Death Note (2017 Film) Review and Discussion

(will add pictures later, just thought i'd post it all once finished)

Full disclosure, before I begin: you need to see the 2017 film adaptation of Death Note. Not because it’s a cinematic masterpiece, not because it does anything intelligent with its source material, not even because it has Jesus Christ as the Shinigami (Death God), but because it’s an excellent example of how sometimes, in an adaptation, making changes to the source material for the sake of doing something different isn’t always a good idea. Also, you need to see the 2017 film adaptation of Death Note because it’s a museum-worthy trainwreck, in every sense of the word except literal. Although this film’s Light Yagami probably crashed more than a few trains, the lil’ edgy fuck.

Spoiler-Free Review: 

4/10, at best. An edgy, scowling, seemingly-intelligent Seattleite (SeattleLight?) student by the name of Light Turner, who has to deal with truly harrowing problems like doing other people’s homework for money and occasionally getting glared at by bullies, happens across a notebook – with the inscription “Death Note” plastered on the front – that fell from the sky into his school’s courtyard. The moment Light picks this notebook up, he’s immediately accosted by some cackling juggalo known as Ryuk, a Shinigami (Death God) and the apparent owner of that notebook. He tells Light how it works: write someone’s name down in the notebook, and they will die. After Light tests it out on some random white trash bully with immediate, successful, gory results, he immediately falls back into delusions of grandeur and teams up with some emo backseater bitch named Mia Sutton to begin murdering criminals (as well as some other chucklefucks they don’t like, including an entire nightclub and… collapsing a cathedral???) under the guise of “Kira”, which naturally attracts the attention of the police, including a notorious, secretive detective named L. Secretive in that he will cover (half of) his face with a mask and not reveal his full name, but apparently not secretive enough to pass up the opportunity to show himself on live television. He’s a genius, trust us. Light now basically has to juggle killing… criminals I guess, the unorthodox L’s constant prying, and staying under the radar from his milquetoast police officer dad named Soichi—er, I mean, James Turner. A lot of shit happens from thence.

Film has decent direction and cinematography at best, bad sound mixing, and a ghastly soundtrack featuring 80’s staples like Air Supply and Chicago, because American-based 80’s synthpop ballads are absolutely befitting of an Asian-produced crime thriller drama involving secretive mass murderers, garish-looking gods of death, and edgy, teenaged Hot Topic mugwumps without a speck of neon to be found in their clothing (the score fares better though; it’s not half-bad at all). Predominantly unlikable cast, either perversions or distillations of previously well-developed and well-used characters. Film veers wildly from mildly interesting to hilariously awful to chaotic at a breakneck pace, and somehow manages to throw in an irrelevant high school prom scene somewhere in the mix. Interesting, ambiguous ending does make the film go out on a better note than it began, but the inconsistent, largely-unimpressive first half leaves a lot to be desired. No Matsuda. 4/10.

this isn't a worrisome shot at all

Spoileriffic Review (for the show/anime and for the movie; the show will be referred to as DN, the movie as Death Note):

4/10. Basically, this movie is fucking whack, and anybody who says otherwise is either lying to themselves or being ironic. This movie sucks dick for a whole lot of reasons, but perhaps most jarring and unintentionally-intriguing is how very much alike it is to DN’s controversial, divisive last ten or twelve episodes, the ones with Mello and Near and Light fucking dying because of Matsuda’s slippery fingers and a death notebook that was stored away in a bank or something. The general consensus is that these last episodes aren’t very good compared to the twenty-five episodes before it. But seriously, this film has all the exact same problems: one-dimensional characters, contrivances galore, either breakneck pacing or no pacing at all (never in-between), and a distinct lack of influence from L. You see, the reason L had no real influence in the last third of DN was because he was fucking dead; Light killed him once and for all. In the film? L never dies, he’s alive for all of its drain-circling 100 minutes. And yet, he somehow has even less effect and influence here breathing than he did as a corpse.

