It’s been almost a week since I last wrote something that isn’t for work or an essay for uni. I handed in a big essay this morning after more or less finishing it yesterday. I’m pretty nervous about it because I’ve had a lot of failures in the past few years, but I’m very close to graduating which would turn my contract into a permanent one. I’ve talked about this before, I won’t bore you with it any longer, but today I want to get back into the habit of writing every day. And it’s JoJo day so that shouldn’t be too difficult.

Jesus jumpscare. We learn that Joseph drew a map of America before it was discovered. It was also the lost map that was the only thing that survived the fire and it looks like the stars might match the different legs of this journey. Is all of this in the bible too? I never knew. And somehow all of this led to Johnny’s hand being scooped out of his skin. Or not? Rule of thumb when you can’t explain something in this story is that it’s probably the work of an enemy stand user.

After the opening finishes we get to learn a little bit about how badly things have been going for some of the racers. Over 500 of them have dropped out – many of them at the same location – and there are already 68 casualties. It is very concerning that a ton of these people are currently racing through the devil’s palm and many of them will probably pick up a stand ability while traveling through it. “The devil’s palm chooses people.” And it looks like a lot of people are about to be chosen. And despite all of their encounters, Gyro and Johnny are still ahead. And Mr Steel possibly knows something about Gyro and his situation, since he thinks Gyro is picking something up on the road. Does he know about Zombie Horse?

We meet two new characters that look like Ibaram from One Piece. They are probably from Italy – I was wrong, it’s the president of the United States –  and they were the ones that sent Oye after Gyro. These people are after a corpse that is supposedly here in the desert. How does this link back to Jesus and Joseph from the start of this episode? Whose corpse is it, why are these men looking for it and why do they believe that Gyro might have it? It looks like we’re digging into the core of the story now and I’m curious to see who these people are and what their deal is. My very early guess is that the hand that just went into Johnny’s skin is the first part of this corpse. Why it did that, no idea.

I do like these quieter moments where the duo are just having fun with each other. It makes sense that if you’re traveling the entire continent on horseback there will also be times where you’re just talking about silly shit instead of having active life or death situations going on. Don’t you agree, Gyro? Gyro? Where did you go? Johnny must be a gamer, because gamers don’t look up and even though we just saw a bunch of birds fly over, he isn’t looking up at all. Even the birds could explain what is going on, why did both Gyro and his horse disappear without the gear, while the gear disappears afterwards. Whatever it is that took Gyro and his horse, it’s not currently visible and seems to be attacking Johnny with a different power. One power makes things disappear, another power can cut into things.

Whenever I cycle to work, there’s this little tunnel that goes along the water underneath a bridge. Sometimes there will be people there that are fishing and one of my fears is that one day they will swing back their rod to cast out a line and hit me with the hook on their fishing rod. It’s not a very realistic fear, but I feel like that would be a terrifying experience. So I can only imagine the terrifying feelings that having a steel hook piercing through your face would bring you. Absolutely awful to even think about. It looks like these feathers have the ability to send out hooks that grab onto people and then take them into another dimension. Something seems to be around here, invisible, guiding the feathers. They stop at a certain distance after all. Using his own stand powers, Johnny does manage to get to relative safety despite his disability.

This stand is definitely related to the president we met earlier as it has a clear goal. They want something that Gyro and Johnny might have and Johnny puts the pieces together. Oye and Stroheim were also after this mummified arm. We now meet the stand user that did all this and it’s probably the weirdest person we’ve seen in this series so far. Even though this guy has access to the things he stole from Johnny and Gyro, it seems he was also able to take out Gyro in the process. His ability looks like it works like a weird form of fishing. The weirdo fishes into a bowl of water and catches whatever is on the other side of the ability, be it through feathers or insects. So my fear of people fishing might be more accurate than I thought.

And ladies and gentlemen, if you thought this show was weird before, it’s about to become even weirder. Some weird labubu just came crawling out of Johnny’s arm and started talking to him. Is this his stand ability or the stand ability of the corpse that seems to be fusing with him? Next thing you’re going to tell me is that this labubu is actually the new body of Jesus Christ. That’s what was hidden here, right? The body of Christ? I can’t think of another logical explanation, if it was Joseph that went on a pilgrimage and buried something. We’ll have to wait a while to figure out if I was right, but as always I think this was a very interesting episode. Thanks for reading!