Season 5, episode 2 of "Samurai Jack" left me in awe

Samurai Jack, taking advantage of its new creative freedom, courtesy of Adult Swim.

Sometimes, when you're lucky, a product of pop culture just knocks you right back on your butt. You experience it breathlessly, completely locked into every moment of it as it goes by, and are shocked to find it at an end, to return to reality*. Often, you feel the need to re-experience it immediately after the fact. You simply weren't ready for the full impact of it the first time around, and hope a second time around will actually allow you to appreciate it consciously, rather than simply being in awe of it, as you were at first.

This is exactly the effect that the second episode of Samurai Jack's fifth season had on me. Though this is not the first time I've experienced this kind of awe before the show's creative powers**, I did not expect to get it again, or to feel it so early in the final season's run. But in life, sometimes we get more than we deserve. And while I didn't deserve to watch an episode of Samurai Jack that simultaneously deepened the show's characters and humor while also putting up some of the best scenes it has ever had, that is what I got, and I'm grateful.

The episode opens with Aku (Greg Baldwin, a great replacement for the late Mako). Dispelling the concern I mentioned in my last review that the new Jack would go all-in on dark, Aku's opening scenes (the first we've seen him this season) are highly comical. The first we see him, he is asleep; when his alarm goes off, he punches it to turn it off, then puts on the flames that sit above his eyes as though they were glasses. He dispassionately attends to some new grovelers and to his scientists, who claim to have created a new robot that can defeat Samurai Jack. And though Aku claims no longer to care about Jack to them, a hilarious scene in which Aku sits on a therapist's couch while talking to another him, also a therapist, suggests otherwise. Though he does not mention Jack in the "safe place" of therapy, we learn that Aku is not ready to accept that Jack will be around forever, a perpetual thorn in his side, as a result of not aging because of temporal displacement. Aku laments that Jack hasn't even changed at all, "except for that stupid beard," and confesses that "I just don't know if I can handle that." Aku is as evil, powerful, and comical as ever, but he is also bored: What else is there to do when there are no more worlds left to conquer?

Meanwhile, Jack confronts his own challenges, without and within. The first of the former variety, he dispatches effortlessly: The Beetle-bot Aku's scientists cooked up for Aku is no match for Jack. Yet his internal struggles are far more complex, as established by what I didn't realize last week is the show's new credits sequence:


In a vulnerable moment, a hallucination of Jack's past self confronts him (both voiced by Phil LeMarr). "How much longer can you keep this up?" past-Jack asks. "It always seems bad at first," now-Jack responds, "but I find a way." Still, past-Jack persists: "I want it to end...there is no more honor" in this present quest. "Come to think of it, the only honorable thing to do is..." But to this implied temptation of suicide, now-Jack simply replies: "Quiet."

Samurai Jack, tormented by his past self. 

But these few words reveal ever more of Jack's character, a resolute man, ground down by failure and by the passage of time, and tempted just to end it all. As I wrote last week, it is not the Jack of the past (or, at least, not yet). Still, it is understandable, and fascinating, to see his character having evolved this way. I maintain hope, however, that he can move beyond this despair, and merge the youthful vigor of his past self with the wisdom and maturity of his present self.

Ahem. 

He has to survive to do that, though. And in this episode, he endures possibly his closest-ever brush with death, giving us some of the best fights in the whole show in the process. The Daughters of Aku, introduced last week as a 7-strong band trained from birth to hunt and kill Jack, have tracked him down. At first, they overwhelm him, so he retreats to an old temple, with many passageways, caverns, pools of water, trees, and other natural obstacles to frustrate the ruthlessly homicidal intent of the Daughters. This entire fight sequence, which comprises the second half of the episode, is wordless, in the great tradition of Samurai Jack. Who needs words when you have perfectly-paced and edited scenes like a fight in the dark, illuminated every other frame by the light of clashing weapons? Or duels that take place underwater, in the air, or in shadowy recesses? Or moments of tension so taut that one of the only flaws in this otherwise incredible episode was to add music to it? Jack's first real fight with the Daughters is by far one of the best moments of the entire show, made all the more so by the stakes and drama of the encounter: Unlike many fights in the show's history, we genuinely don't know how Jack is going to make it out of this fight alive.

And at times, he probably wasn't sure either.

It's probably not a spoiler to say that he does, in fact, escape, though his survival at the end of the episode is uncertain. Yet this escape comes not only at the cost of a brutal stab wound (he walks off at the end of the episode with a dagger sticking out of his side, almost the only item of any sort he has left on his person after the Daughters destroyed virtually everything else he had). It also demands his first-ever** killing of a human being. Earlier in the episode, we learn that Jack thinks his newest hunters are "just nuts and bolts. Just nuts and bolts." So he is legitimately shocked when he brutally disarms and cuts the throat of one of them, only to hear a sickening crunch and to watch as a visceral flow of blood spurts from the slit neck (thanks, Adult Swim!). When his victim falls to the floor, a mask falls off, and he sees a woman, dead by his own hand. He is shocked, angered even, by this, so much so that he doesn't even notice he's been stabbed until a few moments afterward (a Total Samurai Jack Move if there ever were one). The episode ends before we get to see Jack truly contemplate what he has done, but I have a feeling as honorable a soul as Jack will not easily get over such an act.

Jack's physical and emotional pain transcends the medium of animation.

This episode simply left me in awe, shocking me so much the first time around that I had to rewatch it immediately afterward. There were other great things about it--the explicit parallelism between Jack and a wolf attacked by lion-like creatures was a nice touch--but the humor, character development, and action combined to send this straight to the top of the Samurai Jack canon. We're only two episodes into the final season; if what's left remains at the high level set by this episode, then Samurai Jack will have truly earned a place among the best cartoons of all time. And if it continues to outdo itself, it may transcend animation and earn a place among the best pop culture of all time. Thanks in part to this episode, it's already done that for me.

*The last time I felt anything close to this effect was the first time I watched the Darth Vader scene in Rogue One (reviewed by me here and here; scene available here, for now).
**Before this episode, I think I got it from Jack's graveyard fight, and his being faster than a drop of water.
***Arguably, he killed people in this episode from the show's original run, though we do not know for sure that they died. Here there is absolutely no ambiguity whatsoever.