© 堀越耕平／集英社・僕のヒーローアカデミア製作委員会
It’s important to keep a sense of back-and-forth going with season-long (or longer) conflicts like this one. If the heroes are constantly winning every match-up against their opponents, it can feel predictable, while continuously shaving down the amount of credible threats. With how much prep work went into isolating our various villains, that was a risk this storyline was treading close to. Now? It feels remarkably hopeless for the heroes, as their opponents have only grown more dangerous when backed into a corner.
“Those Who Defend, Those Who Violate” is pretty much wall-to-wall bad news for the good guys, and it works remarkably well to reset this war just as it started tipping in their favor. It started last week with Bakugo, who’s so close to slipping the mortal coil that saying he’s clinging to life is a generous overstatement. Rather, it’s other people trying to keep his shredded organs together, providing some gruesome images of what internal CPR looks like. Speaking plainly, we know that will probably work, even if it makes no sense from a biological perspective. This is anime and superhero comics. For now, Bakugo’s imminent demise provides a great tension for those left in the Sky Coffin where Shigaraki stomps towards the boy’s body with the intensity of a slasher villain, dead set on keeping that corpse where it is.
Comparatively, the sudden resurgence of Dabi is a lot more of a head-scratcher. While this potentially opens things up for a full-on confrontation with Endeavor, the way it’s justified strains credulity. Toya, in just 30 seconds, could figure out how Shoto’s Phosphor attack and whipped up his version to just barely disperse that ice attack. That’s… a lot, and even if I don’t care much about the mechanics of made-up superpowers, it still feels cheap. At the same time, it occurs to me that we haven’t checked back in with Toga and Uraraka in a while. If we’re going for a big episode where the villains turn the tables on all fronts, that seems like an odd omission. These are two thematically important villains, so it’s odd to see them feeling like afterthoughts.
Thankfully, the bounce back for AFO feels suitably menacing. The guy has been a top-tier threat every time he showed up, but now we’re being promised an All For One in his absolute prime, free from the injuries and setbacks that All Might delivered to him all those years ago. He’s been given a potential weak spot in that this reversal will eventually revert him into nothing (So technically we can say Eri defeated All For One already. Good for her!) but that makes him more dangerous. Putting these villains on the ropes has only made them more vicious. Giving AFO all his power, faculties, and a time limit is a recipe for mass destruction. So Tokoyami better get my precious daughter Jiro to safety ASAP. I don’t care if that’s technically abandoning your post, you get the future of Rock & Roll out of there, bird boy.
All of those assorted events are dramatically solid. Packed together, they take up so much time that it’s hard to grasp how much happened in this episode as opposed to what’s being set up to happen next time. In retrospect, the episode feels like it existed entirely to build to its last 30 seconds. I can forgive that because that last 30 seconds is sublime. With all the other heroes down, and destruction personified looming over him, leave it to Mirio to save the day the way only he can—with a precision-timed butt joke. The swerve from that to Deku delivering a hellacious Dynamic Entry is pure gold and makes it hard for me to care about any deficiencies in the episode. Sometimes, an episode can live or die off its ending, and this one is alive and kicking.
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