bruh

The reason DN worked was largely because of the incredible dynamics between Light and L, and the interesting amount of chemistry, tension, and stakes that could be drawn from just seeing the two trying to secretly outwit the other. It was a battle of wits between two very similar geniuses, and this was because their ideologies were almost completely dissimilar. Thus, it created a very interesting dynamic, especially in the scenes where the two got to interact one-on-one, where they subtly played mind games and actual, real-life tennis with one another. Another reason DN worked so well is because (at least in the first two-thirds of the show) both Light and L had legitimate, well-explained reasons for believing what they believed, and the show took pains to illustrate the pros and cons in both ideologies. An average viewer could be justified in liking either/or, because they both have incredibly thorough philosophies. Even if you personally didn’t agree with Light’s “ends justify the means” mentality, another person with different sociopolitical or personal beliefs could agree with him, and both of you would be justified in liking or disliking him. The same goes for L. It was a cool scenario, and it left fans on the edges of their seats wondering who would win. In this movie, Light and L have a grand total of two direct confrontations, and neither of them are particularly interesting or intense (L also reveals his face for no good reason, in a public café, where someone could snap a picture of him). One of these confrontations involves L holding a gun at Light and then getting knocked out by a Kira supporter, mind you.

Light Yagami was charming, deceptively good-looking, deeply perceptive, and subtle, careful to catch himself or cover his tracks (at first, anyway). He was a good fit for DN’s highly-intelligent universe. Light Turner is a malicious, snotty, entitled edgelord with a flat, inconsistent set of ideals and even flatter personality, with inconsistencies tenfold. Somehow we’re supposed to believe the kid that writes “decapitation” as his first kill is the same kid that hesitates to kill his daddy or any agents tracking Kira down. He’s a barely-human protagonist, given only the barest amount of personality traits and features to make us think he’s an actual human being with thoughts and ideas. And yet he still fares better than “Mia Sutton”, the film’s butchering of Misa Amane, who doesn’t even really have a legitimate reason for being a sociopathic, bloodthirsty bitch other than because Light needed a murderous love interest. She even winds up becoming a far more succinct murderer than Light, because apparently she’s the one that murdered the FBI Agents, and the one that murdered Watari (Watari fucking dies in this movie; I’ll get to that later), L’s caretaker and mentor. She has no drive, no rationale, no backstory; she’s just there to be a pair of tits, I guess. Mia’s a sadist that watches torture porn in her free time because yeah. She’s a fan of Light because he kills people and that gets her going, but we don’t ever really learn why.

the most of a motivation light ever gets, and it required a dead mother to even happen

The rest of the cast is pretty shoddily-written, too. The only vaguely interesting cast members are Ryuk and L, but even they have problems. Ryuk is pretty fun in this film from time to time, but he also gets a little bit too involved in this movie, which goes against his own policy of neutrality; he begins favoring Mia over Light, actively goads Light into his first murder instead of letting Light do it by himself, and shoots a laser beam or something at the support tower of a ferris wheel at the film’s climax because… some reason. L has the gift of a pretty decent actor, who has his gestures and general personality pretty down pat (a bit too twitchy and hot-blooded for my tastes, but I guess sugar does that to you), but this L’s backstory is fucked to hell and high water. All the lore about Wammy’s House, the Beyond Birthday case, the plot point that Watari is a genius and not just some guy that L trusts, is absolutely gone; instead we get some bullshit story about how L was actually part of a group of orphans and survived some kind of trial in a vault or something that proved his genius.

Also, Watari fucking dies. Apparently, Watari is his actual name here in the movie, and Light Turner utilizes a death note-controlled Watari to go and track down information about L’s real name. Interesting plot device, using Watari to snuff out L’s name. It almost was satisfying except for one little plot hole: Light only knows Watari’s first name, and in the brief shot that shows Light writing down his manipulative instructions for Watari in the notebook, only Watari’s first name is shown. Why did this work? In the show, you needed a full name and a matching face to murder someone. If that rule doesn’t apply here in the movie, then why didn’t Light just write down L’s name instead of going through all that trouble? This is an enormous problem, and it winds up serving absolutely no purpose except for giving L a motivation to angrily try and have Light killed, because we don’t even learn what L’s real name is in the movie anyway.

