The final episode of 'Samurai Jack' is a gift

The end. 

The final season of Samurai Jack, which I have taken it upon myself to review, has been many things: thrilling, dazzling, brilliant, surprising. But it has been, above all, a gift. I have been with Samurai Jack since the beginning, as I wrote in my first of these reviews. Somehow, my eight-year-old self was smart enough (or just narcissistic enough, given the title) to catch the premiere on August 10, 2001 (!). I continued watching it faithfully thereafter, but in 2004, the show stopped airing new episodes with its story incomplete: Jack was still in the past, with a definite yet unfulfilled destiny to defeat Aku...someday*. And that's how I thought it would remain--until December 2015, when news emerged that a final season would come out sometime in 2017. That season has now come to a close.

And what a gift it has been. Samurai Jack was always one of the best shows on television, animated or not. Its heavily stylized, beautifully animated, often wordless sequences wowed me at a young age, and wowed me once more when I rewatched the show in college. But this final season has consistently been at the highest artistic level the original series reached. Thanks surely in part to its move to Adult Swim, Samurai Jack's final season has been deeper, more mature, more serialized, and more visceral. We've seen parts of Jack and Jack's world that the original series did not even touch. It has been a thoroughly enjoyable journey to the end.

But the end has come. And it is only fitting that the last episode of Samurai Jack contains many gifts for its fans. They come in spades, beginning in the very first frames, as Jack's allies worldwide watch helplessly while Aku broadcasts the news of his capture of Jack, as we saw last week. These allies are all people we have seen before: the humanoid dogs from the second-ever episode, the Woolies, the sea-dwelling Triceraquins, and the Archers from season one, the rescued ravers from season 3, the Scotsman and his many daughters. In a fashion reminiscent of the season one episode "Aku's Fairly Tales," Aku forces them all to watch a propaganda video of sorts--and it's the original credits for Samurai Jack, featuring a back-from-the-dead Mako as Aku.

Samurai Jack characters, watching Samurai Jack in Samurai Jack, in Samurai Jack.

The result is that the inhabitants of the show's world become, in effect, viewers of Samurai Jack, for a moment, anyway. For once the credits end, Greg Baldwin's Aku undercuts it all with a mocking "NOT!" and reveals that he has captured Jack. Yet Aku, still caught in the same existential funk from Jack's relentless insistence upon existing, has trouble deciding how to kill Jack. After some struggle, he decides simply to make Ashi, under Aku's control but struggling vainly to escape it, do the deed.

And here appears the second gift of the episode: Jack's allies swarm Aku's lair, hoping to rescue him. An impressively vast portion of those Jack has helped throughout the entirety of the show comes to his aid as he came to theirs (making good on the foreshadowing of a few weeks ago). In addition to all of those already mentioned, we also get the people who taught Jack "how to jump good," and, a personal favorite for me, the 300 Spartans Jack once fought alongside (well before Zack Snyder's 300, I might add). They all likely know how futile their efforts will be unless Jack is reunited with his sword. But they have come to return the favor Jack paid them in his quest against Aku. They are a gift to Jack in his time of need, and to fans (like me) who have watched the entirety of the show.

Jack's allies, come to help him against Aku. 

Yet it is not they, in the end, but Ashi who truly saves the day, making good on this season's exploration of Jack's romantic side, and constituting, in itself, another gift in the process. At Jack's urging, and with Jack's love, Ashi breaks free from Aku's spell but keeps one useful aspect of her paternity: Aku's powers. She fights him briefly, until Jack realizes that her possession of Aku's powers means that she herself can travel to the past. And so Jack and Ashi, hand-in-hand, hurdle down a time portal of Ashi's creation.

Time travel has never been more romantic.

And they leave behind an Aku who, for the first time in the show, appears worried (though not worried enough to go after them, apparently).

Aku, worried, for once. 

