Killua and immediately

essentially starts berating him.

Just sort of tears him down completely before he's terrified.

Kilua has been shaking since the transformation started.

Yeah.

Killua is just absolutely terrified.

We learn that Ilumi needs a hunter license for a job that is coming up.

What we know about Kilua's family, remember, is that they are a family of extremely highly trained and presumably very good assassins.

Ilumi has entered the hunter exam to get a license for a job.

And then with

spinning hypnotic eyes, and we get these.

The way this show shoots villains, the way this show shoots everybody is brilliant.

The way this show shoots villains as having a capacity to exist on a sort of dreamlike, abstracted plane is brilliant.

We've seen this with Hisaka, we've seen this with the prisoners in Trek Tower.

Villains are sort of afforded a presence in front of the camera that is

very dreamlike and separate.

Yes, we get these beautiful close-ups of Ilumi's big black eyes with spinning text in them, like a script that we haven't seen this script before.

This is not the

iconographic language that is used elsewhere in the show, that is sort of the language everybody reads and speaks.

And with his eyes spinning, he tells Kilua that he is not cut out to be a hunter.

And he says, outright, you were born for one purpose, to be an assassin.

And then I wrote down this quote because it is brilliant.

He says, you are a puppet of darkness, devoid of passion.

There is nothing you desire, nothing you wish for.

The only pleasure you're capable of getting is derived from causing death.

What do you imagine you'd accomplish by being a hunter?

And he basically says, you...

You don't have desires.

You don't want anything except to cause death.

What is it that you want?

And Kiliwa can't answer him.

He is silent

until he summons up,

I want to be friends with Gon.

I am just so sick of killing people.

I want to be friends with Gon and just have fun.

And Illumi says, no, you don't.

You are incapable of friendship.

The only thing that you can do is figure out whether or not you can kill someone.

The thing you are feeling towards Gon is not actually friendship.

You don't know how to classify him.

You are wondering if you can kill him, and you want to find out.

This is a...

So, you know, I'm not going to step in every time

that our dubs or our subs say something different, Jack.

This is a pretty big one, I think,

for my dub versus your dub.

For me, what...

Illumi says is, you don't know how to classify Gone because he's too dazzling for your eyes.

He says,

for me, he says.

He's so good.

Where did I write this down?

Because I also pulled out this line, Keith.

It's lovely.

Gone is such a radiant personality that you don't know how to classify him.

Leorio keeps wanting to step in.

This is

real good, Leorio hours in these episodes.

Yeah.

Leorio is saying, you're already friends.

How do you not know this?

It's so fucking good.

I love Leorio so much.

At which point, Leorio goes,

uh,

okay.

Well,

this might actually cause a problem for Killiua,

who I have groomed to be, me and my dad have groomed to be a murderous assassin.

Uh, so I'll just kill Gon.

Uh, and then everybody says, well, no, hold on.

If you kill Gon, you fail the exam and you don't get your license.

At which point Ilumi does a little

bit of calculus.

It's really funny.

Really flat, scary, um, figuring out this.

He's very nonchalant about it.

Yeah.

Like, these are all just whims.

Like, he's just like,

oh, what would be the best thing to do?

I can't.

How should I handle this?

He, I, Ilumi is very is a very silly character in a lot of ways, just not about like what he's discussing, but the way he goes about it is like very goofy in a way that I think is sort of like an intentional foiling with Husuka and a little bit like also obviously with his brother there's like a lot of like

we'll get we will talk more about the relationship with

those old brothers like I feel like that's a guarantee oh yeah and I want to make time

I'm still just going through this scene I want to there's a lot that I want to talk about about the the the the relationship here as it is immediately presented but Ilumi's answer is hilarious oh also I want to say real quick this is kind of um

we can see Gitteraka in Ilumi in this moment.

I feel like this kind of very blasé, confident planning is something that we had seen in Gitteraka already.

There is an extent to which they are not saying, oh, these are two completely different people.

It's a completely different persona.

We really have been watching Illumi just in a different guise.

This is the same sort of decision-making.

Because Ilumi's answer is

in a different guy.

He says,

Oh, well, look, if I pass the

exam

and you give me my license, and then I just kill everybody here, and then the problem's solved, and then you can't take my license away from me.

Isn't that right, Natero?

And Natero sort of goes, like, well, yep.

And I wrote down in the case.

Technically, yeah, that's true.

I wrote down in capital letters, this is not a well-structured system.

It's really not.

It really isn't.

This doesn't work.

So Killua admits defeat without a fight, just just falls apart completely.

And Illumi says, okay, I lied.

I wasn't going to kill Gone.

I was just testing you.

Yeah.

I don't know.

He's really just embarrassing him.

This was like made him feel horrible and guilty and shame.

Yes.

You just to prove the point.

It's kind of the first like window we get into what Killua's upbringing was like in any major way.

And it like really

like

you get gestures at how damaged being a child assassin makes someone but this is like these episodes are the prime example of like or like our first like major example of it in action and also like what leads killowa to behaving the way killowa does yeah there's there's a there's so there's a lot of weirdness to

like there's another dimension to this that we're not getting yet that i think we'll have more to say on later.

But the

way that Illumi insists on ownership over Kilua is

like

it is intense, it's scary, it's weird, obviously.

And

there is like another dimension to it that we'll talk about later.

Yeah, I would love to dig into this a bit.

I mean,

I

this is this these scenes, this scene with Illumi and Kilo is so well written.

And so much of it is monologue, right?

Uh, Kilua actually doesn't say a lot during

this sequence.

It starts with an Adams, an Adams family joke.

Oh, he does it.

Yeah, so

the first thing that they say after they come back from that commercial break that you mentioned, where he's, it's like, this is your brother.

Or this is Kilo's brother commercial break.

They come back and Ilumi goes like, Kiloa, you cut up brother and mom.

And he goes, yeah, I did.

Like, they were crying.

And then

we'd be like, Of course they're crying.

And it cuts back to Illy would be like, crying tears of joy.

Mom was so human.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Let's talk about Killer's family briefly because this is so

it's so interesting, Sylvie, that you said, you know, we got the impression that being a child assassin messes you up.

And

I had sort of intuited the level that being the being made to kill or choosing to kill or encountering so much death as a child would necessarily mess you up.

And also being put into not just a killer, a sort of practical system of death.

You know, you are trained to be a function rather than a person.

You know, you are sent out to

deal death

by a contract.

Or,

you know, your personhood is taken out.

It's not even something that's like

hot-blooded murders of passion or whatever.

You know, you are reduced to a weapon.

Right.

Yeah.

You're an assassin in the same way that,

you know, 10-year-olds used to be factory workers.

Yeah, fully.

The thing that I had not quite got, and what this scene just drills into so much, is how

fundamentally, overwhelmingly abusive and nakedly manipulative

his relationship with his, or rather his family's relationship with him is.

There is a very calculated pattern of

grooming or of

direct manipulation.

For sure.

Yeah, like

it's taking the like

sort of like the family that's very like traditive.

Traditional makes it sound like I'm talking about more like

faith-based stuff.

And I mostly just mean in terms of

business.

Yeah, exactly.

It's like taking that sort of like pressure and amping it up to just like an extreme degree and also throwing in this like very like,

you know, it's not subtle, but I do think it's well done

example of like familial manipulation,

especially for, to, towards a 12-year-old.

Like.

And we get two sides of it.

One is implied.