This isn’t the only plot hole in the movie. A brand new Death Note rule is introduced in the movie: burning a notebook page with a person's name on it will prevent his or her death, as long as it happens before the time of death. This can only be utilized once, and only once, though. Again, a very interesting addition! But the film handles it incredibly poorly. Light plans on burning Watari’s page after he reveals L’s name to him (which obviously fails because Watari fucking dies), but Mia reveals she couldn’t let Light burn Watari's page because she actually wrote down Light’s name and wants to burn his page so that she can get ownership of the note (Mia threatens to murder Light, something Misa Amane would never do). But if you're allowed one page-burning per owner, then Light would've been allowed to burn Watari’s page, and then Mia could have burnt Light's page when she became the owner of the notebook, so there was no need for Mia to remove the page. Also: why didn’t Light simply burn his own fucking page? If he was planning on burning Watari's page once he learned about L’s identity, he must have had a lighter on him (an edgelord like him assuredly would, and Mia smokes in this movie), and yet it never dawns on him to just burn the fucking page himself, and instead he relies on a plot involving, a fisherman, a doctor that eventually kills himself, and a fucking exploding ferris wheel set over a Chicago ballad. The film likes to think it’s smart and clever with these new ideas, but it handles them so poorly it just reverts back to being dumb.

The film isn’t all misery; in fact, the film has more than a few funny (likely unintentionally) moments. My personal favorite scene in the movie is when Light and Mia are very calmly having dinner with Light’s father, and then L appears out of fucking nowhere, waltzing into the shot and then perfectly vaulting into the chair across from Light like it’s absolutely normal. It’s a hilarious touch, very reminiscent of the L from the show. Light curtly telling Ryuk to “shut the fuck up” [sic] was really funny. Watari telling Light that he wants to sleep, even while under the influence of the Death Note, was fucking golden. Some of the deaths that Light instigates are so over-the-top gruesome and gory that they wind up being funny instead of shocking. L’s reaction to learning about Watari’s death – plothole garbage though it was – was actually very well-done, the sounds of his cellphone dropping from his hands and his anguished scream seconds later being completely muted. It’s really telling that the most interesting moment of sound direction in the movie was the part where there was no sound at all, but I digress. The film does have interesting color choices here and there, especially during the second half, when muted blues, pinks, reds, and yellows highlight the Seattle nightlife in an interesting, pulpy way. Also, Ryuk's CGI design is actually quite well-made and true to the show; it doesn't look awful in the slightest, and you can tell it's the aspect of the show the cast and crew put the most genuine effort into recreating.

And then there’s the matter of the ending, which… is honestly way more interesting than I thought it would be. I’m not gonna talk about it, see it for yourself, but it’s really telling that “death note film ending” (as of now, anyway) the first result you see when you type in “death note film” on google, instead of “death note film 2017”, or “death note film review”.

But honestly, these are just cherry-picked moments of decency from an otherwise pretty bad platter. I’ve even glossed over some of the dumber aspects of the movie, like how it handles the FBI Agents dying (they all jump off a building in perfect synchronization, which is hilarious), or how everyone has been Americanized and whitewashed to hell and back except for L and Watari for some fucking reason (who was an Englishman in the show), or how Light’s bully’s name is Kenny, or the entire fucking prom scene and its choice of “Take My Breath Away” (more 80’s) for the slow-dance tune, or even Light’s fucking “NORMAL PEOPLE SCARE ME” sticker he has plastered inside his locker (not even kidding, it’s there in a shot towards the movie’s second half). This film is a trainwreck through and through; it sucks, but it sucks in an entertaining way. DN was a show where you were forced to turn your brain on and watch; Death Note is a movie where you turn your brain off because nothing smart happens. Intrigue and thought and deductive reasoning are replaced by decapitations, edgelords, and High School Prom. This should be a joke; this would work better if it was some kind of amateur parody of DN. But no, mid-way through the film you start to realize this was actually the best the writers and director could do. The film isn’t offensively terrible per se; mostly, it’s just stupid. But unfortunately, “stupid” isn’t a word I’d use to describe DN. Eh, the first twenty-five episodes of DN.

