Plot: Souta is a lonely, bullied boy who spends his free time following and taking pictures of the only girl who’s ever shown him kindness, Kiwako. He has no ill intentions – he merely wants to watch her since he knows any advancement on his part would result in rejection. Besides, she’s dating a skeevy boy named Sugita. He knows he’s a bad person who is bound to somehow hurt Kiwako, but he can’t bring himself to fully contact Hell Girl. When she appears anyway, she rejects his request, stating she’s not a figure of justice. It’s up Souta to save her when things get really bad, but what can he do? What will he do?
Breakdown: I’m not sure how I feel about this episode. It’s kinda boring while leaning on depressing. This is the first time we’ve seen Hell Girl appear to someone and offer her services without the person in question pressing ‘enter’ on the website. I have no idea why she chose this client to do this for, but okay.
I also don’t understand her reasoning for rejecting him. No, she’s not a figure of justice, but this situation is very similar to Beloved Kei where the client did have motives for protecting someone in mind more than revenge and Ai was perfectly willing to help her. What’s the difference?
Most of the episode is just following around Kiwako and her skeevy boyfriend knowing that he’ll do something awful to her. And, of course, he does. He sets it up so his friend can rape her. I have no clue why he’d do that considering he gets nothing out of it.
Souta does nothing to warn her because he has such a lack of confidence that he believes she’d never believe him anyway and his actions wouldn’t stop it.
The ending is interesting because the script is flipped. The target deserved to go to hell, but the client switched to Kiwako, who wished revenge on Sugita. Souta, more enveloped in depression than ever, decides to murder the friend who did the raping, condemning his own soul to hell without Ai’s help, even though she’s perfectly willing to accept his request now. She even shows up at his house right before he’s about to do it, like an offering of taking the full burden off his shoulders.
It’s a bad situation, but the episode as a whole didn’t make me feel a whole lot of emotion. I didn’t even get a lot of catharsis because they skipped the hell torture today. We got to see him be a little tortured by some hands, but that’s old hat by now.
One cool thing I’ll note is that they were playing the theme song from Hell Girl’s first season in the bowling alley scene. That was pretty neat.
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The Anime Madhouse 