Demon Slayer Season 4 Episode 5 Recap & Spoilers

While the past few episodes of Demon Slayer have taken a leisurely stroll through the Hashira Training, episode 5, “I Even Ate Demons,” turbocharges the pacing and gives us multiple looks into new Hashira that have yet to be explored.

What Happened In Demon Slayer Season 4 Episode 5?

If there’s one thing that’s become evident during the Hashira Training Arc, it’s that Demon Slayer is content with this season mostly being filler. Most of the content of the past two episodes has contained virtually all anime original content, so it’s weird that “I Even Ate Demons” decides to forgo that pacing in favor of barreling through multiple different training segments with three different Hashira in one episode. It makes me question why Ufotable structured this season the way they did, inflating non-essential moments but blazing through fairly important character moments.

The episode begins with Tanjiro starting his flexibility training with Kanroji. As always, she’s cheerful and eager to spend time with Tanjiro, even when she’s brutally stretching him. He has to wear a goofy pink leotard, but he’s okay with that and even finds it fun. And just as quickly as that training session begins, it quickly ends as Tanjiro is shuffled off to train with Iguro.

If there’s one thing that I will give this episode, it’s that it firmly establishes that not everyone likes Tanjiro. Sure, the Demon Slayers have become more open to him and view him as a trusted ally, but the Serpent and Wind Hashira feel differently. While Shinazugawa’s hatred of Tanjiro comes from his association with demons due to Nezuko, Iguro’s hatred is much more personal. Iguro has feelings for Kanroji, and while he’ll never admit it to anyone, the Serpent Hashira will become fiercely jealous of anyone who even associates with her. And so, Tanjiro’s training with him is a claustrophobic battle with failed strikes resulting in injuries to the Corps members that Iguro is punishing for annoying him.

This is where most of the filler content of the episode is. We see Tanjiro constantly fear hurting the innocent corps members surrounding him while marveling at Iguro’s strangely fluid fighting style. About a third of the episode is centered on this fight and it continues the trend this season of having its action beats feel lackluster compared to earlier fights. Of course not every battle will measure up with some of the all-time great duels of the series, but these fight scenes don’t have that much substance. Tanjiro eventually overcomes the fear of hitting his allies, strikes Iguro once, and then is shuffled off to more training. He doesn’t improve his relationship with Iguro, which I like since it shows that Tanjiro can’t win over everybody. The real meat of the episode however comes in the second half, once Tanjiro begins training with the Wind Hashira, Sanemi Shinazugawa.

After a painful reintroduction to Zenitsu, who is currently training under Sanemi, Shinazugawa immediately forces Tanjiro into training. Like I said earlier, the Wind Hashira still hates Tanjiro, but it’s refreshing to hear Tanjiro say that he also doesn’t like Shinazugawa for stabbing Nezuko back in the first season. Shinazugawa’s training is relentless, mostly just beating the corps members until they vomit and pass out from exhaustion. The description of the training sounds horrible, but the most we see is just Shinazugawa punching a few people. It’s weird how when other Hashira training regiments were fleshed out with meaningless content, the few opportunities to pad out the season with action are passed up.

Even during the downtime, there’s still plenty of tension. While trying to recover from his training, Tanjiro stumbles upon Genya trying to speak to his brother. Despite all of Genya’s efforts to make peace with his brother, the elder Shinazugawa disowns him and wants nothing to do with his younger brother. For a character that had such an angry presence last season, seeing Genya more vulnerable when standing next to his brother adds some depth to him. It doesn’t do much to make Sanemi more interesting, but his talk with Genya does show how much of a violent psychopath he is. Once Genya mentions that he ate demons to try and grow stronger, Sanemi immediately tries to blind his brother and break him so badly that he has to quit the Demon Slayer Corps.

Tanjiro comes to his defense and has a dramatic showdown with Sanemi, but it quickly descends into a farce. From Tanjiro screaming with cartoonishly large bruises, to Zenitsu’s trademarked screams at virtually everything, to the Demon Slayers dog-piling on Sanemi, what should have been a dramatic moment with some legitimate character growth feels like it missed almost every opportunity to do something meaningful. So Tanjiro gets a slap on the wrist, is told by the higher-ups that he can’t train with the Wind Hashira anymore, and is sent off to the Stone Hashira training, where they find Inosuke already engaged with it meet the Stone Hashira mid-training

At this point, it’s pretty clear that the Hashira Training Arc is all over the place. Between extreme amounts of padding, limited action, and constantly repeating the same themes, it’s clear that this season is stalling for time. It’s an adaptation of an arc that was barely an arc in the manga. Even this adaptation as a shorter season feels unnecessary and could have been fit into another arc. “I Even Ate Demons” does score some points for cutting back on the filler and for fleshing out Iguro and Shinasugawa ever so slightly and their disdain towards Tanjiro, but with only a few episodes left, I’m mostly looking forward to when this season ends and we can move on to the next arc.

And that’s what happened in Demon Slayer Season 4 Episode 5! Come back next week for a look at the next episode of the season!

Demon Slayer is streaming now on Crunchyroll.