Also Watari's name is pronounced Wuh-tarr-ee. Like Atari but with a Waluigi-esque "Wuh" replacing the "A". That pronunciation alone gives it a 10/10.

actual shot in the film; these are mass murderers

But there's no Matsuda in this movie. So: 4/10.

i wasn't kidding dude, LOOK

Samurai Jack Season 5, Episode 2: "XCIII" Review

the epilogue of my review for xcii (samurai jack’s opener for the fifth season) wondered about the whereabouts of the lord of darkness, aku, because he only appeared in the episode for five seconds, and he didn’t even appear in person, just over a phone call. i was also incredibly curious about greg baldwin, and how he would handle the task of being aku now that mako iwamatsu has posthumously passed the torch over to him (although apparently there was a cartoon network online multiplayer game that baldwin had already voiced aku in, so apparently this isn’t his first time doing the voice). and so, with all of this in mind, the opening sequence to episode two (titled xciii) is entirely dedicated to the acerbic, extra thicc lord of darkness himself, and it focuses on a side of aku that we haven’t quite seen before: bored, depressed, and exhausted with his seemingly never-ending cosmic duel against the samurai jack.

the opening sequence is just a typical, mundane day for aku (insofar as a day can be typical and mundane for the master of evil): it showcases him waking up, unenthusiastically stretching, and generally being very moody and uninvolved (the establishing shot of him getting his flaming eyebrows out of his nightstand drawer is my favorite comedic shot in this whole episode) while his many subjects offer tribute and present weapons of mass destruction for his approval. the whole scene is very silly and has a sardonic undertone to it, and it feels like a jarring punch in the face after the heaviness of xcii; but, personally, i don’t mind it at all. it helps not only remind us that samurai jack has a funny heart to it underneath its maturity and sincerity, but assures us that season five isn’t going to be doom and gloom throughout. aku moping around his lair and groaning when his scientists present him a weaponized beetle drone is troublesome – because this isn’t quite like the aku we know – but it’s also funny, and the humorous undertone makes it easier to sympathize with the guy.

you see, jack isn’t the only one that’s been suffering from this endless stalemate. aku reveals in his therapy session with himself (literally) that he was hoping that jack would eventually just keel over from natural causes after eradicating all the time portals in existence; he decided that, after failing time and time again to kill the samurai, playing the waiting game would be the best option. but jack has become immortal, growing only a beard and a couple thousand mental hangups, so not even waiting for jack to kick the bucket due to old age has worked. aku retreated from open conflict entirely and just sort of became… well, a guy that mopes around his lair. a guy that literally has therapy sessions with himself to cope with jack’s immortality, a guy that is pessimistic about his worshippers and indifferent to scientific and technological breakthroughs made by his own team of scientists. it’s so weird seeing aku beside himself, but honestly it’s kind of cool to see this new side of his character. it somewhat lessens his credibility as a threat (not once throughout this episode did i see “lord of darkness”, but that was likely the point), but we’ve got eight episodes’ worth of time to see if he overcomes his nerves and gets down to business again.

diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeeeee

the rest of the episode deals with jack’s attempts to outwit, outdistance, and survive the assassination efforts of the daughters of aku, who – after years of rigorous, brutal training in a cult temple – have finally been mobilized to take him out. this is where the episode takes a turn from being comedy-driven and dialogue-driven into the character-driven, action-driven, atmospheric samurai jack that season 5 promised to be, and it’s amongst the best fifteen or so minutes of the entire show. there’s minimal dialogue during jack’s many spats with the daughters of aku throughout this episode; the sound effects, music, and animation reign supreme here, and almost all of the tension and emotion packed in this very tense, emotional episode are expressed thusly. the music, which was already unnerving and tense in the first episode, becomes thrilling and hectic here, heavy on percussion and bass – the track that plays during jack’s first all-out battle with the daughters of aku has a very earthly, distinctly eastern feel to it, and it’s meshed together with industrial-sounding bass, strings, and heartbeat-like kick drums; that mix of earthliness and futurism describes samurai jack as a whole pretty perfectly. the sound effects and animation work hand-in-hand to keep you on the edge of your seat throughout the battle; the daughters of aku barely appear here, seeming more like shadows or forces of nature than teenage female assassins.

also, it’s worth noting that jack loses almost all of his new material in the first ten minutes alone. his bike, his guns, his armor – it’s almost all discarded or destroyed when the daughters fight him. just as quickly as we got used to seeing him use all of this equipment, it’s gone in a flash. very interesting directing choice.

jack’s struggle is contrasted and interspersed with scenes of a lone wolf fighting against a horde of alien-looking tigers; if that sounds like a metaphor for jack’s situation, that’s because it one hundred percent is, obviously lmao. the scenes with the wolf are a little too on-the-nose and unsubtle for me, but the wolf does make an appearance in the next episode that helps justify its existence here, so i don’t particularly mind; plus the animation and body language on the animals is pretty superb.

and then the scene involving jack’s confrontation with his inner self comes into play. once again, the episode lapses into the uncanny-valley, the psychological realm; and, once again, the episode becomes truly fantastic once it does this. this is one of the darkest scenes in the episode both literally and figuratively; jack is debating with his inner self about the pros and cons of giving up and (implied) seppuku within the dark confines of a beetle drone’s metallic corpse, through which very little light pours through. phil lamarr does a wonderful job distinguishing between the real jack and his intrusive mental self; they both definitely sound and act like the same person, but the performances he gives are varied enough to tell the difference between the two, demonstrating that the jack buried deep down is much different compared to the jack on the surface. the whole confrontation also brings up an interesting point: when will aku find out that jack’s lost his sword, and what will he do once he learns this?

jack flees into a temple, which leads to yet another exciting, atmospheric scene: the daughters’ attempts to hunt him down in the dark temple. the whole sequence is very cat-and-mouse, filled mostly with jack trying to use the environment and the darkness to his advantage and the daughters’ intermittent, brief clashes with him, culminating in a slow-burning, intense, wonderful scene where the daughters finally zero in on him hiding in a hall laden with tombs.

the music turns into a haunting, minor-key ballad with quiet strings and icy piano notes, the color scheme dominated by dark, ugly greens and limes, and shots of jack hiding in a stone tomb, looking visibly scared for the first time in what seems like a long time. the tension builds to a boiling point, and when the daughters finally discover his tomb and get into a climatic fight with him, it feels like releasing a breath you weren’t even aware you were holding in. atmosphere in this episode: superb.

the whole thing culminates in jack managing to kill one of the nameless daughters of aku (it certainly doesn’t look like ashi, given the contours of the face and hair), and the shock and horror is clear as day on his face when the moment actually happens. we learned from jack’s confrontation with himself that he had been running under the assumption that the daughters of aku were just another squadron of robots that aku had mobilized to deal with jack, like aku always does. but jack learns too late that they’re very much human, and the revelation that he’s killed his first human being is as shocking to him as it is to us. there’s blood and everything, bright red blood, both on a stab wound that jack got in his stomach and on the corpse of the fallen daughter. if it wasn’t already obvious that season 5 was committed to being much more adult than its seasonal predecessors, xciii’s ending makes it stark.