You know, the one is that we hear that his mom cried tears of happiness.

You know, there's this kind of like, oh, my beautiful son, you can do this.

I'm going to push you down this path.

And then we get what is implied, by the way, that Ilumi talks about his and Kiluwa's dad, which is that Ilumi and their dad and possibly

a guy named Miluki, another brother, take this other very, very particular line, which is a denial of the aspects of Kiluwa's personhood, sort of joyful or exploratory or

varied personhood, a denial of that and a sharpening of that down to you are nothing but a killer.

Not just, I don't want you to feel these emotions, I don't want you to experience the world in this way, but drilling it into you that you cannot feel these emotions.

Not in the sense of I forbid you from it, but there is something wrong with you.

We have made you into something

that cannot feel those emotions.

And you only think that you feel them because you're confused.

Because, yes, you don't understand yourself in a way that we do.

And this being,

you know, we've sort of implied this, but this whole scene is played against the background of this rotating

script in Ilumi's eyes.

And

the extent to which what is just

rigorous

manipulation and what is a sort of pseudo-supernatural hypnosis is very firmly blurred in this scene and is actually played with in the next episode in terms of like how much of what Killura is experiencing is actually his own actions versus a direct control from the

Zaldic assassin family.

It is

it is so stark and it throws into it for me it throws two things into really stark contrast.

The first is it makes Goan look radiant.

What does he say Goan is in your dub, Keith?

He's too dazzling for your eyes.

He makes Goan look dazzling.

You know, this character who is just a dynamo of

not just good feeling, but all kinds of feelings.

You know, over the past few episodes, we've seen Goan say, I felt angry.

I felt confused.

I felt excited.

I felt joyful.

You know, Goan is someone who is so present in the world that his nose literally guides him from place to place.

Goan is the kind of guy who identifies blood-sucking butterflies and then ties them to his finger.

You know, Goan is existing in the world as a full-fledged person, not one exempt from anxieties or frustrations or confusion or fear.

But he's there in the world.

And, you know, early on in this show, I talked about

Kilua feeling dreamlike, feeling detached.

And so much of that is these aspects of his personhood that have been cut away by his brother and his dad.

Another thing though is so clear here.

Another interesting thing about this and about like

Ilami sort of casting Goan as someone who's sort of like immediately available to the world emotionally as a contrast to Killua.

This is like why they're different, why they can't

be with them.

Why they can't be together.

The thing that we are introduced to here for I think for the first time we talked about this I'm pretty sure this is the first time in these episodes we get the Kilua interiority that we've been missing

for these episodes the anxiety during uh uh between

like

over the bracket the some of this uh illumi stuff this is the first time that we're like in kilo's head hearing what he's thinking

um

seeing what he's worried about

We get this, the sort of, we get the proof that Kilo is a real person in these episodes just in time for Ilumi to say that it doesn't exist.

Yeah.

Yep.

Yeah.

And it comes to nothing.

Or rather,

any sort of personhood that Kilo tries to exert in these scenes comes to nothing.

He can't even move.

He has this really brilliant moment of

interiority when he says, you know,

I want to be friends with Gunn.

And Illumi just shreds it, just instantly.

Not just shoots it down, but makes the shooting it down, works shooting it down into his broader point of,

essentially, you are not really a person.

You are a weapon for me.

And,

you know, suddenly so much of Kilua snaps into place.

Not just in the sense of, you know, what I've known since I I saw him do Vampire Hands and Terror at That Man's Heart, which is that he's a child assassin, but so much of Killua's affect

is

it's like suddenly, it's like

looking at a clay pot and then suddenly seeing the potter and going,

oh, right, I know why the pot looks like that.

It's brilliant.

And then something drains out of Killua.

But then, Bing Doom,

it?

If you stay with him, you'll end up wanting to kill him.

Yes.

Just to see if you can.

Yes.

It's so good.

God.

Oh, oh, I want to talk about this before we move on.

I have been asking...

I wrote it down in my notes.

I want to find my exact.

Oh, here we go.

I have been wondering what this show was about for a long time.

You know, I've been saying, okay, so we're in a hunter exam.

I'm not quite sure what the broader sort of thematic push of the show is.

And I'm still not confident in saying that I've got it exactly.

But when

Illumi said, I lied, Kill, I was never going to kill Gone.

I just wanted to test you.

And now I know you are simply not qualified to make friends.

And then we get this reverse shot of Kilua just drained, just reduced

seemingly permanently to the state of this Zaldic assassin.

I wrote down, oh, wow, this is what the show is about.

This tension, I think, is going to to be the dynamo that is going to drive us for, I don't know, a fucking ton of episodes is this relationship between Killua and Gone.

Killua's specific

denied personhood, denied feelings of love, denied feelings of friendship, his understanding and desire that that's something that he wants,

but

his...

the ways in which people have sought to pull that away from him.

And then on the other side, we have Ghan, this naive, wonderful, radiant entity blundering from problem to problem,

doing anything to try and figure out how to make this connection with his friend again, just as he is also being hunted and preyed upon by this murderous entity that sees the ways in which Goan is lively and Goan is present and Goan is wonderful, and rather than doing what Ilumi does and saying, well, I want to take that away, says, oh, I want to turn that to some awful,

I want to weaponize that or turn that to some awful goal or end.

That, I think, is where we're going.

Yeah, I mean, the show is, you know,

the

show is like

any show is sort of like a

one of those little

toy archaeology things and you get a little brush and you get a little thing and you're digging away and it's like, like, ah, I feel like we've got like a shin here.

We've like identified like, oh, this must be the

Yes, absolutely.

Yeah.

Piece by piece, you know, you go, ah, wait, I think this might be the leg of the show.

Yeah.

Much like Jing Freaks, we are

a weird architecture.

We'll get to that.

But Gene Freaks is Indiana Jones.

I don't, we'll talk about this.

Weird exhibition.

And maybe Saturn Jones is Indiana Jones.

Maybe Satoshi is Indiana Jones, but not just Indiana Jones.

Indiana Jones, if he found the boulder and then said, I'm going to turn this into a visitor center.

Indiana knows.

Yeah.

Sure.

Here's the mouth.

Just Just the nose.

Yeah, sure.

Okay.

Bing, bing, bing.

New fight time.

Everybody's moving on.

Leorio versus Bodoro.

This fight goes normally, right, Dre?

Yeah.

Yeah, what?

Yeah.

Why wouldn't it?

Yeah.

And

how many people don't die of the two in this fight?

Both don't.

Oh, wait.

Hold on.

I'm checking my notes.

No.

One of them doesn't die.

One of them does die.

Oh, so that started good.

Oh, no.

I hope it's not Leorio, I guess, that does die.

No, it is.

Yeah, no, Leorio's dead.

It's not Leorio that dies.

It is not Leorio's.

He says, I died and I lived, sniffing my horny hand, and then he died.

No, don't remind me of Leorio's current worst moments.

I think that's

about as bad as it gets.

Yeah, I feel like it's all up for l You know what?

He brings you low so he can bring you build himself back up.

It's a character argument.

Yeah, I don't I can't I I would I can't off the top of my head think of a lower low.

Uh so um the fight begins and without any warning whatsoever like a laser-guided mission of uh trauma uh mission I said I said mission I meant missile like a laser guided missile of trauma up comes Killua vampire hands enabled kills Bodoro

and

that's the end of the hunter exam.

The Bodoro is dead.

Killua is immediately disqualified and just leaves.

