Season 5, Episode 3 of "Samurai Jack" bleeds, recovers, and raises the stakes

Samurai Jack, bloodied, but not giving up yet. 

After the sheer propulsive momentum of last week's episode, I was wondering how Samurai Jack could possibly maintain the same level of energy into another episode (much less the rest of the season). Unsurprisingly, Episode 3 begins by slowing things down a little bit, letting us learn a bit more about its characters and raising the stakes...until a final fight that outdoes even last week's breathtaking action.

Jack starts the episode in a dark place. The opening scenes pick up right where the previous episode left off, following his bloody but still living body as he flows aimlessly down a river, floating in and out of consciousness. The pain from the stab would he received last week is often the only thing keeping him conscious. The whole sequence, wordless, nature-focused, and beautifully animated, reminded me of nothing so much as Leo's most brutally painful moments in The Revenant. Eventually, Jack stumbles into a cave, still in physical and spiritual pain: physical, from the wound, especially after he finally works up the courage to remove the dagger from his side (another Revenant-esque touch). And spiritual, from the persistent torment of his past self, fittingly drawn in even more warped, demonic style than last week*. The hallucination insists that what's bothering him is not this "pathetic little cut," but the fact that Jack has, for the first time, killed a human being ("flesh and blood," past-Jack remarks, the teeth in his mouth sharpening at the thought, perhaps alluding to the danger that present-Jack succumbs to a sort of blood lust, or at least a dark side). "What happens when the others come? You'll have to kill them to. Can you? Maybe they'll kill you. Or is that what you want?" Jack manages a weak "no" to yet another suicidal lure, but that the show would even go there shows how Jack's character has changed over the past fifty years (and how well the show is taking advantage of its new, mature rating).

The hallucination's face when it says "flesh and blood."

But the cave provides nourishment for Jack as well. Physically, he recuperates (with the help of a spirit animal, the wolf who endured a parallel struggle in last week's episode). And spiritually, he reaches back to his past to understand his present situation better. Specifically, he consults a memory of his father brutally dispatching bandits, though not before stoically warning them that he will only kill them if he has to. "Your choices have clearly led you here, as have mine. I will give you a new choice: Leave now and live, or stay and face your destiny." Naturally, their destiny is a bloodbath that young Jack witnesses.**

And you thought your childhood was rough. 

From this memory, Jack derives the courage and the moral certitude to move forward. He knows his enemies are human, but so long as they desire his death, he must defeat them. "The decisions you make, and the actions that follow, are a reflection of who you are," Jack recalls his father saying. "You cannot hide from yourself." Once again, the jaded, cynical Jack finds purpose in the quest that had driven him all these years. Thus restored, and, indeed reinvigorated, Jack, in the great symbolic tradition, steps out of the cave, ready to face his destiny.

Jack, ready to face his destiny. 

What is his destiny? In the meantime, it is to confront the Daughters of Aku, the relentless foes who spend the first part of the episode tracking him. We haven't learned much about the Daughters as individuals; indeed, I can't even tell them apart, save by their different choice of weapon. But for the time being, they are to be understood as a collective, and this episode deepens our somewhat limited understanding of them as a group. We see them drag the corpse of their fallen sister out of the rubble from last week's episode. Staring at her, one of them then simply says "Death is failure," underlining the brutal ethos on which they were raised, and then they move on.

There is no mourning failure for a Daughter of Aku. 

Later in the episode, we hear one of the Daughters describe Jack as a "parasite," a window into the worldview in which Jack is the villain and Aku is the hero. Though Jack is obviously the hero of the show, and the hero to us, we shouldn't forget that, to the world of the show, Aku is basically god.*** The best villains think they are the hero, and the Daughters fit this description, seeing Jack as the ultimate evil, and themselves as its necessary destroyers. The Daughters also encounter a deer for the first tine. Raised from birth in a temple to be killing machines, they do not know what it is. And they expect doom for it when a buck approaches, only to be confounded when the two creatures nuzzle affectionately. These details add a tragic element to the Daughters' destiny: If, as Jack's father says, and as Jack tells the Daughters before he fights them, our choices reflect who we are, then it must sadden us at least somewhat that the Daughters never had the chance to choose anything but the dark life thrust upon them. It is a remarkably humanizing turn for villains to receive, and it is to Samurai Jack's credit that it has imbued its antagonists with even these little bits of humanity.

And so when we come to another clash between Jack and the Daughters, there is an element of sadness to it. Jack gives the daughters the same choice that his father gave the bandits; when they refuse it, he acts just as his father did. Whereas in last week's episode, the Daughters surprised Jack and reduced him to his most vulnerable, this time, Jack understands his foes and is ready to take them on. More important, he is ready to kill, as he does here, brutally and efficiently. That is not to say the Daughters don't put up a fight; they do, perhaps even a better effort than in the previous episode, coming at Jack from every angle and with multiple weapons, forcing him to be at his best at all times (except for a short breather). And the fight looks as beautiful as anything the series has ever done; set in snow, mostly using black colors against a stark white background, with blood the sharpest hue, it's a battle as beautiful as it is brutal.****

Like I said, as beautiful as it is brutal. 

Yet the Daughters do not stand a chance against a Jack who has found himself again. Unfortunately for them, it was a process they enabled: In the previous episode, they literally destroyed the armor and gear that Jack had become accustomed to in this future life, and they figuratively destroyed the self he had settled into. Reduced to nearly nothing, Jack had no choice but to build himself back up with a recharged zeal for his mission. And that he did.

Once again, Samurai Jack continues to impress. The character and plot development that occur in this 20-minute episode could have easily stretched over two, if not more. In fact, I expected the Daughters of Aku to serve as the primary antagonists for most of this 10-episode season, but now, after episode three, likely only one (though possibly two) of them are even alive. And Jack himself seems to have achieved that merging of the wisdom of his older self with the energy of his past self that could power him to ultimate victory.

I'm going to keep including this image until some episode references it. 

What will happen in the seven episodes that remain? Again, I genuinely don't know. It's possible that Jack may change the mind of one of the surviving Daughters (or the only one); it's possible that the glowing green specter on horseback that has haunted Jack since this season's first episode will become an antagonist (if it's not just a vision of dark Jack himself); it's possible that Aku will realize Jack is swordless, forcing Jack to recover his sword (or an analogue for it) in a hurry. But one of the many great qualities of the final season of Samurai Jack is that I do not know what will come next. All I do know is that it will be great, if this season's first three episodes are any indication.

*This Jack resembles the "Big Bad Wolf" Jack from the season one episode "Aku's Fairy Tales," in which Aku tells stories to try to convince children that Jack is the villain, not the hero.
**In the last episode of season four, which was previously the show's finale, Jack defends a baby who turns into a baby samurai as a result of watching all the carnage. This must have been that moment for Jack.
***"Aku's Fairy Tales" does a good job of showing the world that Aku was trying to create, and by now has (based on the supplicants in the previous episode), in which he is the hero and Jack is the villain.
****The snowy setting recalls Jack's fight with the bounty hunters and his arrow-dodging; the black-and-white contrast recalls his fight with the Shinobi warrior.