A double-edged season.
After years of waiting, Samurai Jack finally got the ending that many thought would never come. Now that the story has concluded, let's look back at how the final season pulled off such a strong finish despite a some pacing issues towards the end.
Warning: full spoilers ahead!
Moving to Adult Swim gave Genndy Tartakovsky and his gifted team the license to take Samurai Jack in a more mature direction, and aging up the content to better align with the tastes of its now-adult audience proved to be a master stroke. Adult themes were explored in a way that broke new ground for the show. Jack took his first human life in the season’s biggest gut-punch moment, making him confront the morality of killing in battle. Instead of hacking away at lifeless robots, Jack now spilt the blood of his enemies and suffered nasty, grievous injuries himself. Wandering the land, immortal and unable to defeat Aku, Jack suffered intense PTSD that haunted him in the form of his younger self given a demonic makeover. And the introduction of Ashi gave Jack his first true romance, and for as complicated as it was with her being the daughter-assassin of Aku, their love became the crux of the show’s emotionally devastating finale.
Yet despite all this heavy material, Samurai Jack never lost its sense of humor. With such a stoic samurai at the show’s center, the world around him made for a nice counter-balance with its quirky characters and strange creatures. The Sammy Davis Jr.-inspired Scaramouche proved to be a twisted delight with his deadly sonic blade and zany antics. He also earned the season’s biggest guffaw with his that’s-what-we-were-thinking penis joke. Jack and Ashi’s, ahem, courtship episode also earned some hearty laughs all the way up to its explosive, sticky conclusion. It truly speaks to the appeal of Samurai Jack that it can create an epic story of Good vs. Evil and deliver sick action scenes while still making you bust a gut.
The voice actors brought their A-game to Season 5, with Phil LaMarr doing a lot with his sparse dialogue (most notably the scenes where Jack argues with himself) and Tara Strong giving Ashi both fierce intensity and warm humanity. The passing of the legendary Mako Iwamatsu left an Aku-sized hole in our hearts, and while Greg Baldwin’s take on the character was a bit jarring at first, he really came into his own by the time the finale came around.
The level of artistry and craft on display throughout this final season was beyond imagination. Tartakovsky and his animation team improved on what was already a stellar formula, making every single frame a work of art worth hanging in a gallery. The mastery of tone, composition, and design in every shot was through the roof. Sound has always been its own character in this show and here it continued to work in perfect tandem with the visuals, from the soft sounds of nature to the clashing clangs of battle. While the execution of the story wasn’t always perfect in this season, the presentation never faltered.
With several big questions swirling about in the early episodes -- what happened to Jack’s sword, who is the Green Warrior, how will Jack defeat Aku’s daughters, is Jack going insane, how will Jack defeat Aku -- it left a heavy burden on the later episodes to give satisfying answers. While the answers themselves made enough sense, their delivery left much to be desired. The early episodes were absolutely phenomenal with their determined pacing and high-stakes action, but all of that slow build-up seemed to cost the show time, resulting in rushed answers to the big questions later on, especially when it came to the reveals of the Green Warrior and how Jack lost his sword. There just wasn’t a strong sense of pay-off for things we had been wondering about all season long.
Speaking of pay-off, Samurai Jack is a story about Jack vs. Aku, and that proved to be another problem area for the season. The two arch-enemies shared precious little screen time, and when they were together, they barely played off one another. In the original run of the show, their encounters made for some of the most exciting moments, but none of that was found here, even in their final battle. Aku spent most of the season depressed off-screen, rather than being his scheming, sadistic self.
That said, we have four full seasons building up their rivalry, so it’s hard to complain too much that instead we got a more grounded, nuanced series of episodes that tested Jack like never before and produced a stunning new character in Ashi. If the series’ ending was going to work, then we had to care about Ashi and want Jack’s relationship with her to work out, so it made sense to invest as much time as possible into developing her character.
And what a journey was Ashi’s. Raised from birth in a hellish environment with the one goal of murdering Jack, tortured by her mother and pitted against her sisters, and kept away from the beauties of life, well, she looked poised to become Jack’s next great nemesis. And for a time, she was, in the brutal forest battle and in the chilling temple chase sequence, yet after Jack defeated her and spared her life, it sparked a change within her.
