Demon Slayer Season 4 Episode 7

As this season of Demon Slayer nears its end, and this week’s episode secured itself an extended time slot on television, I found myself as one of many fans who wondered – ‘what exactly is going to go down this week?’

With Tanjiro’s final training session concluded the week prior, it was near impossible to predict exactly what the contents of this week’s instalment would be – though a backstory for the Stone Hashira was inevitable, unless they planned to really drag it out, additional content on top of this was guaranteed – but surely nothing too major could happen in the penultimate episode of a fairly slow season…

Well, if the final segment of this episode taught us anything, it’s to expect the unexpected when it comes to Demon Slayer. With such a major event taking place right in the final moments of the episode, it’s going to be difficult to talk about anything that happened earlier in the episode – but I will strive to cover this episode as fairly as I can – after all, I can’t review an episode’s quality based purely on the last five minutes…right?

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The Review

Image by Ufotable

The episode begins with Zenitsu receiving a mysterious letter – while we never find out the contents of the letter in this episode, it does have a pretty drastic effect on his personality, as we see later on. To get it out of the way now, Zenitsu of all people becomes solemn and reflective – if that’s not enough to let you know that this letter is something serious, I don’t know what is. As much slander as I direct his way, it wasn’t pleasant seeing such a sorrowful side to the guy, but this might do wonders for his character development down the line.

Tanjiro finally manages to push the boulder the required distance, and his training with the Stone Hashira officially concludes – and as such, this is the first time Gyomei decides to properly show his face. In a pretty hilarious scene, he nonchalantly waterboards our protagonist, before praising the completion of his training – and fairly randomly, Tanjiro’s conviction during the Swordsmith Village Arc. A bit of a late compliment, but a compliment nonetheless.

We then get a look at Gyomei’s backstory which, as expected, was pretty heartbreaking, and explains why there are always tears streaming down his face. Despite his best efforts, the orphaned children he took into his care were slaughtered by a demon – all but one, who accused Gyomei of killing the children as opposed to the demon. I have a feeling that the exact words that the little girl used when speaking to the authorities may have been mistranslated here, mainly because if they weren’t, and she actually straight up blamed the murders on Gyomei, that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Maybe she was just scared? I’m hoping for a mistranslation in this case to be honest – otherwise, that girl might have just become Demon Slayer’s most sinister antagonist.

Image by Ufotable

The next scene once again sees our protagonists eating a meal – I swear that this season has had more eating scenes than all the other seasons of this anime combined. Genya explains the repercussions of his eating demons, shortly before Inosuke insults his lack of breathing techniques. The two then fight, before Tanjiro holds Inosuke down, and then the next sequence of events leave me thoroughly confused.

Firstly, Tanjiro alludes to wanting to talk to Genya about Sanemi further, but the scene abruptly changes before we find out what he wanted to say. After episode 5, I’m honestly not sure what else Tanjiro could possibly want to talk about involving Sanemi. His character hasn’t managed to land with me just yet, and his dynamic with Genya seems like a bit of a lost cause, at least for now, but hey – if anyone can salvage a broken relationship, it’s Tanjiro.

The second stage of my confusion came from Tanjiro’s destination, which was Giyu’s estate. This confused me for two reasons. Firstly, he says he’s going there for his next training session. I could’ve sworn Gyomei’s training was the final session, but on top of this, Tanjiro doesn’t do any actual training when he arrives there. Maybe he will next week, but this just felt completely off to me, and maybe a manga reader can correct me on this, but I feel like this may be a case of filler clashing with manga canon. He also gets lost on his way to Giyu’s house, which I swear he had already visited in episode 2 – maybe this was a different house? Does Giyu have multiple houses? I’m not quite sure – so this whole section of the episode felt majorly off to me, and was by far the biggest blow to the quality of the episode. A strong start, and definitely a strong finish, but this middle stretch was a little all over the place.

Image by Ufotable

We then see Sanemi and Giyu sparring, as the Hashira continue their own brand of training – which is essentially just fighting each other. Even when this season, and anime, are long concluded, I will never forget that the ‘Hashira Training programme’ was a lot of smacking each other with sticks at various locations, and then Mitsuri forcing you into the splits once. In a comedy sequence that likely made a lot more sense in Japanese, Tanjiro intervenes and asks if the two are fighting over red bean mochi. How he came to this conclusion, we may never know. He explains that Sanemi likes it, which seems to upset the Wind Hashira, though I’m not sure why. Lots of confusing segments this week, but this was by far the most perplexing of all.

The episode then cuts to Sanemi ranting and raving about just about anything he could think of, when suddenly, he senses and crushes one of Nakime’s spying eyes in his fist, and finally, a Hashira catches on to Muzan’s infiltration. It just had to be Sanemi, didn’t it? We then get several ominous shots of Muzan walking towards the Ubuyashiki residence, before the credits roll – but that wasn’t all that this episode had to offer – we’ve got an extended time slot folks!

The credits song doesn’t end where it usually does – instead, the song (which I had called out as terrifying as early as episode 2) continues to play, over multiple beautifully animated scenes of Muzan approaching Ubuyashiki. It feels like the entire season has been building to this moment, and I have to say – this whole sequence was the highlight of the Hashira Training Arc so far. The calm before the storm is officially over. Major props to the animators here, but also to the duo of My First Story and Hyde, who have crafted the perfect villain song for our main antagonist.

The episode essentially ends once this sequence has concluded – so what did I think of the episode? If I were to judge off of this final sequence alone, and give Gyomei’s backstory its credit, which was also pretty well done, the episode would be a top contender for best of the season. Unfortunately, the whole middle section of this instalment felt completely off and out of place for me – so, while I wish I could give this episode all the praise in the world for the final sequence, I have to look at the episode as a whole, and ultimately, it comes out as pretty level to other episodes of the season. That being said, it did a perfect job of getting the hype started for the final episode of the arc, which is looking to be a lot more exciting than I had originally thought – we’ll see you there for the review of that episode, titled ‘The Hashira Unite’! Time for everything to reach its climax!

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Where to Watch Demon Slayer Season 4?

Image by Ufotable

The Hashira Training Arc streams exclusively on Crunchyroll every Sunday. You can also find all of the anime’s prior seasons on Crunchyroll. There are 8 episodes confirmed for this season of Demon Slayer – only one episode to go, and it’s looking like a huge finale!

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