The wait is over. The highly anticipated Shonen Jump + adaptation, Dan Da Dan finally came out and gave us a tantalizing premiere and delivered on the promise of being an X-Files style battle shonen coming out just in time for spooky season. You can find it streaming in both Japanese and English language tracks on Hulu, Netflix, and Crunchyroll. So what happened in this episode and how did it turn out? Well, read on dear reader. Content warning: this premiere has content that is inappropriate for children and covers themes of sexual assault that may be triggering to some audiences. Viewer and reader discretion advised.
The episode begins by introducing the audience to one of our protagonists Momo Ayase, a seemingly ordinary high school girl. The show starts with her arguing with a manipulative and abusive boyfriend who tries to coerce her into sexual deeds. She adamantly refuses such advances and he breaks up with her for it. She is upset about getting dumped even though she is better off without him. She reminisces about an old crush named Ken Takakura while moping in a classroom. A few girls tease her, but a boy comes up to her to show her things he thinks might be cool to her in order to cheer her up.
He shows her a magazine about UFOs, oh I mean Unexplained Aerial Phenomenon (UAPs), which is his insistent terminology. The girl calls him a nerd and says that he has no chance of making friends being obsessed with alien stuff. After hurting the sensitive frail boy, she apologizes and slips out that she believes in ghosts. The boy retaliates and says that ghosts are totally not real. This leads to the challenge that ends up setting off the plot of this premiere and the series itself. They both challenge each other to explore an area associated with aliens or ghosts to prove their theory right.
The boy goes to a creepy tunnel associated with ghosts, while Momo goes to a creepy hospital to look for aliens. As the audience predicted, they both have a close encounter with the phenomenon that they were initially skeptical about seeing. The designs for the creatures are really creative, but this is where the viewer discretion warning kicks in. The ghost threatens to do something horrific to the boy in a scene of very dark humor, a scene made more awkward in the English dub when the dub voice is the iconic voice of Rita Repulsa from Power Rangers. Momo ends up getting abducted by aliens and strapped to an operating table. The aliens say they need her help as they are an all male race that cannot reproduce without doing “experiments,” the unsubtle implications, being horrific.
Shockingly, the ghost who stalked the boy comes out and beats the crud out of the cruddy aliens in a brief shonen fight scene. It turns out the ghost has indeed possessed the boy. The ghost threatens to attack Momo after beating the crud out of the aliens. Momo reminisces about her medium grandmother, who influenced her belief in ghosts, and remembers her grandmother doing a hand gesture to release her chi, a gesture that her childhood crush Ken, made fun of her for doing. It turns out this ritual was not stupid or silly as it gives her psychic powers, which allow her to control the ghost and give the boy his body back.
It turns out that she has to stick around the boy to make sure the ghost doesn’t take control of him and they have a new mission of exorcising it, which might be the goal of the whole series. The episode begins on the major twist of the unnamed boy finally telling Momo his name. For those who have not gotten the hint yet, the boy is her childhood crush Ken. Dun dun dun! Or is it Dan dan dan?