Everybody else passes by default.

Something fun happens here with time,

I guess.

We get Sato still narrating this as it's happening, but we've the visual is we've actually jumped forward seemingly a minute or two to see like Goan is like storming down the hallway.

Yeah, it's great.

Really, really angry.

Satots is like, so the

narration catches up with reality.

Satos is like, no, Goan, you have to rest.

No, Goan does not have to rest.

Goan has to go see his friends and see the rest of the contestants.

Nobody in media has ever been told, no, no, you have to rest.

Lie back down.

And then Don has gone to rest.

Yeah.

And then has gone, You know what?

Yes.

Now, we have seen characters in media who have rested.

Yes, I'll grant you that.

But as soon as someone says, no, no, you have to rest,

it's like a knock-knock joke.

The other person.

Oh, you know what it's like?

It's like that bit in Who Frame Roger Rabbit where he taps the rhythm on the wall and Roger Rabbit can't resist bursting out of the wall because he's a cartoon.

If you are in media and you are told you have to lie down and rest, no.

It's actually a curse that means you must not rest.

You're going, oh no, they cursed me.

The incantation.

The incantation.

Goan is furious and appalled and joins the others in this little orientation room, this room built for maybe 50 people, but it has

seven hunters in it, all sitting separately, like students on the first day of class who don't want to get to know each other.

And Goan storms right up to Ilomi, who he's never seen before, face to face.

This is the first time Goan has seen Ilumi and not Gitirakua.

grabs him by the wrist and says, apologize to Kilua and we cut to credits.

What a good show.

I won't.

Oh, do we, do we have it?

I think we do have it by now.

I won't, yeah, in the hallway, I think we see it.

I can't tell you what I think this means, if it does mean anything, but he, but Goan does have a cross on his head for this, where to bandage up where Hanzo punctured him in the forehead.

I don't know if this is...

When you say a cross you mean like an X like Hunter X

right right he has the X from Hunter X Hunter on his forehead.

I think it's a time symbol.

Wasn't that what we decided?

Yeah, it's a multiplication.

Yeah, it's like a cross like

mixed with or multiplied by.

I think it's not totally clear.

But it is the exact same X is on his forehead in bandages.

I don't know what that means.

It just was notable.

Like, they didn't have to do that.

That's so weird.

No, it's uh it's just i think it is just

uh we've talked about about how um gone is cursed to be the protagonist of the story and i i read that just as the uh production design or the art direction uh firmly putting its thumb down and saying yes buddy Even in your wound, you are being marked by the logo of

the show.

Branded.

He's literally been branded.

You, you are,

you know, and it's so, it's so unsubtle, right?

Because it's not just the ex, it is the

ex

over the wound that he, that was the culmination of his obstinacy and determination.

And pain.

And pain.

Being marked with the hunter's ex.

It's lovely.

I don't know.

I have a real deep love for unsubtle storytelling sometimes.

I think it's just a really nice moment of it, especially when we have had such great

nuanced colored writing with Ilumi talking to Kilua.

Them just being like, yeah, Goan has a cross on his head, like in the show.

The show has it.

It's great.

Okay.

Yeah.

Before we move on from this episode, I want to do two quick music notes.

Music notes, like they are in music.

I mean, notes about music.

We have some new music that is introduced when Ilumi reveals himself.

This is a sort of

darker, looser, more traditional sound than we have heard.

You know, Goan is most closely associated with

a brass band, the most gone

instrument choice that you could think of.

The hunter exam is associated with these like

chunky, threatening, exciting electric guitars and basses and percussion cues, big rumbling drums.

Hisuka is associated with flamenco guitar.

When Ilumi arrives, it is a series of choral chants, almost religious choral chants, and rattling bells.

Heavy reverb on these choral chants.

So the sibilance of their syllables gets swallowed up by the reverb.

And then

low, slow.

Very low, but not the electric bass of the hunters.

A real heavy natural base of singers and bells.

And then, which is really scary because, you know, a lot of where we see Illumi,

a lot of what Illumi is talking about is very immediate, right?

It's very in the now.

We have made you to be this person.

This is your purpose.

And the soundtrack is telling us that there is something old happening here, or there is something deep, or there is something ceremonial or severe.

And I really like that.

You know, that we get Illumi.

When I talked about

how much I didn't like it when they just played Goan's sad theme overshots of Goan looking sad, because I'm like, well, I know you are telling me the same thing that everything else in the show is telling me.

I think this is a really good example of something else happening here, right?

Which is that we have Ilumi outputting one kind of aspect of his character and of the Zelda Assassin family's character, while the music is underwriting that with a kind of ceremonial, old, frightening severity.

And then in a beautiful piece of music supervising, as we cut to Killua's interiority, interiority, that theme continues.

So we are told this isn't really actually Ilumi's theme.

This is a soundscape and music that we should associate with this crew of assassins generally.

You know, Killua is being brought back into the fold against his will.

to this assassin family and the music is solidifying that he is a part of that.

I thought that was just really lovely composing, really good music supervising.

And then as we see Kilua kill Bodoro

and we realize that this is against, or rather we realize that this is the end of the Hunter exam.

This is the end of all that they've been pushing for is this kind of

extrajudicial.

It's all been extrajudicial.

Yeah.

Even more.

There have been no judicial kills here.

It's a kill that is even worse than it could have been.

We actually have Gohan's theme play, sadly, again.

This to me is good composing, because what we are watching isn't just a series of shots of Goan being sad.

We are watching the culmination of Goan's efforts and desires, and um

uh uh

we are literally watching that.

You know, we're seeing these scenes play out against a sad version of Goan's theme.

And to me, that is a much more effective deployment of that piece of composing than it was when we just saw Goan sitting in a tree feeling sad.

Yeah.

And that's the end of Jack's music notes.

Uh, I.

Do you want to know the lyrics to the song that plays?

The one that plays during the brothers' confrontation?

Oh, shit.

They're actually singing in Japanese?

No, they're singing in Latin.

Yes!

Oh my god.

Much like when someone in Meteor is told you

have to rest and they have to get up immediately,

there is no time that someone has written something in Latin against music that is not a delight when you translate it.

Either it is a complete disaster of the translation and that's joyful or it's fucking metal.

And my guess is it's going to be the latter.

What have they written, Sylvie?

From what I can tell,

I'm trying to triple check this now, but I believe it's Zoldec S.

Dominus, Zoldec S.

Domine,

which is just Zoldec is the master, but also the feminine version of that as well.

That's fucking brilliant.

And

the implication that I get based on how this scene, the music supervision here worked, is that they are speaking less about

Ilumi or the mother or the dad and more about the supremacy of the Zeldic family as entities like this.

They are saying, you know, you are being reduced to a Zeldic assassin

and we are the fucking best at this.

That's a beautiful music cue.

Maybe I'll...

Maybe I'll put it in this episode.

Maybe I'll arrange it.

We'll see.

I'm going to need you all to send me really nice clips of the music because I can't go searching for them without spoilers.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Unfortunately, the spoilers are everywhere.

Yeah, you cannot look for this one at all.

No, because if I know anything about how stories work and how music supervision works, when one of these characters invariably kills the other, we're going to get a sick arrangement of this music.

And that's how I feel about that.

Uh,

new episode 21.

There's There's another arm break.

Yeah, this one's pretty straightforward.

Yeah, who wants to talk about the second arm break in these episodes?

I fucking love this bit so much.

Sylvia.