This leads to yet another gift of this episode: a direct callback to the very first episode of Samurai Jack. We return to the final moments of Jack's very first fight with Aku, the moment when he flung Jack into the future (see the different versions of the same scene compared here). "We will meet again, Samurai," Aku says as Jack disappears down a time portal Aku just created. "But next time, you will not be so fortunate." 50 years in real-time but less than five seconds later from Aku's perspective, Jack and Ashi appear from another time portal in the same spot. Aku is flabbergasted. "You are back already?!?" he exclaims, and barely even has time to mount a defensive in the weakened state past-Jack left him before Jack vanquishes him once and for all.** This leads to a "destruction of ultimate evil" sequence of thematic power I haven't encountered since watching Return of the King in theaters in 2003. What took 16 years in real-time, and 50 years in show time, unfolds in what, from past-Aku's perspective, seems to be all of 10 seconds. It's a brilliant, hilarious, and fitting end to Aku's evil.

The last moments of Aku. 

The episode and the show do not end here, however. The man Aku called a fool has finally returned to the past, to all that he loved. And he has brought with him the one person he met during his time in the future who loved him back. They are set to be married in a lavish ceremony, alongside Jack's family, watched by all of Jack's friends and trainers from his past and childhood. The land is at peace, Jack is in love, and he is to begin ruling as emperor, with Ashi at his side as empress. It is all so happy, so neat, so tidy. Too much so, I suspected upon my first watch.

Too good to be true. 

And so it proved to be. As Ashi makes her wedding procession, she faints. Jack rushes over to her, and hears her whisper: "If not for Aku, I would have never existed." Then, she disappears, and Jack is left holding an empty robe. You could say this is a logically inconsistent manifestation of a time travel paradox, since, if Aku brought her into being, she should have ceased existing the moment Aku did in the past. And that's fair. But the way I see it, treating time travel in this way did not allow for a convenient deus ex machina or something like that, which is where most people would get mad about it. It, instead, only heights the pain Jack must endure, giving him one final, ironic suffering at the hands of Aku.***

Jack, however, does not let this get him down. Nor should we. In the show's final moments, Jack sits under a tree, reflecting on what has happened to him. A ladybug interrupts his reflections. It was a ladybug, remember, that set Ashi on the road to her redemption. Jack remembers this, catches it, releases it, smiles, and observes once again the unfolding of one of the autumns he loved so much as a child.

I know I already included this image, but I just love it so much. 

And that is the end of Samurai Jack. I have spent 16 years of my life devoted to this show in some fashion. Not since the finale of LOST have I experienced the end of a TV series in which I invested so much. Samurai Jack was way more than a cartoon, both for me, and objectively. It was a work of art. And what was the point of this work? I think I'm as well-qualified as anyone to hazard a guess. In the end, after suffering through so much alone, it was Jack's opening himself to others that ultimately allowed him to achieve what he had always sought. Yet misfortune marred even that accomplishment.

You could ignore all that I have said and written and say that Samurai Jack is just a cartoon. But I think there is a profound lesson in the show that should far transcend its medium even to the direst animation skeptics. We are strong creatures, we humans, capable of great things, with talents and virtues worth honing. But we accomplish nothing, and our accomplishments mean nothing, without friends, without family, without love. Sadness will come to us all, and no one among us will ever achieve exactly what we want. But that is no reason not to try, so long as we keep those we love by our side. Whether that is what Samurai Jack was trying to say after all these years, I am grateful for the gift this show has been in my life. So thank you, Genndy Tartakovsky, for creating the show in the first place, and for giving it the ending that it deserved. I will continue to try to live a life worthy of sharing a name with Samurai Jack.

Farewell, old friend.

*I wrongly thought last week that this glimpse we got in the original series would be the path Jack took back to the past. We learned last week that it would not. But I think the path the show took was better than that would have been.
**This reminded me of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, for some reason. Or maybe Bogus Journey.
***One filmmaker has said that "coincidences to get your characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of trouble is cheating." I think this is more an example of the former than the latter.