Recap

The remaining chimera ants start their new journeys, while Kite makes a guest appearance in an unlikely place.

Euri’s thoughts

And there we have the final episode of the chimera ant arc. It’s been quite the roller coaster ride, but wasn’t it great? Anyway, I spent most of last week fauning over the conclusion to the story of Komugi and Meruem, so it’s time to get stuck into hard facts as we figure out how Gon and friends are doing…

Ah, who am I kidding? First of all we’ve got the absolutely miserably reunion of Reina with her mother. It turns out the Reina, the bubbly young girl we unfortunately see become one of the earliest chimera ant victims along with her brother, had been reborn as the ant that followed…the female ant with the funky hat. You know, antface or whatever she’s called.

As you might imagine, this could cause all sorts of problems. First of all, it was the chimera ants that originally killed Reina and her brother. Her new appearance is more or less guaranteed to scare the crap out of the villagers, her mother included, because strangely enough a human-like ant, complete with compound eyes and mandibles, doesn’t look a great deal like a 4 year old girl. But because of the power of love, she is recognised pretty quickly and is welcomed back to the village. As crazy as that is, it was still great to watch. It would have been incredibly upsetting if she’d been shunned from the community because of her appearance, but then it’s also something I wouldn’t put out of the realms of Hunter x Hunter and its story. Fortunately it all turned out okay, and it seems even Brovuda has a home because of it.

It’s been a while since we last checked in with Colt and the young ant he rescued when the Queen died, but as is seemingly natural with chimera ants, she’s already at the age of a toddler. Not bad for a few days of growing! But really, as much as Colt was a good plot device twenty episodes ago, we don’t really need him around any more. We didn’t know much about the baby ant, but then interest in that nugget of information was hardly high. Still, this show managed to throw a curveball by announcing that the kid is referring to herself as Kite. Yes, that’s right, Kite has been reborn as a little mouse girl. I’d say it’d be interesting to watch her develop over the rest of the series, but that would also be on the assumption that there’s much of the series left to even do so in. I think we’ve only got about 10-12 episodes left to go.

It was amusing to see Morel dropping everything to rush and tell Gon and Killua of the news, but unfortunately they’re hardly in the best of shapes right now. Gon is near death and completely out cold, while Killua has re-entered his emo phase and plans to leave Gon in the capable hands of the doctors while he ‘searches’ for a way to heal his best friend. Admirable, sure, but at the end of the day that ten year old kid, or however old he is, is just going to wander around aimlessly in search of an answer.

Right at the very end of the episode, we get a very brief introduction to the Zodiac members, an oddball lot who seem to be dressing up as one of the twelve zodiac. But look who shows up! None other than Gon’s dad Ging, and with such impeccable timing. Gon is not going to see him while unconscious, and I’m pretty sure his old man is not going to make an effort to go see the poor kid while he’s battling for his life. We’ll see, but we already know he’s done an outstanding job of being a father so far.

Random observations

• I realised between this episode and the previous episode that Pouf died near the hypnotised humans. Would his poison have killed them?
• Surprising no one, the Zodiacs are dressed based on signs of the zodiac. My personal favourite is the cow guy as taurus, which is giving me a lot of Fairy Tail vibes.