We got

Gone sort of just striding into the room where they are at like hunter orientation.

It's very funny seeing where everyone's sat because Karapika and Leorio are not sitting next to each other.

It's just like a very funny thing to have, like, oh, yeah, we're besties and we've been hanging out, but also I'm going to just sit behind you a row up.

What's important here, though.

Who's sitting further back?

Is it Leorio?

I don't remember.

Because Leorio does feel like a lean forward over your shoulder kind of guy.

That I would believe, actually.

You know what?

Even if it's not Leorio, to us, it's Leorio.

It's Leorio, and that's what it is.

Because the idea that those two would be in the same room and not sitting next to each other is silly.

It's very funny to me.

The thing that

really matters here, though, is Gon walking right up to Ilumi, grabbing him by the wrist, and we get like a zoom in of like

Gon's grip squishing Ilumi's forearm basically.

And he like tries to swing him out of his chair, but Ilumi is graceful enough to land on his feet afterwards.

Yeah, he has like a feather fall thing happen.

Yes, and they have this sort of exchange where he like he wants, he wants

Gon wants Ilumi to apologize.

Um, and when Elomi is like not going to, he wants to just know where Kiloa is.

Um, I think he says something about like give Kiloa back or something.

Um,

because

during this discussion, uh, Gon sort of talks about it like he like Kiloa has been kidnapped, and Ilumi points out it's like he left of his own volition, he walked out those two doors and went.

Did he, bro?

But did he?

But did he?

Let's talk about this, Later.

but um i think this is where i think it's i think this is where it first comes up i think this is where uh

yeah uh so netro introduces that leorio and karapica have

put forward hypnosis theory

yes although karapica being karapica

right thank you yes please karapica is so sweet i

karapica is like now look i do want to be even-handed about this because i'm karapica a daily Please no one misinterpret me.

He says, it's generally considered impossible to make someone do such a thing.

That is to say, hypnosis, murder.

Oh, right.

So they are essentially saying, Kilua's kill of Bodoro was specifically authored by Ilumi

to get Kilua out of the tournament and sort of break him essentially, pull him back into the Zelda Assassin crew.

Everybody.

At this point, everybody goes, well, no, hang on a second.

That whole tournament was fucked.

Let's break it down.

It's great.

Everyone suddenly, it's like the scales fall from people's eyes about the Hunter exam, and they're like, wait a second.

I've got questions.

I think the moment you're talking about Jack is when Pacle is like, well, yeah, sure.

Kilua's murder of Bodero is weird, but so is your victory over Hisoka, who whispered something to you and then gave up.

You want to tell us what that is?

You want to share that with the class, Karapika?

And Karapika says, mm-mm.

He says, no, thank you.

I do not want to share that with the class.

I think this is funny because this is sort of, I think that this is Paco

being like mad at Kiloa.

Like, I don't want people helping Kilo because Kiloa embarrassed me.

Yeah.

Yes, absolutely.

Paco's specifically upset about Kiloa already.

During this whole conversation, Goan is still holding Ilumi's wrist.

It's brilliant.

Ilumi is so genuinely baffled by this whole turn of events.

Yeah, Ilumi, you get a couple shots of Goan like squeezing Ilumi's arm and Ilumi being kind of surprised at

something seeming seems to be surprising like how strong Goan is.

Well, not just that, I think surprised at like, I mean, I think he is surprised at that, and we learn more about that later.

Goan has broken his arm, um, but I think also surprised at like, well, why are we arbitrating this?

It's done,

you know, yeah,

I'm hesitant to make big statements about Ilumi, given that uh, I've seen him for one episode, but Ilumi does seem to be

just

a little bit more Illumi, just not necessarily what that means.

True, yes.

Ilumi is like, on some level, the culmination of what he wants Kilua to be.

Empty,

hyper-focused.

You know, he has these big black eyes with nothing inside.

Light, but

mean, cruel.

Right.

Oh,

you bringing up the eyes does mention, mention does bring have something i want to i've been wanting to bring up but haven't been able to because we haven't had ilumi beat ilumi yet um when killoa is like in his like murder mode he has the same sort of pupilless eye like featureless eyes that ilumi does and i think that's really worth pointing out that's brilliant can you send me a screenshot of that i want to see that yeah uh it's not like pure black like that but um i think it's straight up the the very good shot of from episode 20 where Kilua has the blood on his face, I think, is the best example of it.

Um,

yeah,

where it's just the sort of purple color of um, oh, look at that, yeah, Kilua's irises, yeah.

Yes, we talked about this in the episode when he pulled out that man's heart.

I think I described it as like, this is the first time we've seen this particular look on Kilua.

I didn't realize I was describing like the characteristic Zaltic assassin move

of I'm a weapon.

Um,

But Gohan says, look, this doesn't matter.

This doesn't matter.

I don't care that Killua has been disqualified.

I have absolute faith that if he does the hunter exam again, he will pass.

I'm more concerned that his evil brother

has been manipulating him to kill.

He says, once I rescue Killua, I will never let you see him again.

Beautiful, Gohan thinking.

Just simple as that.

I love him.

At which point, and this is just, this might be my single favorite moment of the show so far.

It is just fucking wonderful.

Green, green, jelly bean man does the orientation.

Everybody's like.

Smiling away during this whole exchange, by the way.

Standing there, smile on his face.

And then it's like, can we go back to it?

Let's do the orientation.

I mean, listen, how many times do you think beans does have to do this?

We don't know if beans is like,

how old do you think beans is?

Beans could be 800 years old.

Beans kind of

in society.

You know, this could be old hat.

Yeah.

Is beans.

The manga is in black and white.

Yes.

Is beans being green an invention of the show?

We've talked about 1999.

Yeah, we've talked about horror beans.

Read the flesh-colored bean, yeah.

Yeah.

I believe that the

have to dig into like what the manga volume covers look like because that typically speaking is where a lot of and that and other promotional art is where a lot of people get like canonical color schemes from.

And I don't know if I've seen any with beans on it.

It does, just based off the fact that he was uh horribly flesh-colored in 1999, does make me think that the green bean uh aspect of it was a recent development or just like a thing that Togashi wasn't able to get to the production team in

the 1999 one.

I've I've always heard that the 2011 series is like

he's closer to the text of the manga, but I don't know if that also means that they've

that the manga's had more or less impact on like the color schemes of characters.

I have no idea.

I looked it up.

I don't think Beans is on a cover.

I don't think so either.

I was expecting it to be like maybe if there's a Netaro on a cover, there'd be like a Beans in the corner of it.

Did you know Beans didn't have a name in the 1999 anime?

We probably talked about that.

Yeah, we've been talking about

He doesn't have a name in this.

We named him, and then Tagashi listened to the show.

Yes, true.

But

Beans is named so cursory.

How do I say this word?

Beans is named with such a cursory attention.

to what he is that it would be like if in episode one I saw the cloud and I went like, bet that guy's name is Hisoka and then I was right.

Yeah.

But then the show itself barely cares about naming him.

No, yeah, no, no.

No one is like, and this weird guy's name is Beans.

No, he says, Beans is introduced on the airship.

He says,

this is Chamber Notero.

I'm Beans.

Okay.

He invited us once that I'm Rob.

Yeah, yeah.

What's up?

It's me, Paul, Notero's guy.

This is genuinely one of my favorite bits of the show.

The presentation begins, and we learn what a hunter card does.

this is a big bell ring.

Oh, yes.

