Spring 2023 is a season without many bubble series at this point.  That can be for good or bad reasons, but here it’s mostly good – there are plenty of series that are clear keepers and not many in the grey area.  But Jigokuraku is definitely one of them.  I’m very much on the fence with it, though I did find this episode to be probably the best since the premiere.  I have no qualms with straight up battle series but they can be difficult to write about if there’s no thematic underpinning with some depth.  There is here, but the question is more about how much the series will pursue it.

This episode was really about establishing the other pairs – or groups, as the case may be.  They’re presumably going to be critical to whatever mileage Hell’s Paradise has, since Gabi and Yamada can’t carry the whole narrative on their own.  They do have their part to play, doing battle with a circle of giant deities and that fish thing.  The fact that these monsters all appear to be religiously themed (mostly Buddhist with some Taoism thrown in) would seem to indicate a mystical nature to the island, but they certainly bleed like living creatures (and this show does love its rains of blood).

Whether the three other pairs focused on here are the “main” pairs or just the first, I don’t know.  We met Gantetsutsai and his young minder Fuchi already, and now the kunoichi Yuzuriha joins the party as Gabi is finishing off his monsters (the headline being his having taken the time to save Yamada).  Yuzuriha is a lot to take, to be honest – she’s already pretty grating.  Her two Asaemon are the bookish Senta and Genji, who ported over after she killed the crim he was assigned to (because she seduced him, obviously).

Most interesting to me were the Aza brothers, Choubei and Touma.  In Kimura Ryouhei and Ono Kensho you have two really good seiyuu playing the Aza, with Kimura’s Choubei being the elder.  Touma infiltrated the Asaemon specifically to get assigned to his brother and join him on this quest, and while Choubei’s so-called philosophy is a bit shallow, the character has a fair bit of charisma.  I’m curious to see what happens with these two.

Whatever the hell is going on here – the monsters can talk, interestingly enough – Yuzuriha is probably right in that the main danger comes from the bugs.  And Fuchi is right that this whole operation kind of doesn’t make sense on any level, which is somewhat concerning but it is nice to have an on-screen character acknowledge that.  If Fuchi’s position on the matter is aligned with Kaku Yuuji’s, I”d have more confidence in the latter’s intentions to steer this story in an interesting direction.