Love Triangle Black Hole (恋の三角ブラックホール, Koi no Sankaku BURAKKUHOORU?) and Hey, Hey It's a Little Demon (ホレホレ小悪魔だっきゃ!, HOREHORE Koakuma Dakkya!?) are the two segments of the 6th episode of Urusei Yatsura.
Summary
- a
Lum constantly interferes with Ataru’s attempts to reach Shinobu by phone. By barging into their phone conversation from her UFO, it inadvertently creates a black hole that causes aircraft to vanish.
- b
Ataru puts two mirrors together on Friday the 13th and accidentally makes a little demon appear from another dimension.
Plot Overview
- a
Ataru is phoning Shinobu, keeping his voice low to avoid alerting Lum, who’s asleep upstairs. However, Ten is hiding behind him, and rats him out. Lum grabs the phone and beings shouting about her plans to make a baby with Darling that night. When Ataru grabs the phone back, Shinobu reaches through it and claws his face.
Upstairs, Ataru insists that he wants to see Shinobu, and throws Lum out. In tears, she flies away; Ten follows after blasting out a huge gout of flame. Ataru is momentarily sorry to lose her hot bod, but he must revel in his freedom, which he celebrates by crawling downstairs in a weird headfirst creep toward the phone. Shinobu is initially pleased to hear about Lum’s departure, until Lum’s voice comes on the line and starts saying that they slept together last night. Shinobu loses her temper at Ataru, and then it goes into a really weird splitscreen.
Ataru’s mother has a visitor, a woman in traditional Japanese dress, who laughs and says she wishes she had an amusing son like Ataru. We immediately cut to Ataru’s mother chewing him out for being stupid, since the woman is a huge gossip and everyone will know how stupid her son is. The argument is interrupted by the TV news announcing the nearby disappearance of a fighter jet, which excites Mr. Moroboshi, prompting his wife to shout “Ataru’s stupidity won’t be cured just because a plane disappears!”
Walking outside, Ataru is struck by the realization that he can just walk to Shinobu’s, until he’s struck by lightning from the clear sky. He begins shouting at Lum in her UFO as the gossipy woman looks on, pointing him out to some other women who clearly aren’t based on Takahashi designs. Ataru calls Shinobu from a pay phone, telling her that Lum has been interfering. Lum listens in from her UFO, then gets mad and jams the signal. Ataru shouts that he has a pocket full of 10 yen coins, as a helicopter disappears from the sky behind him. The TV news comes on again, showing the disappearance of the helicopter with Ataru in the foreground. At a sumo match, they go to a stablemaster, who explains that the EM waves between the phone and the UFO have created a black hole that will suck anything that flies into it into another dimension.
Ataru dons a disguise to head to see Shinobu. As he leaves, his father gives him a rubber raincoat that will protect him from lightning. He runs toward Shinobu as lightning strikes all around him, followed by Cherry. As Shinobu runs toward him, Ataru is struck by a falling telephone pole, apparently pushed there by Cherry. Ataru rises, attacks Cherry with a pipe, and then he and Shinobu embrace amongst a background of ruined buildings.
Lum shouts that she’ll end this through lover’s suicide and launches her UFO directly at Ataru, but misses and crashes. Ataru and Shinobu seek each other amongst the smoke, but finds Lum again. Shinobu, seeing them together, attacks them with a pipe. When she leaves, local businessmen show up and demand the 3 billion yen price of rebuilding the town, which they decide to take out of his hide. Cherry proclaims that this is fate.
- b
Ataru is walking home and bemoaning his lot when a black cat walks in front of him, followed by several others that run around him in a circle. When he chases them off, a delivery moped loses control and crashes, hitting him in the back of the head with a loose wheel and leaving a lump. Back at home, we see that it’s just before midnight on Thursday the 12th when Ataru wakes up in pain. He picks up a hand mirror and checks the back of his head in the reflection in the window. As the clock turns to midnight, a small and very Takahashi-esque demon crawls out of the hand mirror and attaches to his face.
He yanks it off, and in a panic it throws itself at the hand mirror and then the window before noticing it’s past midnight (five minutes just flew by, apparently). It demands to be sent home and runs toward the futon closet, which is opened from the inside by Lum, awakened by the noise. She panics on seeing the demon, while it’s smitten and runs toward her with its tail sticking up in a very questionable manner. The chase leads to the roof, while downstairs Ataru’s parents pretend not to hear the commotion. Lum insists she can’t stay around the demon and flies off to her UFO. Ataru realizes the benefits of having it around as Lum repellent and invites it to stay.
The next morning, Mrs. Moroboshi is fixing breakfast when the demon wanders in and tells her that she’s gorgeous. Sadly, she’s flattered by this, to the chagrin of her husband (at least Rei was handsome most of the time). Shinobu arrives and Ataru explains the situation to her. She realizes that putting two mirrors back-to-back on Friday the 13th summons a demon, but is pleased when Ataru explains that it drove Lum off, up until the point that it wanders in and flings itself at her torso. (If this were live-action the actress would be holding a demon doll in place.)
Lum is watching from her UFO and becomes jealous of Shinobu, flying down to the house. Cut to the demon suspended from the ceiling by a rope tied to its tail and Ataru playing tetherball with it. It becomes upset at wanting to go home, causing Shinobu to start to feel sorry for it. Lum appears, and things escalate until Ataru is thrown through the window.
Ataru and his father meet with Cherry in a restaurant, buying him deluxe sukiyaki (there’s a sign saying “Sukiyaki Restaurant” in English in the background) in exchange for his assistance. Ataru points out that this is more of a Christian demon, but Cherry explains that as a high priest he’s studied Western religious texts as well, adding “This is a pen” in English, which is the English equivalent of “la plume de ma tante”, apparently.
In the Moroboshi’s living room, Cherry and the demon stand between eight mirrors as Cherry chants prayers to Amida Buddha and Jesus Christ, explaining that he’ll create an interdimensional space between the mirrors to send it home. The women look on in disappointment. Cherry does a lot of jumping around and bead-twirling, and portals appear behind the demon’s reflections in the mirrors. However, instead of disappearing, long lines of the demon’s reflection appear. Mr. Moroboshi returns home from work to discover that the living room has turned into a scene from “The Trouble With Tribbles”, as Cherry explains that there must have been an error in his chanting.
Cast
- Ataru Moroboshi
- Ten
- Shinobu Miyake
- Lum
- Ataru's Mother
- Ataru's Father
- Cherry
- Mirror Demon
Trivia
- First appearance of the Mirror Demons.
- First of the three episodes to have different writers for each segment of the episode. It would usually be one writer doing both segments per episode.
Differences from the manga
- a
- Ten doesn't appear, since has yet to be introduced.
- Ataru doesn't get betten up in the end, as the mob targets Ataru's parents instead.
- b
The plot is the exact same, but the differences are that:
- Lum doesn't appear, as she was originally supposed to be a one-shot in the first chapter of the manga.
- Ataru gets a bump from a baseball ball.
- Cherry appears through out the whole story, as seen at the beginning and even following Ataru home.
Gallery