At first she kicked and screamed, doing whatever she could do kill Jack, even if it cost her own life. But then little by little, Jack and a world of people influenced by his kindness chipped away at her rage until she came to appreciate the environment, community and beauty. The Coachella-esque concert performance was wholly unexpected yet made for a rousing and inspirational scene, leading us to her omg-that-black-stuff-was-on-her-skin rebirth, complete with a new revealing Peter Pan outfit and a refreshing zest for life. Seeing her go from a child who was scorned for stopping to observe nature to someone fully embracing hope, all in defiance of Aku, was such a stirring character arc that it outshone Jack’s at times.
Side note: filled with a new sense of compassion, it would have been nice for Ashi to have taken a moment to mourn her fallen sisters and explore the complicated feelings of partnering up with the man who killed them.
It’s to Tartakovsky’s credit that he focused so intimately on Jack and Ashi and resisted the impulse of taking the Greatest Hits approach and building to a predictable all-out battle on Aku. Instead, he worked in a few cameos and callbacks to the original show without letting the desire for nostalgia overpower the main narrative. Going into this season, everyone was chomping at the bit to see the Guardian again and watch King Jack lead an army like we glimpsed in his time portal, but it was not to be. It’s hard to be too mad at this, as the story of Jack out on his own, bearded and wearing mismatched armor from defeated foes, was incredibly personal and intense. Plus, seeing the Guardian’s red glasses on the ground only made me hate Aku more because it implied that Aku killed him, destroyed the time portal, and wiped out that possible future.
Ultimately, how the ending played out was going to decide if this final season could stick the landing. We didn’t wait 16 years not to be thrilled, shocked, and impressed, after all. The twist that Ashi was not only Aku’s real daughter but could be controlled by him wasn’t something I saw coming, nor was the revelation that she could use her father’s powers to create time portals, giving Jack his ticket back home. A few beats to get to that point were predictable, like Jack freeing Ashi through the power of love, but the final episode did right by fans. It showed Jack’s friends risking their lives to save him, gave Jack a fun reunion with the Scotsman, and took Jack back to that fateful moment in the first episode so he could finally put a definitive end to Aku, giving us that gratifying, slow-motion death blow. Of course, with the way time travel works, Ashi could never exist if Aku was killed in the past, leaving a heartbroken Jack. He finally defeated Aku and stopped his long reign of evil from ever happening, but in the process it cost him his one true love.
Now, we’ve all spent years honing our own vision about how the series should end, so it’s easy to start complaining about how the story decided not to use one of the numerous, seemingly “better” ending options. (Seriously, you should have seen the first draft of this season review!) But ultimately, Tartakovsky created a personal, dramatic, and bittersweet ending that just wouldn’t have been possible had Jack not found something worth losing on his journey. The best stories aren’t a happy ending but ones that end with a sense of irony, a great cost paid to earn victory. And while I agree that Ashi was misused at times, like when she became more of a tool to manipulate our emotions than a three-dimensional person (I’m looking at you, wedding scene), ultimately she was a character that I cared about and became invested in as the season went on. Watching her embrace the hope that Jack gave the world and decide to change because of it, and seeing what she meant to Jack, forever the loner, was immensely moving.
This all brings us to the final scene where a victorious Jack isn’t celebrating with his family or enjoying a parade but riding in the forest alone, mourning the loss of Ashi (and assumedly the loss of all the also-now-erased friends he made in the future). Yet the arrival of a tiny, curious ladybug reminds him of his time with Ashi, and reminds us of how important ladybugs were to Ashi’s appreciation of life. Then there’s that smile on Jack’s face, and we know that despite his devastating loss, he can now move forward in a new world free of Aku, with the memory of his greatest love in his heart. More so than the violence, blood and darkness of Season 5, the bittersweet ending proved to be the true sign that Samurai Jack became a more mature and sophisticated show.
The Verdict
The final season of Samurai Jack embraced its license to be more mature to deliver an intense, bloody, and emotionally devastating send-off. The first half of the 10-episode season was brilliant in execution, breaking boundaries left and right and pushing Jack like never before, all while executing its animation and sound design in masterful fashion. Even though the latter half of the season experienced some pacing issues that didn’t pay off the big questions enough, the blossoming relationship between Jack and Ashi kept things focused and created true stakes heading into the series finale. And what a finale it was, with all of Jack’s friends showing up to help fight Aku and create an opportunity for Jack and Ashi to finally go back in time. That left us with a bittersweet conclusion that saw Jack save the world at the cost of his one true love, an imperfect but nevertheless effective turn of events, and put to an end one of the best shows ever to grace our screens.
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