Genndy Tartakovsky sat on the toilet in 2015, wondering what his next production would be. Then Tartakovsky, an animator, writer and director, thought of his most acclaimed cartoon, a show that he had never been able to bring closure to: Samurai Jack.
“I thought, ‘maybe it’s time to finish the Jack story,’” Tartakovsky said during a Q&A on Periscope.
Several phone calls and more than two years of production later, the fifth season of Samurai Jack went from a dream to reality. More than 12 years after the conclusion of its fourth season, the fifth season debuted on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim on Saturday night.
Back to the past
Samurai Jack debuted on Cartoon Network in 2001. The series originally concluded in 2004, but now the show has returned for a final season.
The cartoon tells the story of Jack, a stoic samurai warrior, and his nemesis Aku, a shapeshifting demon. In The Premiere Movie, a TV movie comprised of the series’ first three episodes, Jack nearly defeats Aku, but Aku opens a time portal and sends him into the future. Jack arrives in a dystopia in which Aku rules over a world filled with retro-futuristic cities and wastelands. Jack spends the remainder of the show defeating various forces of evil, but he remains unable to defeat Aku, who escapes near-defeat multiple times or return to his own time.
Every episode from the first four seasons of Samurai Jack opens with Aku’s narration of this story in his legendary booming voice.
But in the season premiere, gone is the iconic opening. The episode starts with a cold open of an alien mother, a baby in her arms and her child fleeing across an open field. They are quickly surrounded by giant beetle drones. All hope seems lost as the drones close in — then a motorcycle closes in from over the horizon. Wielding a machine gun in lieu of his trademark magic katana, Jack shreds through the beetles, saving the aliens.
That leads into what appears to be the new title sequence. “50 years have passed, but I do not age,” Jack, voiced by Phil LaMarr, says, his face silhouetted against a cosmic background. “Hope is lost,” he despairs, saying Aku’s evil will pollute the future as it has the past and present. He then utters the iconic lines from the original theme song, “Gotta get back, back to the past,” and the title appears.
Ageless wonder
As Jack says, he has not aged in 50 years. Thus, he is cursed to wander the world, searching for both Aku and a way home.
Time has not been good to Jack. His hair, once neatly slicked into a topknot, now flows wildly across his shoulders, and his face, previously clean-shaven, now bears a wild beard.
Multiple times throughout the episode, Jack has horrific visions of his parents and others who have suffered at Aku’s hands, plus a dark and mysterious figure on horseback. In one particularly traumatic hallucination, children surround Jack, pleading to help them. The visions terrify Jack, as he screams in fear and attempts to literally run from his dreams.
Aside from sinister visions, the rest of the episode cuts between two storylines. First, there’s the classic Jack-fighting-a-villain one — fairly standard for Samurai Jack.
In the first episode, we meet Scaramouche the Merciless, who describes himself as “Aku’s most favorite assassin.” Scaramouche is super flamboyant — he’s dressed in a purple overcoat, orange scarf and red high heels, he says “babe” after nearly every sentence and his voice sounds like someone doing a rather bad Austin Powers impression. Basically, he’s awesome.
Scaramouche tells Jack to draw his sword — only to realize Jack doesn’t have it. The scene flashes back to Jack’s sword skittering off a cliff into a seemingly endless pit.
Jack is still able to defeat Scaramouche, destroying him with one deft stroke from his own sword. Magic sword or not, Jack remains the incredible warrior he was in the first four seasons.
The other storyline of the episode introduces the Daughters of Aku, a group of female ninja warriors.
While they don’t seem to be his children, the Daughters of Aku are still imposing. The seven girls grow quickly into adult killers via a classic training montage.
The episode ends with the completion of the Daughters’ training, as they are told to go fulfill the “one purpose for which (they) were born — to kill the Samurai.”
Takeaways
The premiere did exactly what it should have. It’s apparent from the get-go that Jack is still a warrior with incredible skill, but it’s also clear that he is not the same Jack we left in the fourth season. It also introduced the Daughters of Aku, who look to be major antagonists this season.
It will be interesting to see how the Daughters of Aku are used in the season’s more cohesive story. Most previous villains were killed off in one episode, save for Aku.
Speaking of Aku — where was he? Except for perhaps the Scotsman, whose return was confirmed by Tartakovsky in a livestream before the show, Aku is the best character on Samurai Jack. His dark sense of humor and the sense of darkness that surround him are unmatchable, as is the voicework from the late, great Mako Iwamatsu, who passed away in 2006.
It should be interesting to see when Aku returns — perhaps the delay indicates a grand reveal — and how similar his voice, now performed by Greg Baldwin, sounds compared to before.
Regardless of the lack of Aku, the first episode contains everything that made Samurai Jack so great in the first place. The art and animation are both stunning and the fight scenes are tense and exciting. Plus, the sound design remains unparalleled — the contrasting of sound and silence creates an unmatchable atmosphere.
The premiere sets up for a great season that will hopefully conclude Jack’s story in a new way while also using nostalgia to take viewers “back, back to the past.”
Rating: 4.5/5
Samurai Jack airs every Saturday at 11 p.m. on Cartoon Network.
