DEAD DEAD DEMON’S DEDEDEDE DESTRUCTION Episode 4 takes a turn for the worst and weird

Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction “Episode 4” Recap/Review (⭐️⭐️⭐️ /⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)

Directed by Tomoyuki Kurokawa
Written by Reiko Yoshida 
English Voice Cast: Elyse Maloway, Britt McKillip, Caitlyn Bairstow, Kazumi Evans, Meaghan Hommy
Studio: Production h+

Oran continues to be the most inscrutable character in Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction. We all knew this person growing up, otherwise known as the kid that just wanted to be a weirdo. Most of her dialogue tends to be nonsense or about her obsession with the in series video game Battle Prison. 

Last episode gave viewers a glimpse into her home with her father who runs a convenience store and her shut-in brother. “Episode 4” starts to peel back the layers of her character when tragedy and weirdness come into her life.

Thank god it’s not Christmas

It’s not that these young women haven’t experienced difficulty caused by the aliens landing, as life for everyone in Japan has changed. Kadode’s father left her and disappeared as far as she knows while alien debris displaced the massive family of bespectacled Ai Demoto into a very cramped living situation as mortality really hits them in this episode. 

After Kiho broke up with her boyfriend last episode, all of the girls celebrate Christmas together. It’s snowing and picture perfect weather for the holiday. Kiho explains that she broke up with her boyfriend because he claimed to see an “invader” and his obsession that the aliens may be hiding among us. Oran once antagonizes Kiho about boys while Kiho jokes that Oran will go to college and become normal. The celebration is a nice moment for them.

However,  the military and general public have concerns about snow piling on top of the mothership as more crafts continue to detach from it, with the Fujins striking them down. Since the military can’t control where they crash, casualties are starting to mount. During Christmas, a massive craft comes out of the mothership that looks like a Rubik’s cube. The military strikes at this new craft but unlike the others, they barely make a dent in its defenses.

There is debris and with debris also comes casualties, with one of them being Kiho. Director Tomoyuki Kurokawa and writer Reiko Yoshida tastefully don’t show the actual moment of her death or cut to her dead body, she just ends up being a name on the news. To the people of Tokyo watching, she’s just an unfortunate victim. To the girls watching and being emotionally crushed by the news, she is an absence immediately felt.  

Her death ends up deeply affecting all of the girls and as a result of the tragedy, they get excused from school. When they go to find Oran, the group weirdo is once again on the roof looking at the mothership. She tries to act like the death isn’t affecting her and in the end, it does. Her emotional breakdown is the most human moment from this character in the series so far thanks to voice actress Britt McKillip. Her facade slips and we’re reminded this is a teenage girl who can only act like a weirdo for so long. 

Loving the alien

Finally, Oran comes into contact with actual weirdness while hanging out on the roof looking at the mothership. She ends up encountering the alien inhabiting Keita Oba. He spots her with the piece of alien tech she picked up way back in “Episode 2” and asks her a question. In the following moment, she’s sent back in time to the moment she met Kadode. 

There’s been a few flashbacks before (and one where Kadode gets referred to as “The Demon”) but now we’re witnessing things from Oran’s point of view. In this moment, Oran is a well-liked and seemingly normal student and it’s only when she claims she saw a UFO and hears Kadode says they did too, that something goes off in her younger self’s head. Oran returns to the present seemingly unphased, but something clearly has changed.

The series up until this episode avoided going towards the typical science fiction plot devices. Before this episode, none of these girls gained strange powers, or became friends with a cute alien. They merely lived in strange times and we know that they’ll at least make it to college and the series until now was ordinary folks forced to cope with living through strange times. 

With the latest development, Oran might able to time travel and Keita refers to her as a “shifter”. The show has otherwise been slow moving in explaining anything outside of “Episode 0”. Who knows if this development will pay off anytime soon or if the other girls will believe what Oran tells them, since she kept her friends at a distance intentionally and this discovery might actually push her friends further away when she needs them the most.

The episode doesn’t end with a drastic change in Oran’s character or satisfyingly redeem her previous behavior, but it still offers glimpses into who she is as a person. Until now, she’s been the most outwardly oddball and off-putting of the two leads, since she cares about her friends, but it takes a lot of effort for her to show that outwardly. 

However, her encounter with Keita threatens to change how she might continue to relate to them. The episode manages to turn her from self-proclaimed into an actual weirdo.

Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction is currently streaming on Crunchyroll. New episodes drop every Friday.

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