天下制覇

Good thing it wasn't deer mating season.

Impressions:

How convenient that Jack has a flashback right to an almost completely identical situation letting him get right over killing humans, which is apparently a thing we're saying has never happened before. And what was the line right after he was ranted at by a twisted, monster version of himself? "Your actions are a reflection of who you are"? If we're going to say that was just a little bit on the nose, then the nose was an elephant trunk. I still don't really get the wolf either. It recognized Jack as a kindred spirit I guess, because both were covered in blood? So then dedicated its next… week (?) to nursing him back to health through its expertise in human physiology before dicking right back off to wherever it came from? Maybe it could've worked had Jack saved it in the past or something, but without that, it's just some random magical doctor animal. At least the yelling frog can easily be chalked up to instincts and hallucination from blood loss. The dark shogun, or whatever you want to call that thing he keeps hallucinating, is also beginning to get on my nerves. Clearly meant to be symbolic of something, but right now, it most symbolizes symbolism. It's getting to the point where I'm suspecting he exists mainly to spur discussion, and not too much more than that.

I'm also not a huge fan of what went on with the girls this week. First, at least half of them got pretty bloodily and unceremoniously cut down. So much for all that training, huh? It's not like we practiced dodging things while blinded… except for that time we did. I doubt the last three that simply fell off the tree with Jack are dead, especially not the sole one they bothered to make unique both in the first episode and this one. You'd also have thought there'd be some time in their education for understanding where food comes from. There's this… schticky bit where they see a male deer and decide that it's probably one of Aku's minions, which was just close enough to making me wonder if they were about to start following it around and taking deer orders in the middle of their assassination hunt. There's still time for that, I suppose.

At least the action continues to be extremely strong, even if I wasn't feeling the story or character beats this week. Well worth watching for that if nothing else.