We have an announcement for a new Assassin’s Creed! That’s something positive, at least.
There is a possibility that I won’t have Netflix in the coming months, so I’m trying to finish at least the first season of Community. But I did finish Samurai Jack, and that’s what we’re going to talk about here today!
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Samurai Jack: The Final Season
There be some spoilers here, ahoy!
Let’s start with: I thought that the final season of Samurai Jack is great. It ties up the story in a way that satisfactory, it contains a lot of great action sequences, and is a strong conclusion to a story from over a decade ago. The fact that we got a final season that finished the show at all is almost miraculous, because I didn’t expect it to happen ever.
It’s good. It’s satisfying. Buuuuuut---
In many ways the final season doesn’t feel like Samurai Jack. I get that by necessity, it can’t; one of the things that was signature to Samurai Jack was that it was almost entirely standalone episodes that didn’t relate to each other, with very little need of continuity. A conclusion to the story, by its very nature, would feel an aberration, because it would need continuity. No matter how it came about, it would need to take all these bits and pieces and put them together in the finale to be something that the fans would love. I suppose you could do a Samurai Jack finale without referencing the Guardian, or the Scotsman, or the three gods who made the sword, but I think it would feel a bit empty.
So fine, the Samurai Jack finale was never going to feel like the rest of the series. Let’s accept that. But the final season has a few elements that don’t feel like Samurai Jack, most notably the reliance on dialogue throughout. I suspect much of that has to do with the fact that the final season is only ten episodes long, and it is more convenient to deliver that information by having the characters say things rather than just showing it to you. But I don’t think it had to be. We didn’t need to have all of the dialogue during the training of the Daughters of Aku; there is quite a lot that would have been picked up from scenes with much less dialogue. Jack’s internal struggle is displayed with him arguing with voices in his head, alternate personas that manifest to tell us what he thinks. But it doesn’t need to do that either, at least not to the same extent; the show very easily could convey his despair, loneliness and conflict through other means.
It doesn’t help that one of the big conflicts of the first few episodes rings hollow to me. In the first battle with the Daughters of Aku, Jack tells himself “They’re just nuts and bolts,” and becomes horrified when he kills one of them and discovers that she’s a human woman. In his conversation with himself afterward, he says that he’s never killed a human being before.
Even if we assume that in the fifty years he’s been wandering as an ageless samurai, he’s never killed a human being before (which okay, he’s a bit of a badass, so let’s give that one to him), what bothers me more is that it apparently never even occurs to him that Aku might send minions or bounty hunters that aren’t robots. Which is bulshimflarkus. He knows this isn’t true. He’s fought plenty of opponents that were flesh and blood before this point. And even if that weren’t the case, many of the robots we have seen have been intelligent, rational beings that seemingly have their own personalities. This angle, this whole, “Now he has to kill for the first time to survive” thing doesn’t feel right at all.
Compounding that, the final season seemingly contributes a lot of elements only to drop them unceremoniously. In the episode that brings him back halfway through the season, the Scotsman declares “We have to find Jack,” only for this to not be an ongoing subplot; he appears in the final battle, and he’s AWESOME, but despite teasing that he and his would be searching for Jack throughout the season, this doesn’t happen. Likewise, Scaramouche’s attempts to go inform Aku that Jack has lost his sword feel wasted, because by the time he does it, Jack has already reclaimed his sword.
[This last one is a bit more forgivable, because Aku going after Jack when he learns this does go somewhere, just not where it said it was going.]
Finally, there’s the Guardian, a plot point set up in the original series. Jack comes upon a time portal protected by a mysterious Guardian, who won’t let him through because he’s not the one destined to use it. We, the audience, find out that he is, but he isn’t yet; that at some point in the far future, Jack will be ready to go back to the past. This is dropped like a hot potato, where Jack comes upon the place where the portal used to be, and finds the Guardians glasses, implying that he’s dead.
And yeah, of course the show has to address why this thing didn’t happen, but… why didn’t this thing happen? Why bring it up at all in the original series if it wasn’t going to go anywhere? It just feels wasteful.
I suspect that a large part of why these problems occurred were because the final season was rushed. They were only given ten episodes, instead of the usual thirteen, and I suspect that if this story had been spread out over a couple of seasons it would have felt, if not more organic, then more Samurai Jack.
Like I said at the essay’s opening, I still think it’s a very good finale. We got a finale to Samurai Jack in 2017, and if you’d asked me a year before if I ever thought that was going to happen, I’d tell you ‘no.’ But we did, and I’m thankful for it. I found myself cheering during the final battle, and that’s not something I usually do when I’m watching cartoons by myself these days. It’s certainly worth watching if you’re a fan of the series, though I can’t help but think it could have been something more.
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