it’s the final scene that really drives everything home. jack slowly, bloodily limps towards what might be a fatal dive into a waterfall, using the last tool he has in his kit to stop the daughters’ progress for the time being: the explosive tuning fork he scavenged off of scaramouch in the previous episode, which turns the temple into a smoldering pile of debris as he takes the plunge (both narratively and metaphorically). it’s the look on his face that sells it: pained, feverish, and maybe angry, but above all? exhausted. after the uninterrupted tension and action of the previous twenty minutes, this final scene feels, once more, like a breath being drawn. we can now breathe.

if it sounds like i’m just making this episode out to be a series of great moment after great moment, that’s because it basically was. the animation is fluid and slick; the daughters have an airy, sleek, shadowy quality to their animation compared to the weight of jack’s movements or the jaggedness of aku’s lousing around. the music is absolutely wonderful throughout this episode; there’s a dark, sinister aura to even the more gorgeous tracks, pianos and spacey synths and contorted percussion all working in tandem to create a restless atmosphere. phil lamarr and greg baldwin are quite good in their respective roles, the former bone-tired, guilty, and furious with himself deep-down, the latter pathetic and indifferent to everything and even a little petty. it’s well-paced and well-directed, and it leaves you chomping at the bit for more. and hell, that’s really all it had to do.

Samurai Jack Season 5, Episode 1: "XCII" Review

I’ve wanted to talk about the brand-new revival of Samurai Jack for a good while now, so I figured why the hell not just talk about the brand-new revival of Samurai Jack? It’s been over ten years since the original Samurai Jack ended on Cartoon Network; a fifth season was inevitable, given how damn popular the series was and how anticlimactic the final episode of Season Four was.

The notion that Samurai Jack’s fifth season would be a good deal darker (more “adult”) than its previous seasons has been common knowledge for a considerable length of time, ever since the return announcement made about a year or so ago, but I don’t think anybody anticipated just how different the fifth season was going to be until it actually aired a month ago in March. “XCII”, the first episode, is really just a mere sampling of what is yet to come, and it deals with topics like massacre, child abuse, manic-religious cults, and Jack’s augmenting guilt complex just to start with. This isn’t to say everything is doom and gloom, as XCII’s latter half proves, but this opener is, by far and away, sadder than the four before it.

The intro is superb. It establishes the series’ quasi-apocalyptic setting by opening with a shot of a distant, shadowed kingdom, enormous white clouds behind it, and a rolling, provincial field of green in front of it, and then immediately following that opening shot with a family of teal, female aliens being chased down by a black-clad group of Beetle Drones. The original show was a fantastic mixture of Japanese-flavored nature / provinciality aesthetic (sprawling hills, tall trees, lush forests thick with overgrowth and vegetation) and futuristic technology (the presence of robots, iridescent bridges and skyscrapers, club circuits), and the opening shot continues this trend quite faithfully without calling any particular attention to either extreme. It’s incredibly subtle, and subtlety is something Samurai Jack has always thrived upon.

The little alien family communicates only through messages displayed in-between their antennae, decreasing the need for spoken dialogue and showcasing emotion in the rawest, simplest way possible.

The sound effects are fantastic in this episode. Everything feels and sounds incredibly crisp.

How Jack has changed. Fifty years have passed, and he hasn’t aged as a side-effect of being displaced in time (and from time-travelling in the first place), and yet this Jack is a very different one than the Jack many of us were used to seeing as kids. The bearded dude’s got long, swooping hair and thick, multi-layered armor, meaning he’s ditched both his chonmage and his kimono robes, and comes in to save the alien family guns blazing on a combat-rigged motorcycle (with retractable spikes in its wheels). It’s just like the climax at the start of the series, but he’s missing something else in addition to almost everything else that made his design so iconic: his sword.