And we get a little presentation.

The card will let you enter 90% of the countries that limit immigration and 75% of the restricted areas in the world.

It's a fucking thing.

Also, use 95% of public transport for free.

And

this is the newest bit of information.

This last bit.

This is like the real bit.

Because we've sort of heard about these other things from Kropica, you know, 15 episodes ago.

Yeah.

This is this next bit.

Banks will, no, this is a big one, listener.

Banks will treat you like you are a top-rated company.

You can also sell the card for enough money to last a lifetime.

Now, there are no replacement cards.

This is the whole vibe of this is like library card orientation day at the university.

No.

The most important library card of your life.

Important sub-difference, Jack.

My sub says

that the Hunter card provides you a line of credit that rivals large corporations.

I think that is clearer, but less funny than just banks who treat you like you're a top-rated company.

Yeah.

The idea of walking into a bank and being like, I have a hunter card, and then being like, oh, yes, sir, yes, sir, absolutely.

One in five hunters somehow lose their cards within a year of getting it.

And Beans delivers this with such

a puckish,

casual joy.

He's like, we've all gone through the hunter exam, I'm giving you the stuff.

And it is met with absolute deadpan disinterest from the main cast following the events of the last two episodes.

The way this ceremony has been just ruined, just reduced to nothing, is

absolutely delightful.

And then we get this big, custom, glossy title card showing the people who made it as hunters.

And the episode seems like it is going to come to an end.

But we have a little bit.

Oh, this is before a commercial break.

We do have one big sort of thesis statement.

Like, this is the most official hunter stuff we've ever gotten on what a hunter is.

Can I read out to you?

Please go ahead.

So we have the unofficial one.

Bean says, the most important thing is don't lose your card.

And then three official ones.

One, to rise above challenges.

Two, believe in your own strength.

And three, fulfill your dreams.

It's army strong.

Be all you can be.

The way the hunter exam, just after all of this, stutters, after, after

running in the dark, hundreds of people, after everybody dying in the swamp, after the weird cooking contest where they all get killed by pigs and all fail the test, seemingly.

After the uh, what's after that trial?

Oh, trick tower.

Uh,

killer pulling a man's heart out in Trick Tower.

And then we have, uh, after Trick Tower is

this.

Oh, no, Zevil Island.

Getting the badges on the island, the Battle Royale.

And the way that it just stutters to

just a miserable, flat, ruined halt.

All this death and effort for what?

A card that gives you free transit on buses and the fact that banks will treat you slightly better.

It is.

And license to kill.

And license to kill.

It is so beautifully, suddenly hollow.

And it always has been hollow.

We've been told how hollow this was the whole time, but maybe we thought that the show didn't know that.

Maybe we thought that, you know, it was funny because they were fighting really hard and the show is presenting this goal with the full knowledge that this is like a great thing that everybody wants to get.

But no, the way that this is being presented against, well, first with our main cast's reaction, and then against the just death and terror and abject sadness and

being hauled back into your family's worst desires and worst impulses.

The show knows exactly how hollow free transit on buses is.

It is

such a beautiful moment of sad deflation.

Of like the Hunter exam ultimately comes to a age 16 to 25 reduced rail travel card it's wonderful

you really get this um

like a slingshot back to the sort of

like

uh the

conversations that the arguments that Leorio and Karapika were getting in in the first few episodes of like what a hunter is and like Karapika has this very idealistic vision of hunters they're like basically crappy's like hunters are heroes who save the world um

uh and i want to i want to i want to be a hunter so that i can get revenge on my the people who killed my family and learia is just like being a hunter is for the money money money

and we know that this is kind of um a facade this is not really what

uh what leario wants And actually, what Le Ario wants is kind of to be a hero in the same way that Kropika has described.

But

he is seemingly right that, like,

I can't think of

any way at this point to say that the Hunter exam, getting a Hunter's license isn't basically about

financial security, long-term and short-term,

getting access to huge amounts of wealth.

And the show is very open about this.

I think this is part of why I find it so delightful.

I think the show knows that underneath the gold, the chalice is made of plastic.

I think that where it is interested is in saying,

what happens to you

if you want a gold cup that much?

You know?

If you are so desperate to lift that thing above your head and you have filled your head with all these ideas about what it is, I don't think it is very interested in the revelation that it's plastic underneath, but the show's just

tipping its hat.

Oh, it's tipping its

tipping its hat.

It's hand.

Tipping its hand, hand.

Tipping its hand, right.

And going.

Tipping a hat is a different thing.

It is a thing, yeah.

And this revelation is treated with as little respect as the show affords the process of being a hunter, because immediately Killuer is...

Sorry.

Oh my god.

I've got Killier on the mind even though he is no longer in the scene i always got killua on the mind i got it killua

i just did that to you i incepted you

go says

okay but look i want to go and get killua i'm not done fighting with ilumi um and this is such a clear nice setting of the stakes you know we have resolved the hunter exam and the path to the next sort of goal the next

uh where we are going narratively and literally is immediately laid out for us.

There is no pissing about as we've gotten.

Even given the name right away.

Yes, because Ilumi says, so Gon says, we've got to go and do this.

And Karapakur and Leorio say, we're going to go and do this.

And so we've assembled the crew.

And Illumi says, well, yeah, absolutely.

I'll tell you where Killer is.

I don't think you're going to get there.

Killer lives on top of Kookaroo Mountain.

That is where our house is.

And we get the most menacing establishing shot of a mountain.

Does someone want to describe what this thing looks like?

Oh,

Sharp.

Sharp wasteland.

Sharp wasteland with carved ruined dragon statues in front of it.

Yeah.

Deeply unpleasant.

The family homes at the summit.

God says, got it.

Bye.

Jack,

I love this

bit that you've set up about the...

The hollowness and the cynicism of like what it means now that the hunter exam's over,

you're a very important bit of plastic that lets you live

a life full of convenience and wealth, unless you sell it, and then it lets you live a life of extravagance.

There is,

I do want to sort of bring up as not a silver lining, but as a

just as like, you know, just as like a little worm in the dirt here.

The, the, the, the Satots line about

this card is the most important, this card's more valuable than Hunter's own life, but also is just like a worthless scrap of paper.

The actual important thing

is

what you do now that you're a hunter, which is, which just goes to, you know,

Karapiga being like, the thing to do if you're a hunter is to be like a good person and help the world.

We get a little bit more of that from Satots later.

But

there is this sort of like,

you know,

I don't want to put my foot down too far into the future and spoil anything.

But there is this like

funnel that

the show has

for if you want this card to be rich, like here it is.

go do that then you know and it and uh in the same way that in a few minutes we'll talk about Pacle saying that he wants to be an exotic game hunter

we get Bean saying this is if you want to be a rich hunter you know these are the rules you're the only rules you need to know if what you want is to be a rich guy

Yeah, totally.

Also, when he said this is the most important item that you own, you will value it above your own life, but it's also just a scrap of plastic.

Uh, I have uh now encountered several absolutely critical immigration documents, and let me tell you, the feeling is exactly the same.

It's like this piece of paper is the most valuable thing I own.

If I just lose it, it's gone.

It's just paper, it came out of a printer in an embassy somewhere.

Um, it's very silly, but mine doesn't give me free travel on

uh public transit.

Anything no, in fact, it makes my life much more complicated.

Okay, so we're back.

We're back.

I think that you were setting up, Jack, the scene between Ilumi and Hisoka.

