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.