Jack’s as physically fit as ever, but mentally, things aren’t looking too good for him. The fact that his mind continues to age but his body does not as a result of his immortality is just one problem he has to deal with in a myriad of issues. It’s been fifty years, and things have started to look completely hopeless; he’s no closer to achieving his goal than he was beforehand. If anything, his chances of defeating Aku have been snuffed thanks to the absence of his father’s sword. Jack’s depression and guilt have mounted to the point where he starts to hallucinate – in these hallucinations, all he sees are the people he thinks he’s failed.

This is where the episode starts to get really interesting. These hallucinations, personifications of Jack’s feelings and guilt, are wonderfully surreal – almost everything he sees has a distinct shape, and yet there’s something indescribably off about the people he sees in these hallucinations, no matter how familiar they look, which leads to a stunning moment where a simple campfire transforms into a wall of fire demons that scream at Jack, cursing him for his failure and inability to save the world from Aku’s evil. These psychological moments are operating on a dramatic scale that’s wholly different from the kind of stuff we dealt with in the previous four seasons, and it makes for a completely different, unique experience as a result. Yet, none of it feels out-of-the-blue, forced, or ineffectual; these moments are well-directed and well-used, underscored by terrific vocal performances and a tense, restless, ambient-industrial score that makes everything feel claustrophobic as all get-out.

Although the best scenes in the episode are the psychological, subjective ones, there are some really great moments in XCII notwithstanding. The fight between Jack and newcomer villain Scaramouch is wonderfully animated, briskly-paced and full of incredibly fluid motion and physicality; everything is working on a technical skill that the previous four seasons couldn’t even begin to dream about, and it’s very exciting to see this technicality in motion. Scaramouch himself is a pleasant addition – his theatrical, flamboyant gestures and joking personality is a stark contrast to literally everything else in XCII, and yet he doesn’t feel out of place at all (the fact that he brutally murdered an entire village just to get Jack’s attention helps). He’s played for too much comedy and dispatched too quickly for us to believe he’s a genuine threat to the Samurai (he’s no X-9, to be sure), but he makes a wonderful impression for his… what, five minutes of screentime? Plus, his equipment is wonderfully creative and cool, including a telekinetic, golem-conjuring flute, a weaponized tuning fork that causes delayed explosions, and the ability to fling swords at Jack via verbal scatting (he’s a musician, in case you didn’t get the drift already).

In the meantime, we learn about some brand-new characters called the Daughters of Aku. These girls are nameless, save for one (a curious one called Ashi), and have been “raised” since childbirth by a devilish, Aku-worshipping cult. “Raised” meaning they underwent brutal, outlandish combat training in a cult temple their entire lives in order to become strong enough to kill Jack. This is (according to their tyrannical mother) their only purpose in life. Sound familiar? Well, unlike Jack, who received intensive but patient training across the world and was raised by kind, understanding people, the Daughters seem to know nothing but hate and scorn because it’s all they’ve been taught, all they’ve been shown. It’s a very dark parallel to Jack’s story, and it makes the named character, Ashi, all the more interesting because of it. The High Priestess (the given name for the mother of the Daughters) is a pretty damn scary villain; we never see her face, only a mask, and her body is like a pointy series of black, jagged lines that rarely moves, marked by small, occasionally violent gestures, suggesting more of a vicious, coiled snake than a human woman with thoughts and emotions. She is as brutal as the training she forces her children to undergo. Both she and Ashi may prove to be very interesting characters as time goes on.

And that’s really all there is to say on the matter. The episode is perfectly-paced, switching between action-driven and character-driven moments with finesse; it never feels rushed or overcrowded at any point. The art is beautiful; the backgrounds are delicate and simple, primarily marked with warm pinks, oranges, muted grays and reds, save for the scenes inside the High Priestess’ temple, where the color palette becomes an overwhelming mixture of black, dark reds, and muted purples. Aku doesn’t even show up in this episode (he speaks for about five seconds on a phone call with Scaramouch), which makes things all the more interesting: where the hell is he, exactly? It’s a good opener – fans of the original show will be pleased, and newcomers will likely be impressed.