Season 5, Episode 4* of "Samurai Jack" slows down, deepens its characters

BFFs? 

What if everything you had been taught, everything that you had grown up believing, and everything you thought was true were actually a lie? Would you accept the uncomfortable truth when it confronted you, or would you resist it, fight it, perhaps even deny it?

We all like to think that we would take the former course. But humans are creatures of habit and custom. We cling to what we know in a world that often doesn't make sense. And even if faced with logical, irrefutable evidence that we had been misled, we might stick to what we know. The effort to adjust to a new reality might simply be too much. I certainly am not sure how I would fare.

This difficult question provides the main drama of what seems, superficially, to be a much more restrained episode of Samurai Jack. And it was, by the standards of the episodes in this season so far. But even a relatively calm episode of this new season of Samurai Jack can reveal much about its title character and his new, somewhat unwilling female companion, in a fun story set against some of the best animation of the series yet.

Episode 4 continues more or less right where the last episode left off, after Jack had brutally dispatched all but one of the remaining Daughters of Aku, the assassins trained from birth to hunt and kill him. The lone survivor wishes to continue the fight, despite Jack's defeat of her after a short sortie.* Jack is prepared to move on, but then the two are swallowed by a giant creature and have to escape from it. The trope in situations like this is easy: "Enemies forced to work together to escape." But Ashi (Tara Strong, sounding quite different from her more famous role as Timmy Turner of the Fairly OddParents), the last living Daughter of Aku, has no interest in helping Jack escape; in fact, she laughs when they find themselves trapped in the beast's belly, thinking this seals their mutual fates, and works against Jack at every turn as she journeys through the beast's bowels chained helplessly to Jack's back. Aside from a few creature fights, that's all that really happens in this episode.

But the emotional journeys this narrative drives are as compelling as anything in the show so far. Jack continues to struggle with various hallucinations: a feminine Aku, threatening to attack him; a murder of crows pronouncing his homicidal guilt (a defiant Jack shouts back that the people he has killed chose this path); his past self, urging him to leave Ashi behind to die (Jack refuses, calling her an "innocent" who has "lost her way" and is "here because of me"). But Jack struggles most with the very real Ashi. For she not only works against him as much as she can in his attempt to escape the beast, as mentioned above***; she also continues to taunt him. Propagandized from birth to believe Jack her world's greatest evil, she has great trouble giving up her delusions, even as Jack continues to point them out as such.

And despite the free piggy back rides.

Ashi herself, however, has the more intriguing emotional journey over this episode. This season has already established the Daughters generally, and now Ashi specifically, as dark mirror versions of Jack himself. Like Jack, they were raised from birth with a single purpose. Like Jack, Ashi is driven to her goal by hallucinations. And like Jack, Ashi is loathe to give up on her goal: "to undo the evil that is" Samurai Jack (a surely-deliberate reference to Aku's opening monologue in the original series, in which he says that Jack's goal is to "undo the evil that is Aku").

This is why she refuses Jack's many attempts throughout the episode to convince her that he is not evil. How would you react if someone told you, as Jack tells Ashi, that "Everything, every word, every thought that you know is wrong!" We viewers know that Jack is right, of course. But Ashi knows no other life than the one she has lived up to this point. Ultimately, it is not anything Jack says that persuades her, but something he does: He shows himself to be in tune with the natural world. We had seen small but meaningful hints in earlier episodes, and earlier in this episode, that Ashi had a very un-Aku-like appreciation for the delicate wonders of nature. And it is one such wonder in particular that opens her mind to the possibility that Jack might be right after all.

It's the little things. 

Speaking of the wonders of nature, this episode is full of them. Setting most of the action inside of a gigantic living creature supplies a striking diversity of backgrounds, colors, and environments for the animators. We see our characters walk along arteries, beneath neurons, and around pools of acid, all drawn brightly and clearly. Samurai Jack is hardly the first work of fiction to go inside of another living being****, but its foray is certainly one of the more impressive.

Just one of many colorful scenes from this episode. 

Where does Samurai Jack go next? I have closed most of my reviews with this question, and it thrills me that I do not have a good answer (except what I know from the teaser for next week's episode). This week's episode was a bit of a breather, and a bit less exciting than what I have come to expect from the new season of Samurai Jack. Yet it was just as revealing, and just as beautiful, as any of the preceding episodes. And so I say yet again: If Samurai Jack persists at this level, then the 13-year wait will have been more than worth it.

*This week's episode was supposed to air last week, but, in a bizarre April Fools' Day prank, Adult Swim aired the Season 3 premiere of Rick and Morty with barely any announcement instead. I am a recent convert to Rick and Morty fandom, so I wasn't too mad about this, but Samurai Jack is my first love. Besides, Rick and Morty fans were complaining about having to wait 18 months for their new season. Samurai Jack fans like me have waited 14 YEARS.
**One of Jack's more impressive moves in this fight is to kick a blade away from him, which is how the Bruce Lee movie The Big Boss ends. 
***I think this is meant to be at least partially an Empire Strikes Back reference.
****Jack reacts to Ashi's persistence with an exasperated "Are you kidding me?" It reminded me of the "you gotta be f*ckin' kiddin' me" from The Thing.
*****To name a couple off the top of my head: Jonah, Pinocchio, Fairly OddParents, Kingdom Hearts, Rick and Morty