Now we’re really getting somewhere. The third volume of Hell Girl does what I enjoy most in a show — it takes its own conceits, turns them inside out, and sees what emerges. Instead of just running through the basic idea over and over again as it did in the earlier volumes, Hell Girl is now scrupulously questioning its own premises. What if, for instance, you send someone to hell as revenge, and that turns out to be what they want? Is it revenge if you give someone the punishment they secretly long for? I’m glad the show is finally becoming what it needs to be; I’m just a little frustrated it took this long.
Most of the episodes before Volume 3 featured a pretty cut-and-dried case of vengeance. Here, the stories now center around reporter Hajime, his daughter — who seems supernaturally connected to Hell Girl’s victims — and his dogged pursuit of the truth of the whole situation. The more he finds, the more disturbing a picture he pieces together — and the more his own nascent sense of morality starts shoving (inconveniently) to the surface. It’s no fun to realize you have a conscience after a lifetime of pretending you don’t, and the idea that someone would throw themselves away on revenge begins to mortally terrify him.
“Broken Threads,” the first episode on the disc, deals with a colleague of Hajime’s who’s given the Hell Girl treatment when one of his slanderous articles destroys a man’s life. This time Hajime manages to get in contact with Hell Girl’s “client” before the fact, but his arguments fall on deaf ears and come far too late to make a difference. “Spilled Bits” gives us a teacher, Fukazawa, caught up in a bizarre emotional liaison with one of his students — another episode where we’re led in what looks like one direction when in fact we’re going in another, and the motives underlying everything we see are entirely different. Fukazawa is the victim of the girl’s revenge … but sees damnation at her hands as being better than anything he could come up with in this world, and goes along willingly. Is it revenge if the other guy is only too happy to be destroyed?
Then comes the episode “Purgatory Girl,” where we get the first tentative answers to the question, where did Hell Girl come from in the first place? The answer’s left deliberately unclear — there’s just enough hints dropped to make us pre-order the next DVD — but Hajime’s digging leads him to an old magazine that contains a story with a plotline entirely too much like the drama he’s now seen played out again and again. The idea, if I read this correctly, is that Hell Girl has always existed in some form or another, and that by writing the story something was not so much created as tapped into or allowed to manifest more fully.
In “Beyond the Dead End,” Hajime once again races to prevent revenge from being enacted against someone who did the wrong thing for what are ultimately comprehensible reasons. In this case it’s a city official who swapped political favors with a gang of criminals to prevent them from destroying an old-age home. His fate brings to mind the old adage: in this world, it’s not what you do, it’s what you get caught doing.
Now that Hell Girl has moved away from a mere gallery-of-horrors mind-set and is actually exploring the implications and possibilities inherent in its setting, I’m recommending it all the more enthusiastically. I do keep thinking the show could have been truncated a fair amount — there’s still a lot of redundancy across episodes — but if what we’re getting now is all the better, all the deeper and more satisfying, I’ll save my complaints for a show that’s not even trying.
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