As I mentioned
before in my Schedule Change post, I've decided to move game design
commentary to Wednesdays in order to have Animation Deviation here,
so I can have an excuse to give an immediate reaction and analysis of
the revival of Samurai Jack. So let's get started on what happened
last Saturday, cuz it's a doozy.
Episode 2 opens with
an extended scene with the always enjoyable Aku, the shapeshifting
ultimate master of pure evil in his evil lair. What sort of
diabolical plans does he have in motion to further terrorize the
world that he has under his thumb?
Nothin' really. He's
kind of lost his drive.
That's right. Aku is
dealing with ennui and it's kind of hilarious. Some subjects come in
to appease him? He casually waves them aside. Scientists come in to
show off a new superweapon that will definitely destroy that pesky
samurai? His reaction is basically, “fine whatever, I don't really
care anymore.”
And for like ten
seconds I bought this. Aside from Samurai Jack wielding a magic sword
that is the only thing that can kill him, Aku has basically won. The
world is his, what does he have to worry about.
Then we get a pretty
amusing sequence where Aku...creates a copy of himself to act as his
therapist. The funny thing about Aku as a villain is that he always
manages to be equally terrifying and intimidating as a villain, while
also being playfully amusing. He could go from being a force of
nature made to end worlds to...reading propaganda as bed time stories
for children to turn them against Samurai Jack. All evil in different
flavors, but the pettiness is amusing.
This scene does
bring up two crucial bits of information. First is the reason why Aku
has lost his drive to kill Jack. Turns out Aku actually did the
smartest thing he could against an enemy whose sole motivation was to
get back to the past: he destroyed every single form of time travel
he could find and decided to just wait out Jack dying of old age.
But, as the new opening handily reminds us, time has lost its effect
on Jack. Aku even mentions all that has really happened is that he
grew a beard. Which has allowed the thought to creep into his head
that Jack will be stuck here forever and that they're at a stalemate.
The second fact
revealed to us is that it is a damn shame Mako Iwamatsu had to die.
The original voice for Aku was an absolute joy to listen to. He could
go back and forth between being funny to menacing to acidic to
downright obnoxious and make it feel organic.
To his credit, Greg
Baldwin does a decent job capturing Iwamatsu's speech patterns and
tones. Yeah, a freaking Baldwin is voice-acting in Samurai Jack and
it's a Baldwin that hasn't completely shat the bed and lost their
damn mind to boot.
But at the same
time... it's noticeable. Not a dealbreaker but noticeable.
Which brings us to
the lion's share of the episode: Jack's introduction to the seven
assassins sent to kill him trained by the Daughters of Aku.
I'm not gonna lie...
it's pretty brutal.
Within an
astonishingly short amount of time, Jack is basically left running
for his life. All of the weapons he was seen wielding in the first
episode are either stolen or destroyed, his armor gets torn to
shreds, and his firearms are fully depleted of ammo. So he runs and
hides, genuinely afraid of just how skilled these new enemies truly
are.
And here we are
brought to the entire thematic focus on this episode: Jack's
deteriorating sense of self and self-worth in light of an enemy that
is his equal. This is epitomized in a sequence where Jack argues with
himself, imagined as his more ideal self. Clean-shaven, in his Gi,
but completely maddened by the multitude of his failures. Jack of
course tries to re-center himself by saying he's been in this
situation before on multiple occasions, and that whatever this new
enemy is, they are just machines. Simply programmed and unable to
adapt like he can.
Usually whenever a
hero speaks with himself, it feels like a clumsy way to express their
emotional state since body language can't be expressed. But here it
makes sense since he is under great duress and it helps give Jack
more character beyond his more stoic nature from before.
But the key element
of the scene is that Jack...sincerely believes in a part of his mind
that he has completely lost and his very honor has been besmirched.
His sword is gone, these enemies are out of his league, and even if
he escapes, it'll just be more torture of what will be an eternity of
wandering aimlessly looking for false hope. He even entertains the
idea of hara-kiri, to join his ancestors. But then, Jack spots a
temple and takes advantage of an impending thunderstorm to run to a
larger more advantageous area, silencing this part of himself
resigned to failure.
Right here is why I
need to give Genndy Tartokovsky more credit as a creator. This could
have easily been a recurring motif, the idea of the hero slowly
giving up. Imagine if this ghost version of Jack just kept showing up
in almost every single scene. It would get old really fast and it
would undermine just how much the character has already gone through
in the show and in the fifty years worth of adventures we haven't
seen as viewers. But here it is used just enough at a moment of
weakness, then quickly thrown away.
And from here, the
entire second half of the episode is Jack fighting off the assassins
inside the temple, through hiding, attacks of opportunity, and a lot
of thinking on his feet. No dialogue, no sound effects, not even any
of the stylistic black bars Tartokovsky likes to use to focus the
viewer on something of importance. Just a slow building suspenseful
orchestral swell coinciding with our hero's rising panic.
Of course the way
I'm writing this makes it almost sound like our hero has become a
total wuss somehow, and I am here to say that is absolutely not the
case. These assassins are professionals and they are truly
frightening. As a unit they watch eachothers' backs. They don't
conveniently wander off. They don't make mistakes. Their weapons of
choice are all designed to counteract battle with a katana. The blade
catching sais, the range and the stance-breaking of a kusari-gama,
the weight and force of a spiked club, the reach of a spear, the list
goes on. But of course the most disturbing of all is that we as an
audience know that they aren't machines, and the ruthless efficiency
to which they improvise and laterally think makes this abundantly
clear.