Yes, so Gon leaves, and we get a really little, a nice little moment of conflict between

who we have now revealed to be.

It's been really interesting, right?

Because Hisoka has kind of been eclipsed by Ilumi as a weird, menacing force, and we get reminded that he is also a weird nightmare.

Right, Gon is is essentially protected from Ilumi.

This is why he's allowed to break his arm and suffer no consequences, because Ilumi does not want to run headlong into what I have written here as Hisuka's perverted ambitions.

Yes, Hisuka says, is it really a good idea to tell Goan where

Kilua is?

And Ilumi says, well, no, not really, because

we don't hide where we're from.

And also, the locals know that we're up there.

Everyone's just fucking terrified of us.

And as they get closer, Goan and Karepika and Liorio will realize why.

But

Ilumi, I think, wisely recognizes Goan as a sort of existential threat to the Zeldic ideology and Kilua's presence in the family and possibly, you know, the family itself.

So briefly threatens Goan, and then Hisaka says, Goan is mine.

Don't forget that.

Leave him be or suffer the consequences.

And in much the same way as we started to see the boat of rivalry rocking between Goan and Kilua,

we are now starting to see a potential sort of thread of that between Hisaka and Ilumi.

And then Hisaka says he's going to wait until the fruit becomes ripe enough to pluck.

It is so fucking gross.

Hisoka's voice actor is extraordinary.

Hisoka's voice actor sells this performance so well.

Ah, fuck.

I pushed a button on the back of my monitor.

I didn't mean to.

Now it is asking me if I want to change the monitor preset modes.

Hold on.

Will that go away if I just don't do anything?

While you're fixing that, I'll add in

the subtitle difference.

Maybe it's not a difference.

Maybe you just didn't highlight this particular phrase, but

I think it'll be a fun one to return to.

Ilubi tells Hisuka that they live in different worlds than

Goan and his crew.

Like,

it won't matter if they show up because

we're not even in the same world.

It's not going to work.

This comes back to, I think, the way that he was talking to and about Killiua, you know, of like, you are not a person in the same way that Goan is a person.

We are different things.

You know, you are trying to compare a bird with a fish.

They are completely different.

That's the the end of the villains.

And now everybody says goodbye.

Everybody's leaving.

They're leaving.

Goan is so happy to see Hanzo, the man who tortured him for four hours.

Hanzo is very happy to see him.

Hanzo called it.

Hanzo literally was like, yeah, he didn't even remember that I had been torturing him.

And Gohan says, we went through a lot, but had a lot of fun.

This is the flip side of the

flip side of the show being so horrible and explicit about that scene with Goan is that this scene is played as like a weird, funny joke.

And while there is a kind of terror inherent in like, what kind of person is Goan to feel this way?

It does actually end up as this like lovely moment of levity between the two of them that is made even funnier by Hanzo saying, if you're ever in my country, come and visit him.

And then he gives them his business card.

Remember, this is a shinobi.

He gives them his business card.

And his business card says in huge letters, cloud hidden ninja Hanzo.

And Karapaka says, wow, that is one big, self-assured ninja.

Oh,

this is a massive difference between the subs.

Oh.

In my sub,

what it says, what Hanzo's business card says is, quote, a shinobi who tries to leave an impression.

That is even funnier.

Oh, that's actually a better version.

What's Karapaka's reaction to that?

He reads it out loud and then goes, huh.

Hanzo is so funny, which made that episode just fucking terrifying.

So scary.

I know.

These are the two modes.

These are, it just did it in reverse, where it was like scary Hanzo who refuses the poison, and then funny Hanzo who goes introducing himself as a super spy to everyone.

Well, and then Hanzo, who tortures Goan relentlessly for four hours, and the show lingers on it.

Bizarre.

Yeah.

Bizarre storytelling.

Then Pockle shows up, apologizes for getting worked up with Karapika, says, we were all in a bit of a mood, weren't we, after we saw Kilua Kill That Man?

I have a metaphor here.

Yeah, go ahead.

So Pacle's like, yeah, Pacle teaches going what a computer is.

Yep.

Yep.

The internet exists.

That's very funny.

And that the internet exists.

That's a fun sort of like, like something that feels anachronistic.

You know, like, this show is like kind of out of time in a really fun way that reminds me of Original Dragon Ball.

I've been watching this with my girlfriend.

She's never seen it before, and she reacted so strongly to the internet reveal.

Yeah, the internet reveal is really, really funny.

Uh, especially because the internet barely existed when the manga was being written.

It's great,

so it kind of makes sense to have to explain the internet to someone, but then it still makes sense because Gun's a forest child.

Yes, it's also very funny that the way the internet is introduced is that uh Kirapika says, I don't know where uh the mountain is, but I'll just look it up online.

Just gonna Google uh Zaldic Assassin base, it has 4,000 five-star reviews and they say things like good assassin good killing

killed my uncle success um

god imagine a five-star review of an assassin's business that just said success

so so paco's like yeah yeah i'm gonna be you know i'm gonna really get to it i'm gonna i'm gonna turn my sort of embarrassing victory by default into a good thing and become an exotic game hunter that sounds fairly literal it sounds like the most normal kind of hunter we've heard of so far, but it did just sort of

like kind of hit me in the face with that like being a hunt, picking what kind of hunter you are is like having a subclass.

And that

being a hunter is sort of,

this is my metaphor.

It is like the real life

to them.

It's the real life equivalent of the sort of reality simulator kind of video games, like the kind of games that want to be everything to everyone forever, like a star citizen

or like in some ways, like a no-man's sky.

But it's like that, what if that is real?

The only thing that you have to do, the only thing that you have to do is be one of the strongest people on the planet, and the entire world becomes a real-life video game to you.

Yes, this is very consistent with what I was talking about very early in the show when I didn't know what the Hunter exam was, and I kept being like, Oh, it's just games.

It's a variety of games that are put in your path.

And I think it is interesting that you have brought that back up here as we get to the end of it.

I do want to notice that after Pockle apologizes to Karapakir and Karapakir apologizes too, and then Pockle says, Do you want to use my laptop?

And everyone says, Yeah, sick.

Isn't it nice how all the people who have gotten through the Hunter exam are kind, good, honorable sorts, except the two absolute evil monsters?

It's one or the the other.

Who's the third evil monster?

Hanzo.

His capacity to be silly and goofy does not overshadow the four-hour child tour.

I'll say this.

I mean,

this is a big statement.

I think that the Hanzo-Goan fight, but

if you can set aside the structural violence of the hunter exam itself and maybe the implication that Netaro is the sort of maybe individual responsible for that structure.

Setting that aside, the cruelest thing that we've seen in these 21 episodes is Hanzo torturing a child for four hours.

Yes.

Do you remember the message that I put in our Discord?

I will fight Hanzo with my bare hands.

Is that right?

I will fight Hanzo.

I think I said, I'm going to fight Hanzo with my bare hands.

Yes.

Yeah.

And I stand by it, but I do also think he's a wacky, funny, goofy guy.

And in that way, I am like Gunn.

I am like Gunn.

Gunn says, hey, while you've got that laptop open, can you look up something for me?

Can you look up my dad?

Can you Google my dad?

Type in his name G-G-N-G space.

F-R-E-E-C-S.

And then another S.

I do it all the time.

God, I've had to spell my name down the phone to a bunch of people to help me move house today, and I don't like spelling my name down the phone.

The extra spaces in it make it frustrating.

