Phil LaMarr is happy about how Samurai Jack will end.
LaMarr, the voice actor of the Jack, prefaced his Reddit Ask Me Anything Saturday night with “no spoilers.” When asked about the show’s upcoming climax, though, LaMarr said, “You can never satisfy everyone but I, for one, felt resolved.”
For now, fans of Samurai Jack will have to continue to anticipate each new episode on Saturday nights.
The third episode picks up directly after the end of the second. Jack, having just killed one of the Daughters of Aku, floats down a river, severely wounded and unconscious. The fantastic scene is silent, save for the rushing of the river. Jack is eventually awoken when he falls off a waterfall. He continues to float, too weak to do anything else.
An innocent frog hops onto the log Jack is clinging to. The frog shouts, “They’re coming!” Jack tries to start paddling but, exhausted, passes back out.
He awakens at night and, in a nightmarish sequence, lumbers into a cave. In the cave, Jack is again confronted by a bright blue apparition of his past self. The apparition is less human than last episode — perhaps Jack’s sanity is slipping even further — and questions his ability to defeat the Daughters of Aku when they inevitably find him again.
Morning comes. Still in the cave, a blood-coated Jack encounters a similarly-wounded wolf. The wolf first appeared last episode and is now a pretty clear metaphorical parallel of Jack: a warrior, fighting against the odds, dreadfully wounded. After realizing the wolf does not intend to harm him, he passes back out.
Jack dreams of his childhood with his mother and father in feudal Japan. While riding in a carriage, the three are attacked by would-be assassins. The emperor steps out to confront them, and he offers them an ultimatum: “Your choices have clearly led you here. I will give you a new choice. Leave now and live, or stay and face your destiny.” When they refuse, the emperor quickly kills them easily. Young Jack, watching the fight through a crack in the carriage, has blood splattered on his face.
Jack wakes up, gasping for breath, and stitches up his wound. The wolf returns and the two slowly form a silent bond. They share food, soothe each other’s wounds and snuggle at night to stay warm. Eventually, the two are both healed and, after a long, silent look, go their separate ways.
Jack thinks back to his past again. His father wipes the blood off his face and tells him, “The decisions you make and the actions that follow are a reflection of who you are. You cannot hide from yourself.”
After the commercial break, the six surviving Daughters of Aku show no remorse for their fallen sister, saying “death is failure.” They then resume their pursuit of Jack.
The Daughters, although human, move in a more mechanical way than most of Aku’s robot subordinates. They track Jack efficiently but are baffled by the buck and doe they encounter, mistaking the buck’s antlers as a sign of being a minion of Aku.
Eventually, the Daughters reach a clearing. A thick snow begins to fall, and Jack’s voice booms out, offering a similar ultimatum to the one his father gave a lifetime ago: “You have chosen this path. Life works in strange ways. Your choices have clearly led you here, as have mine. I will give you a new choice: leave here now and live, or stay and face your destiny.”
The Daughters refuse to leave, claiming their destiny is to kill Jack. He repeats what his father once told him: “The decisions you make and the actions that follow are a reflection of who you are.”
A furious fight begins. Jack quickly kills two Daughters and battles the remaining four. Jack is suddenly far more proficient than the Daughters and tears through them. He lures them to a cliff and, one-by-one, sends them careening off the cliff into a bottomless pit. Even to her last breath, the final Daughter berates Jack, claiming Aku will destroy him — until Jack releases her, letting presumably her plunge to her death.
Then the tree branch Jack is standing on snaps and he, too, falls into the abyss.
Takeaways
Another cliffhanger of an ending leaves me itching for more. Obviously, Jack’s not dead. He’s not going to die three episodes into the new season, and a cliff is not going to be what vanquishes him. However, that muddies whether the Daughters of Aku are dead, too.
No Aku in this episode, and no trace of the fantastic Scotsman either. Bringing back those classic characters is a must.
The demon who is haunting Jack, riding a horse and cloaked in green smoke, is a big question mark. Is it just another minion of Aku, or is it something darker? Perhaps it’s an embodiment of death. After all, death has been chasing Jack for 50 years.
The real question is: where is Jack’s remorse? He was so horrified when he killed his first human, but, in this episode, he killed six more without a second thought. Did remembering his father’s advice and the Bushido code really shake the trauma he was suffering from?
Either way, the episode was fantastic. But it isn’t quite as good as the past two, which were each phenomenal in their own ways.
Rating: 4/5
Samurai Jack airs every Saturday at 11 p.m. on Cartoon Network