But of course after
a beautifully animated extended chase and fight sequence it ends with
Jack killing one of the assassins and getting mortally wounded in the
process. But not before seeing to his horror that for the first time
ever he had taken another human being's life. The episode concludes
with him using the sonic weapon he had picked up from Scaramoush in
the first episode to collapse the temple and limp out to the exit, a
dagger still in his gut.
Yeah, that's how
episode 2 ends. Jack getting the absolute shit kicked out of him by
our new enemies, considering ritual suicide for possibly failing his
mission to save the world, spending an entire night trying not to die
by seven highly trained assassins out to kill him, and it ending with
him escaping while bleeding to death.
I mentioned before
how this show seems to be going out of its way to sidestep the
pitfalls of darker nostalgia revivals, and this episode is another
example of Tartokovsky understanding basic motivations and character
informing decisions rather than basic juvenile pandering or shock.
Imagine if this new season opened with Jack as a gun toting warrior that killed these
assassins and felt nothing because he Just Didn't Care Anymore. That
would be far too incongruous with a character that, while basic in
terms of personality, had a concrete and defined moral center.
It'd be like going
from ANY version of Batman to Frank Miller's All-Star Batman and
Robin. For those who don't know, that was a hated version of the
character that psychologically tortured kids, killed people, actively
screwed over the Justice League because he hates them for some
reason, and was basically seen as a maniac in the mask. The most
egregious example of this is a scene where he blows up a warehouse
full of people than has sex with Black Canary. Outside the building.
While the bodies were still burning.
Instead, they treat
the serious moments with enough emotional weight, then move on.
And in that spirit,
let's move on to the episode that broadcast just a few hours ago.
Episode 3 picks up
immediately after this brutal encounter with Jack floating down
river. He continuously slips in and out of consciousness since he has
a large bleeding untreated stab wound, and he is still in a panicked
state.
After this
atmospheric sequence we have Jack finding refuge in a cave where he
slowly nurses himself back to health and tries to plan ahead for what
will happen next. Since his pursuers are actual thinking human beings
they will not let up the same way a machine will. And we see this
pain up close as he uses improvised stitches, healing herbs, and
shivering in the harsh cold once what little firewood he has has been
used up.
Now there is one
misstep in this entire large stretch of episode: Jack's hallucination
returns to deride him for killing a human being in the last episode.
On the one hand, this is still a manifestation of Jack's ideals made
feral and hostile in light of what our hero has become. But visually
he becomes more exaggerated and he is even given sharp teeth and
it...outstays its welcome despite being around for like ten seconds.
It is also rendered
moot by a scene of growth and a re-affirmation of Jack's morality in
a flashback sequence to his childhood. It shows that despite his
father banishing a warrior of ultimate evil from the world using a
magic sword forged by Odin, Ra, and Vishnu using the solidified
essence of his righteousness and good heart (no, really), there were
still bandits and highwaymen trying to kill him. It shows his father
trying to be diplomatic and peaceful before killing them, and Jack
witnesses the whole thing. All while staying silent of course, there
are some traditions you have to keep. It concludes with his father
basically telling him that your actions alone aren't what defines
you, but how and why you do them.
The episode's second
half is then shown through the assassins' point of view as they track
Jack. Eventually they find the cave and signs that he has moved to a
snowy forest and start to move in, but are oddly startled by the
wildlife interacting nearby. Apparently when you are raised from
birth in a dark cave and are only taught pain and suffering you tend
to get weirded out that things like birds and deer exist.
But Jack then
reaches out an olive branch and tells them to stop, speaking from a
hidden location. As a matter of fact in brilliant bit of bookending,
he echoes the same diplomatic words his father used in the flashback.
The assassins of course tell him no, and then the second battle
begins with Jack using the environment to his advantage and some
improvised throwing spears, all while a white out blizzard kicks up.
Once again, absolute
highlight of the episode. The assassins are off balance by the
natural environment and the alien behavior of the animals, Jack keeps
taking advantage of the low visibility and the range of his throwing
spears. And he actually takes down more of the assassins with
definitive killing blows, and they do not linger on it. He tried to
be nice, he didn't want to kill them, but he had to defend himself.
There's an old adage
when it comes to narrative that I'm fond of, “heroes are reactive,
villains are proactive.” A villain wants to get stuff done and goes
right to the most lateral method possible like killing the hero or
nuking a place. The hero reacts to this, and it is in this reaction
that his true character is revealed.
This is why Jack
killing these assassins sat well with me when any other way would
have made me sick. It also puts to bed the idea that Jack has to
continuously sacrifice his ideals in order to survive in his
increasingly harsh environment, which means Ghost Jack might not be
as pronounced of a presence further down the road.
The episode ends
with Jack and the remaining assassins falling off a cliff and into an
unknown location with next week's teaser showing Jack trying to
navigate it.
Once again, smart
storytelling by Tartokovsky. If the entire season was Jack dealing
with these unstoppable ninja warriors it would get one note and
boring very fast. But now they are either out of the picture
completely, though I doubt it, or if they returned it will be in a
different context in capacity. Less death troopers and more fish out
of water with an honor-bound mission to uphold with death being the
failure state. A dark parallel to Jack himself when the series first
started. Coincidence? I think not!
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