Yes, the one that actually gets me is the DT at the end because down the phone, the difference between Delta and Tango.

Close.

Yeah.

What do they find when they Google Jing Freaks?

Oh, the most exciting thing to find if you're in fiction and you Google someone.

A lot of security checks.

His name is hidden behind a lot of security.

Pockle says...

He must have friends on the national level and Leorio leans down and whispers, it sounds like your dad is someone really special.

And Goan is delighted by this.

And I have a very bad feeling about it.

So they say their goodbyes.

And Goan is like, they have a brief conversation about, like, ah, we should have had them Google, we should have a Pacle Google.

Oh, Pacle gives them his email address.

Right?

Packel gives him his email address.

And then Krabby is like, it's fine.

We didn't need Pacle to Google this anyway.

We'll Google it ourselves.

We don't want other hunters knowing what we're doing anyway.

So let's go.

But Satyots has a couple words to say to Goan.

It cuts to,

I mean, it is so bizarre to have these like adorable moments after the episodes that we just watched.

It cuts to a close-up of Goan sitting on a bench.

It's just knees down, just kicking, swinging his feet happily, sitting on this bench next to Satots.

Nature's weirdo, Goan freaks.

The guy who can't remember if being punched and then choked by Hizuka was scary or fun.

God.

Oh, sorry, firstly, Goan has forgotten his hunter card.

Oh, Satoshi gives it back to him.

Satos is very nice, gives it back to him, and then tells him...

Who wants to talk about this story that Satos tells Goan?

I could kind of do it.

Okay.

So, Satot sort of describes, I don't have the exact wording he uses to describe himself as a young hunter, but he talks about how he was sort of like...

He says

he excavates, preserves,

and preserves ancient ruins.

Yeah, but there was also, there was something about him like not really having the love of the game anymore.

He was in it for the glory.

He was in it for the...

He was like, I was just in it for the fame, essentially.

And then

while going about doing this,

he

I don't remember if he learns about him or he meets him specifically.

He never meets him.

Never met him.

He finds out about a hunter who not only like

does the like preserves and like rebuilds things, but also like

I remember the specific thing is like he makes it open to the public and stuff like that.

Yeah, he sets up free museums

at the site.

He restores them

and self-finances them.

He self-finances projects to excavate ruins and then return them to the country of origin as a free museum, a free public museum.

Can't pay child support, though, huh?

Can't pay child support.

Can't make one visit.

No birthdays.

Because he says, and I figured out this hunter's name and his name was Goan Freaks.

Sorry, Gene Freaks.

Gene Freaks.

Gene Freaks.

And Satot says, I wanted to meet him, but the man was an enigma, and I could learn nothing about him.

And we learned that Satoats, it's so sweet.

Satot says this in the present tense.

I think this is lovely.

Satots says he wants to become a hunter just like him and thank him in person one day.

Satots is great.

He could so easily have said

he could, and I think it's fun the way this show has done this several times now is just introducing a character that has

I'm sure I've talked about this.

The way that there is no distinction made between...

You can be shown a really weird-looking character in this show and they will never appear again.

Which means that when someone like Satoats was introduced in the first tunnel chase sequence, I was like, oh, right, we're going to see him and he's going to go.

But no, he's stuck around.

He's a consistent character.

I like him a lot.

He could say, I wanted to become a hunter, but no, he's like, no, Gene was great.

I want to thank him in person one day.

Goan leaves.

And Satoat says.

He blushes.

He's like, really happy.

It's really sweet.

Yeah, it's very sweet.

Satoats says, oh, Goan.

And Goan turns around and says, what is it?

And Satoats pauses and says, take care of yourself.

Cut to an internet cafe.

Karapika is looking up the mountain.

I don't think it's an internet cafe.

I think it's in the hotel.

It is in the Dentora region, the Republic of Padukea.

It's described as a stable country open to tourists.

And then something wonderful happens, which is that we suddenly cut to shots of busy roads, cities, airships moving in the sky, people stuck in traffic, other characters.

We have been been freed from the weird gestural hell of the hunter exam, and we are back in the real world.

We are surrounded by like birds in the sky, boats in the sea.

It's really cool.

In a way, we're not quite back in the real world.

We're in the real world for the first time in the show.

Because the only other non-hunter exam moments we have is Goan, who's a forest child that grew up in the woods.

Yep.

We saw the buses towards the city.

Yeah, yeah.

It's gestured.

We just shared at cities and towns.

We saw some shops and shopkeepers,

but like, we're now in a world of highways, not like

wonderful.

I was really surprised by how well this moment landed for me.

Just this sudden,

like,

it could so easily be felt as like an imposition of the real.

You know, like the real is asserting itself in the story and you go, ah, no, not this.

I want to get back to the weird stuff.

But the weird stuff has been so

alien and frightening and odd and consequential that this very lovingly rendered shot of just like a bunch of people stuck in traffic on a sunsetty summer day felt like a weird breath of fresh air of being like, oh, right, something I can latch onto.

Yes, I know what that experience is like.

And they're stuck in traffic and Gohan realizes that they can basically like run on the balustrade next to the traffic by the ocean.

Goan wants to rescue a killer so much that he is going to run to the airport.

And they reminisce about the exam as they run.

They say, this was like that time we ran in the dark, but this is a lot.

Do they say this is a lot easier or a lot harder?

Yeah, yeah, a lot easier.

Like, this is way easier than a Hunter exam.

And you'd think that would be the end of the episode, but we get a little bumper.

Satots watches the airship leave and is met by Menshi and Buhara.

Menshi says, Wasn't that a really close call back then?

Because we learned that Satots almost let slip as he turns and looks up at an airship passing overhead that the real hunter exam isn't over just yet and yellow flowers

now the hunter exam begins now yellow flowers blow in the wind as we come to the end of our first arc is that right

uh i would say so yeah

keep disagrees the season ends after the next four episodes technically this feels like an arc ending to me the same arc yeah i agree

I think, okay.

So there's two things.

I think this for okay, first of all, this doesn't matter.

The second thing is we're about to get four episodes that either count as the shortest season of all time, a four-episode long season.

ARC doesn't mean season.

What's that?

An arc isn't necessarily a season of TV in the same way.

It's just a story.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, then

it would be the shortest arc.

It is.

You just think it's a four-episode arc?

That's fine.

I think that this is a.

I think the next four episodes wrap up loose threads from this arc, and then we move into the second arc, but it's not important.

Is this next arc going to be Goan tries to figure out how to use an airport?

Yeah.

It's four episodes.

And he gets stuck in Pittsburgh for an expression.

And I think that ties up a lot of what we've been dealing with for the past 20 episodes.

What, Goan figuring out how to use an airport?

yes uh who would use an airport best uh my guess is weirdly probably leorio leorio seems like the correct guy who understands how an airport works krapika would do it just fine but yeah

krappy would be very early

very well packed

sitting and waiting for too long i think leorio is someone that gets to the airport maybe five minutes after they're supposed to they're like just barely slightly late but in a way where everything's fine uh and gone doesn't show up at all, and they're like really scared until they get on the plane and they discover that the pilots have let Gohan sit in the cockpit because he's been a nice little boy.

Yeah.

I do love the visual during these last couple minutes of Karapika being the one.

at the helm for the computer uh typing and google searching and it's like leorio is wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase gone is a little forest child and uh karapika is wearing like a gown.

It's just very funny that it's not Leorio that's a girl.

