A father searches for the item able to revive his son; a gladiator from ancient times returns to meet the woman he loved; Komui jumps to conclusions and puts the city in danger.
Coverage: Episodes 014-018
Short Summary
Rather than a proper arc, this original episodes of the anime cover three different, unrelated stories that happen in the span of time between the Rewinding Town and the Vampire of the Old Castle arcs. As they don't belong to any arc in special and are for the most part standalone episodes they have been all grouped here.- "The Leaf of Revival" (eps. 014-015): Allen, Kanda, Lavi and Bookman are sent to a snowy zone where extreme weather conditions have been reported, thinking an Innocence can be behind everything. There they meet a man and his daughter, who are searching for a legendary item known as the Leaf of Revival, that is said to be able to bring the dead back to life, with the intention to revive their deceased son/brother. Things go tense between both parties when the man accuses the Exorcists of wanting to steal the leaf from him, and the situation gets even worse when Skinn Bolic and his Akuma arrive to find the pressumed Innocence.
- "The Millennium Swordsman" (eps. 016-017): After Kanda goes missing from a mission in Rome, Allen and Lenalee are sent there in order to find him. Upon arrival, they find that the daughter of a rich merchant has been kidnapped by a mysterious swordsman. Believing that the swordsman is the cause behind Kanda's disappearance, the Exorcists decide to investigate him. They eventually learn that the swordsman is Victorio, a gladiator from the Ancient Rome who has been kept alive by an Innocence shard for millenia.
- "Lenalee's Love" (ep. 018): Komui realizes that his sister has been unusually close with one of the scientists from the Order, Jake Russell. Believing that he's secretely dating his sister, he decides to eliminate him with his inventions, which makes Allen, Lavi and the members of the Science Section follow him in order to keep the furious Komui in check. Meanwhile, a really incompetent Level 2 Akuma begins targeting Lenalee's life in an attempt to recover his former glory.
Main Summary
The Leaf of Revival story has the following tropes:
- Adaptational Early Appearance: The elemental stamps of Lavi's Innocence appear for the first time in episode 15, while in the manga he wouldn't use them until his fight with Krory. Interestingly enough, the Wood Stamp makes its debut too when Lavi uses it to dispel the snowstorm blocking the entrance to the location of the Leaf of Revival, while in canon he wouldn't employ it until the fight against Eshi in Anita's ship (the only time when Lavi used the Wood Stamp).
- Bad Boss: Skinn Bolic treats his Akuma subordinates like dirt, insulting and beating them for their unability to find the Innocence in the snow.
- Big, Thin, Short Trio: The three Akuma Skinn Bolic brings with him are this in their human forms. One is a a tall man (big), another is a white haired slim woman (thin) and the last one is a short, overweight man (short). Even in their Akuma forms they play this, with the tall man turning into a towering dog-like machine, the white-haired woman becoming a mechanical snake-woman and the short guy being a smaller tank-like robot.
The Millennium Swordsman story has the following tropes:
- Curb-Stomp Battle: Victorio manages to defeat everyone who faces him (be Exorcist or Akuma) with extreme ease thanks to the power of his Innocence. He's only beaten when Kanda takes a risky gamble in order to disarm him from the Innocence.
- Deliberate Injury Gambit: Kanda manages to defeat Victorio when he takes the attack of the sword of the gladiator in his left shoulder, taking the chance to use his Mugen to deliver a strike that severs Victorio's arm from the rest of his body. With the power of the Innocence leaving his body and gravelly injured, Victorio suffers the pass of the millennia in his body, aging quickly and dying shortly after.
- Really 700 Years Old: Victorio has been living for centuries without aging thanks to the fragment of Innocence embedded in his sword. This is what gave him his title.
The Lenalee's Love story has the following tropes:
- Breather Episode: Compared with the other two stories (one dealing with a jaded father mourning the death of his son and trying to obtain an ancient item to revive him and the other being about a woman who distanced herself from her father after money and fame went to his head and she was abducted by a gladiator from the Ancient Rome), this one is entirely comedic and deals with Komui getting hilariously homicidal after believing Jake Rusell is dating his sister. Even the Villain of the Week Akuma is so pathetic that it barely accounts for a threat.
- The Chew Toy: The only role of the Level 2 Akuma who appears in the episode is to be abused and humiliated for the amusement of the audience. He's weak, looks ridiculous, is so useless he has to resort to human methods to try to kill people and his luck is so bad nothing goes ever well for him. His destruction can be seen as an act of mercy.
- Mistaken for Romance: The main plot of the episode is about Komui's suspicion that Jake Rusell is dating Lenalee (a teenager) in secret, to the point he obssessively wants to destroy Russell with his Komurins. At the end of the episode is revealed that Russell was never dating Lenalee, she merely approached him to ask him about a present for Komui himself.
