For the last few months, I’ve been re-watching the original four seasons of Samurai Jack, and finally got to watch the new fifth season, which I finished today. It’s quite an exciting moment for me, actually. I’m not sure I realized how much I wanted a conclusion to the series until I got down to those final five episodes . . . I’m not going to touch too heavily on the older seasons; I mostly want to focus on the final one.

Spoilers follow for Samurai Jack.

seasons one through four
Samurai Jack really is unique among media. Saying that it’s a cartoon really doesn’t do justice to the series or its creators. While a lot of the episodes of the early seasons did tend toward the more cartoonishly silly, a lot of them are significantly more serious in tone. SJ is an example of a series in visual medium that really couldn’t exist in any other; it relies too much, and makes too good use of, presenting image to the audience. Color, lighting and motion combine with the musical score and the voice acting to create a unique emotional experience for the viewer, and I don’t think any other existing tv show has tried so hard to do so. (I shudder to attempt a PPC mission in this continuum; I don't think I could do the mood justice at all.)

season five
This season was quite a trip. In retrospect, I think I wish the entire series had been done in serial style like this, even though it might have lost us some good episodes. After the decade-plus of wait, it was really nice to have a streamlined plot arc to follow on through this season.

Knowing that this season had been made for Adult Swim (cartoon network’s NSFW nighttime programming for not-children), I was a little worried that the tone would be too far-removed from what I remembered in my teen years. This fear was quickly allayed by the introduction of Scaramouche, a robot assassin with a silly voice that can telepathically move objects through music. He was just the sort of nonsensical one-off robot bad guy we tended to see in the original run, and it was comforting to know the show wasn’t going for grimdark.

I loved all the more direct call-backs to characters and locations from the original run, too. I especially love that so many of the people Jack had rescued over the years arrived in the final episode to rescue him, too. It really underlined for me the real conflict of the setting: not Jack vs. Aku, but hope vs. Aku. With Aku ruling over Earth for so many centuries, nearly everyone other than Jack had grown up in a world polluted by his power, that acceptance of his rule became one of his primary support structures. The turning of the tide of opinion against Aku thanks to Jack’s work was something that got touched on occasionally in the original seasons, but is very strong in season five.

Aku’s voice . . . I feel like I’m being unfair, but I can’t help how I feel. The original voice actor, Mako, passed away in between seasons four and five. The VA they got to replace Mako . . . does a really good job, considering what a unique performance it was, but it’s just not quite there. The new voice certainly has the gravelly register of the original, but not the range of cadence. Aku sounds more bored and depressed all the time—and granted, he spends a lot of this scene in such a mood, but there are more triumphant moments for Aku when his voice needed to be higher pitched, and it just can’t get there. I know it’s unavoidable, but it’s still disappointing.

It was interesting and surprising to see the depths to which the writers were willing to send Jack’s character. He had nearly always been so stoic during the show. Seeing his angry personality manifesting as a hallucination, and the literal specter of his failure to fulfill his goal, really drove home a sense of how the years with no time portal and no sword have worn away at his patience and hope.

I recognize the role that Ashi played in the plot of this season, but I’m not a fan of the romance that developed between her and Jack. As an asexual person, one of my favorite things about the show all these years was the complete lack of romantic plot in it. I just didn’t get any benefit from that aspect of season five, and it especially felt like it slowed down the third quarter of the season. It almost made for a rather pointless slap in the face at the very end, when Ashi fades from existence as a result of Aku’s past destruction during her marriage to Jack. It gets a little confusing, because if Ashi had never existed, Jack could never have gone back to change history in the first place, so it feels like she needed to continue existing? Maybe that’s the reason for the delay?

That also leads into the next weirdness: the realization that all those friends who rallied to Jack’s aid in the final episode, now have never met him at all. I wonder if Jack’s memories of being in the future will fade just like Ashi did? Even so, I think Jack would content in knowing that he made the world a better place for all those lives, even if they’ll never actually know him or what he did.

—doctorlit, scratching a nostalgia itch

“You need to bring your best if you’re going to beat the samurai. And the best parts of you . . . are spoilers!” “You need to bring your best if you’re going to beat the samurai. And the best parts of you . . . are spoilers!” “You need to bring your best if you’re going to beat the samurai. And the best parts of you . . . are spoilers!”