D.Gray-man Hallow: Episode 7 Review
By: TheJewphin[yasr_multiset setid=11]Well... that escalated quickly.At the end of Episode 6, a younger Yu sat on an operating table, ready to be put down like the rabid experiment he was. Meanwhile, Alma fused with his old innocence in an attempt to rescue Yu.Episode 7 starts by reminding us that Yu has someone for whom to live, a young girl who lives in his half remembered memories. Given that the central location of the episode is Yu's memories, the young girl is actual a memory of Yu's in a memory of Yu's. If those memories start to remember, he may become lost in space and time.Anyways, back to Yu's memories. Yu decides that life is worth living - almost against his will - and chooses to fuse with his old innocence. The fusion gives Yu just enough strength to break away.
On his way out, Yu runs into Marie who was so badly injured that the order decided to just harvest him in the same way they did with Yu and Alma. Because that worked so well for them in the past. Luckily, Yu's blood heals all wounds and Marie is quickly back on his feet. Well, it heals the life-threatening wound. Marie is still blind. And he can't walk without aid. But he's healed!A little more back story reveals that the researchers who ran the experiments set up their own deaths at Alma's hands to teach future generations a lesson. While the noble sacrifice is a nice touch, it's unclear how we as the viewer are seeing it. They explained away visions of just Alma as bleeding into the awakening Alma's memories. But neither Yu nor Alma were in these ancillary scenes.Yu eventually runs into Alma who has murdered everyone he can get his hands on. He apparently gave up on the whole rescuing Yu plan once he realized he could just kill everyone everywhere. With that in mind, he tries to kill Yu. And he almost succeeds. In fact, it seems like the only way Yu wins is that he surprises Alma by suddenly wanting to live. Alma apparently expected Yu to roll over and just die with him.Then we get the best scene in the episode. While Yu is systematically chopping up Alma, Allen is getting angrier and angrier. Not at the second exorcist program or what was being done to the children. No, Allen is angry that the Noah are exploiting Yu's memories and that Yu is allowing it to happen. So Allen breaks free from the mental handcuffs long enough to punch the current Yu directly in the face. This breaks Wisely's hold on the two and leaves Wisely with a splitting headache.
But freedom came too late. Yu's memories awoke Alma who exploded the room in a flash of light. As the Noah watch in delight, Alma prepares to face off against Yu.The escalation of this episode was amazing. It started with two children trying to break away and ended with a large number of people being murdered - both in Yu's memories and the current world. It is unclear who on the good guy's side is alive at the end of the Alma-splosion, but at least one member of the order was vaporized in the blast.Hopefully Johnny and Reave survived. Their deaths wouldn't be sad enough to be worth them dying and they are actually fun characters to have alive. There is also an interesting side plot with one of the artificial akuma-exorcists hunting down Allen in fear that Allen is going to kill her siblings. While this side plot has not generated anything useful yet, I am interested to see where it is going.
