Well…now that we’ve put that filler behind us we finally get back to the story…that looks suspiciously like filler. Well, at least the majority of the episode is taken from the manga, with only a bit of padding added to flesh it into a full episode. So overall it is not terrible, and actually really funny again.
Himekawa and Kanzaki are for some reason stuck inside the same hospital room, when Kanzaki’s two minions, Shiroyama and Natsume come to visit them. Natsume tells them that Kunieda, the third Tohoshinki has returned from conquering the Northern Kanto Ladies Association.
In the meanwhile Oga is forced by his Mom, Sister, and Hilda to take Beel to make his park debut. This is obviously a Japanese culture thing, and even after watching this episode and reading the manga several times I’m still not entirely sure what exactly it is. But from what I understood it’s basically where a parent, most often the mother (I think), takes their child to the park for the first time, in order to meet the other mothers and children in the neighborhood.
Hilda does not go because she’s busy watching a soap opera, leaving Oga to force Furuichi to go with him. Furuichi doesn’t stick around for long, and instead leaves for a date. So he says… While sitting in the park Beel notices a father and his daughter playing upsy-daisy.
When Beel demands to play as well Oga of course goes over board and has to make a mad dash to stay within fifteen meters or it’s his life.
When he makes the catch he meets Aoi, the daughter of a local priest who is taking her brother to play in the park. Unfortunately for her all the mothers assume that she’s the unwed mother of her little brother.
After an initial…misunderstanding…
Oga and her get to know each other a little, while trying to figure out the park debut between themselves. Of course Oga’s attempts end in failure, for some reason.
The other mothers in the park, who by that point have been repeatedly terrorized by Oga’s failure to grasp social interaction, come back with a police officer who just wanted to go home early and play video games. But when he sees Aoi he decides that there might be a perk to doing his job.
He starts harassing Oga, and when Aoi comes to defend him the cop starts to talk down to her as well. She is about to slap the cop, when Oga kicks him in the balls and throws him in the trash. Then he runs away.
Thinking that Oga did that to keep her from assaulting the police officer Aoi heads home, where a bunch of girl delinquents are waiting along the stairs to the shrine to greet her. Yes, in a plot twist that was so epic at the time, though I probably should have figured it out, Aoi is in fact Aoi Kunieda, the third member of the Tohoshinki!
This episode is another example of what I like to refer to as Studio-Pierrot-padding-the-episode-for-timing-and-thereby-ruining-Tamura’s-pacing. Or SPPTEFTATRTP, for short. And it’s no coincidence that it sounds like a fart noise when you try to say it. Because the pacing in the Beelzebub manga is comedy gold, and part of the reason why I love it so much. Tamura knows how to put together panels in the most hilarious way, and the anime adaptation so far isn’t doing it justice. Of course I know that a single chapter of the manga isn’t enough to fill an episode, and I’d much rather they go for padding instead of filling half the episode with a terrible original story.
On the plus side this episode does indeed mark the continuation of the plot, the anime has way too much filler for a show that’s only just starting, and it’s good to see them sticking to the manga more closely now.
Things are looking up for the Beelzebub anime.
If you liked my review, Watch the Episode Here!