It's great.

Yeah.

And that's where we are.

That is the end of episode 21.

Is there anything we want to talk about that we have not covered?

I feel like

anything that I would have to say is going to be more...

where we can discuss more freely next episode.

Sure.

Dre?

I think.

Yeah.

There was something, but I think after what Sylvie said, actually, I think it would be better to talk about with further context in future episodes.

Yeah.

Yeah,

I don't think that I, I think I hit everything.

Incredible.

Yeah, great.

Really fun episodes.

I finished that first episode and I was like, yeah, this is fine.

I've seen, I've seen, you know, I just saw Gohan got beat up for basically the full length of an episode this wasn't great and then the next two episodes just knocked it straight out of the park it's something that you've really

you know if you're

if you're signing that check you've got to be able to cash it and they do i think and they do that's a big it is a big check like the the the The stuff they have to do to make the brutality of that

first episode not

like

stick in your mouth for the whole rest of the arc

is really tough.

It is a tough needle to thread.

And I think they really do it.

And

it leads to the, I think, the best, the most successful set of episodes we've watched.

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I am so excited to get a sense of where we're going next.

Because, you know, right up until this point, it has just been the Hunter exam the whole time.

Uh, and I have had no idea of what this show is outside of the hunter exam.

And I think go and get

Killua is such a great plot hook that I am very excited to see more of.

Yeah, yeah,

also, Killua has failed.

Not a hunter, not a hunter.

The only one, I mean, only of the final nine.

A bunch of people were killed by a tortoise, yeah.

Yeah, so it could be worse.

Um, there is this sort of underlying implication that because everyone was being followed

by their own personal

guard, maybe not until after they get out of the tunnel, but who knows?

That there is some measure less death

than

is implied.

But

I don't know by how much, and I don't know if it's even

fair to give them that credit.

I don't know.

My read on that was that they were watching them to give Netsero his stupid scoring points, that there was no guarding going on.

Well,

this is the sort of the second half of this is like we get this information from Pacle that

not Pacle from

Hansla.

No,

sorry, the B woman.

Oh, yes, yes.

Oh, about how they like come get you because there's a GPS tag.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So we get that.

We get that.

We get, oh, oh, they'll, you know, they'll, and that is, that is sort of something that's said, but not

proven.

And then it does sort of get kind of re-litigated when Hanzo is like, oh, you were the one that was assigned to me.

I assume that everyone had someone.

And, you know, if that's the case, then

unless they're just leaving people to die.

I don't know.

I don't think so.

I'm going to say that they're not.

I'm just going to say that they aren't.

I don't think that that's, I don't think I'm making excuses.

I think it's probably.

I'm afraid of them.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, should you mean the individual hunters or the hunter?

The hunter hunter organization.

All the above for me.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Balhara seems cool.

Yeah, that's fair.

Yeah, Menshi seems cool.

Yeah, I'm a big Menshi fan.

I don't trust the prison guy.

If you were in a prison, I don't trust you anyway.

And Sato, it seems cool.

Oh, Sato, it seems cool.

Yeah.

And at this point, we get sort of the ratio of which hunters are cool that at pass are also about the same.

They're two to one

cool to shitty.

Oh, I was thinking about it.

If you weren't watching the show, you might have thought we glossed over it.

What Hisuka whispers to Karapika and Bodoro is not revealed and is not subtitling.

There is no...

Right.

We weren't forgetting to talk about that.

You just see Hisuka's mouth move and then the characters surrender.

It's curious even that they had what seemed like

a low-intensity cordial spar

before

the whisper moment.

Well, the other person didn't know what Hisuka was planning.

But yes, I suppose Hisuka could have just walked up and whispered to them.

I don't know.

I don't know.

Hisuka can disintegrate people into butterflies.

Yeah, sorry, yeah.

It's not Karapika being low-intensity that was surprising.

It's Hisuka choosing to fight for a little bit, but like not very intensely,

and then to give up after a few minutes of kind of, you know, even matched sparring.

Yeah.

Just something to keep in mind.

What are we watching next time, Keith?

Next time, we are watching.

This was episode 20.

Correct.

This is episode 21.

This was

fun.

Some brother trouble.

So 22, 23, 24, and 25.

Four episodes.

This is our first four.

It's our second scheduled four, but it's our first four that we're actually going to do.

And we are going to try our best to keep the episode about the same length.

How that's going to turn out, you will see.

We'll see.

But that's our goal.

Yeah,

I think that as this only drew a point, but I think that having four episodes, we will just have, we will naturally stick on to fewer things per episode, I'm hoping.

The thing is, just by doing this, we'll be able to like

look at the whole, what I consider a mini arc as a one thing.

And hopefully that'll make stuff.

I just think it's funny to bring it up now.

I think that'll make stuff easier for us to just discuss because we can be a little more free with that.

You know, as always, you should go to friendsatable.cash to support the Patreon.

That is the Patreon that lets this show exist.

You can also follow the streams that we do at twitch.tv slash friends of the table and watch archives of those streams and you know occasionally some other stuff on youtube.com slash friends of the table you can follow us on x.com at friends underscore table or co-host.org

at

friends dash table

uh you can also follow us on tick tock at friends underscore table did i miss anything Oh, this is the first episode that's out.

This is the last episode that will

the last episode that we're recording before episodes start going live.

So you should go to Apple Podcasts and rate and review highly, as highly as you possibly can.

Here's what I'll say.

And I'm going to borrow from the excellent range touch here.

You should leave us a five-star review if you enjoy the stuff that we make.

We don't take advertising.

All the stuff,

all the ways that people hear about our show is through word of mouth.

But five-star reviews on podcast platforms, especially Apple podcasts, really help us out.

If you write us a five-star review and it is funny and good, we might read it here at the end of the episode.

But we can't do that yet because none of it's out yet.

None of it's out yet.

Here's my review of the podcast.

Oh.

I'm going to give it five stars.

I think everybody on it

is fun.

I think the music is great.

I will say, personally, it takes up more of my time than I was expecting it to as a listener.

I thought I'd just sit down and listen to this podcast, but no, I actually have to watch Hunter Hunter and record it as well.

But that doesn't take out my reduction.

It doesn't reduce it from five stars.

Still very positive.

Maybe even watching Hunter Hunter increases it.

Yeah, hey, maybe a good time.

Because I know some people are just going to listen along to this, and that's totally fine.

Yeah, that's true.

If you haven't watched Hunter Hunter yet and you're just hearing us talk about it, you should check out Hunter Hunter.

Find a way to watch it.

Yeah.

Or read it if you want.

Or read it, honestly.

Honestly, reading is a great way to go.

Yeah, give you a different little flavor.

Because then you can be like, well, wait a second.

That didn't happen in what I saw.

And then we can be like, sorry, we're casuals.

It's not true.

Any final things to plug?

No, I think we covered all our bases.

Oh, worth mentioning, you can also rate us on other apps too.

Not just Apple Podcast is the big one, but if you're listening somewhere else, just go in and give us a little like,

two thumbs up, five stars, 10 out of 10, whatever it is.

Whatever the best one is, please.

I'm taking only best ratings right now.

Only best ratings.

I don't have, I don't have,

I don't have space to receive negative ratings.

So please only positive ratings.

I don't have the emotional bandwidth right now.

Yeah, I don't have the emotional bandwidth for four or three stars or God forbid a one star.

We need to end this fucking.

And that's how we feel about that.

Goodbye.