Samurai Jack S5 #07 — Magical Disappearing Blood

April 29th, 2017

 

I bet I can find the padding scene!

Impressions:

Another mess of an episode that shares the same core issue as the last couple. The character has an obvious epiphany, declares it, and then goes on the transformative journey, only to have the same epiphany. I'm not sure whether this one was better or worse that it took about five minutes and a tea ceremony. Yeah, I get that it's a contrast between his 'peace' and the chaos of Ashi's time-chewing fight, but I don't really have any kind of answer as to why. Perhaps if he was still relying on his anger and frustration as a crutch, but again, epiphany already had, and Angry Inner Demon has had helped him less than Random Doctor Animal, so the ranting and raving about only surviving because he went rage mode doesn't make an iota of sense. Hell, even this episode, they showed that giving in to his anger is what caused all his despair in the first place. Perhaps we should've been showing him turning to feral/brutal methods in the initial episodes if this is the direction we wanted to take things, eh?

The rest… eh. It felt like much of it was just there to fill in an extra 8 minutes, which is probably why the tea ceremony bit was so goddamned drawn out. Ashi's fight against the… orcs, I guess they were supposed to be… was trying to be both cartoonish and bloody, and then they bring back her mother for another epiphany-after-the-fact bits, popped out and done in a couple minutes. Maybe we could've cut the orcs entirely and played up more of Ashi being unable to resist her or something? Or have moved this to Ashi's original transformation bits multiple episodes ago? 

 

Posted in Samurai Jack | 2 Comments »

2 Shouts From the Peanut Gallery

  • jgoi says:
    April 29, 2017 at 10:02 pm

    Shouldn’t have been so easy for Jack to deal with Mad Jack this time but 10 episodes so gotta rush shit.

  • Longing says:
    May 3, 2017 at 2:17 pm

    Yeah, have to admit I was giving the show too much credit before. The Inner Jack was just so different in each episode (even in this one he’s much more angry than before), so I figured getting past him would have been a much more complicated and involved process. Not just arguing with him and then blowing him away.

    I felt the same way as you when Inner Jack announced that Jack “needed him”. They’ve been arguing the whole time, Jack never listens to him, and he’s never shown going out of control. If it had shown Inner Jack telling him to avoid saving people (like the village in the first episode), or doing anything out of the ordinary… Their argument would have had more impact.

    Ashi defeating the entire army on her own felt more like a return to form to the old Samurai Jack. Where he would frequently have someone (or a gang of someones) act like they could win with ease and then get destroyed. Though I do have to admit that a drawn out, bloody battle with her mother would have been more satisfying. It also would have given the mother’s death a bit more weight.