5x10 CI

[9.6/10] Jack’s destiny has been clear for a long time now. However long it takes him, only the most cynical viewers would expect anything other than Jack returning to the past and defeating Aku. That gives fans hope during five seasons’ worth of necessarily fruitless attempts to do just that, but it also makes the endgame a known quantity. How can you take an almost mandated conclusion and make it interesting, meaningful, and unexpected?

Give it a cost.

I don’t mind telling you that I teared up at Jack and Ashi’s wedding. I cheered when the cavalry, made up of so many people Jack helped, arrived. I rejoiced when Jack’s love gave Ashi the strength to resist her father’s dark envelopment. And I lamented Ashi’s death on the walk down the aisle.

That is the bitter irony of Samurai Jack’s finale. Jack’s victory -- his ability to finally return to the past and right what went wrong and fulfill his hard-fought quest -- owes to Ashi, but the very act of his triumph negate her existence. His act and profession of love is what permits Ashi to break free and use her powers to undo her father’s evil, but ultimately takes her away from him, the source of his love snuffed out before it can be bonded for eternity.

Jack wins. He saves the past, present, and future. But he also loses the person who made his victory possible, in more ways than one, and the person whose love changed him as it changed her. That makes this final hour a melancholy one, where the sweetness of success after such a harrowing journey is metered with the bitterness of loss and pain on the cusp of profound joy.

But there is still some profound joy in this finale! There is undoubtedly a fair bit of fanservice at play here. I don’t mind it one bit, though. After more than sixty episodes of very restrained nods to continuity (give or take a bit of indulgence at the halfway mark of season 5), it is rousing and earned to see the Woolies, the Archers, the Sparatans, the Seafolks, the Ravers, the Jumpers, the robots piloting a mecha and, of course, the Scotsman’s family, coming together to rescue the hero who’d rescued them.

There’s also a nice bit of comedy to it. This show always balanced its grand, spiritual mythos with some throwback loopy humor, melding the two together within an episode or even a scene. This is no different, as the Scotsman lists off his various daughters as potential dates for Jack, and responds to Jack’s gesture toward the inky monster as his betrothed with a pithy, “she’s not your type.”

The battle is appropriately epic. The in-universe shout out to the original intro creates both excitement and apprehension. The mash of Jack’s colorful allies with Aku’s malevolent minions makes for an appropriately massive skirmish full of arrows, spikes, swords, and cheers. And Jack’s efforts to retrieve his sword and, more importantly, encourage Ashi to fight through Aku’s influence, has the tension and stakes of both the personal and the world-changing.

That’s what makes the finish so clever and so devastating. This is another power of love story, where Jack’s feelings for Ashi help her to push away this representation of abuse and inherited darkness. But it’s also a story where Ashi is able to use that unwanted inheritance for good, to brandish Aku’s powers against him, and to solve the problem of the lack of time portals by creating one to the past as her father created one to the future.

What follows harkens back to the series’s opening chapter. While Jack has been fighting for half a century, from the perspective of the present, he has been gone for only a moment. In that blink, he wields his magic sword, slices his foe to pieces, and with his last act and pronouncement, banishes Aku and his evil from this realm.

The visual of the sword breaking through Aku’s malleable, memorable face signifies the end of this journey. It satisfyingly pays off the promise the series made so often in that introductory proclamation. He goes back to the past. He fulfill his destiny. He returns to the mother and father he never forgot, honoring them with both the deeds he performed and the man he’s become.

He returns with a partner, one who’s more than a friend, forged in the evil he fought so long to defeat, but renewed, as he was, by what is possible even in a world shrouded in darkness. That’s why it is so sad when Ashi departs this world as her father did, the necessary, tragically ironic consequence of her reformation and assistance in the felling of this great malevolence.

And yet, this episode did not leave me with sadness. Ashi’s role in this final season was one of hope. Jack professes to have lost that state of being in the new opening mantra, having been convinced that there is no defeating Aku, no changing the world, no reversing the evil that has swept across this land for so many centuries.

Ashi was living proof that his self-negating lament was not true. Change was possible. Those in whom evil has been bred can be swayed back toward the light. More than her prowess in battle, Ashi’s transformation from an abused, hateful warrior to a compassionate champion and loving partner, restored Jack. She helped return him to the man he was, a man who believed that better days and better things could still come.

The final moments of Samurai Jack are appropriately hopeful. Jack’s loss is unfathomable, his love ripped away from him moments before their union is affirmed. But as he sits under the arbor of his homeland once more, a ladybug rests on his hand, the same natural symbol that mercy and kindness are possible in this world which helped persuade Ashi that the future need not be so bleak or blood-stained. With a simple look, he tells us that she is still with him in spirit, the gorgeous hues of sunlight bathing our hero, the warrior of the ages, who knows that even the deepest losses and harshest abuses can give way to brighter days ahead.

There may be no television series more epic than Samurai Jack. Through sixty episode’s worth of brilliant fights, colorful characters, and thrilling adventures, the show always kept its endgame in focus. But it also kept Jack’s soul at the forefront of those adventures, reminding the audience that he was not just a brave fighter, but a man of grace, dignity, and compassion. When I think of this show, I will think of the stunning art direction, its unassumingly goofy comic chops, and its mythic quest to set things right.

But I will also remember the man who struggled with his own demons and still strove to keep up the fight, who sacrificed his own chances for glory to save the innocent, who inspired not only admiration but friendship with all kind souls who crossed his path, who persevered despite setback after setback after setback because he knew in his heart his cause was just. I will remember that man, and I will remember that enduring, unquenchable hope.