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Post by wordweaver3 on Dec 10, 2015 7:47:59 GMT
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Post by Tech on Dec 10, 2015 17:08:27 GMT
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Post by Harkovast on Dec 10, 2015 21:09:44 GMT
Gotta get back, back to the past...
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Post by wordweaver3 on May 28, 2017 0:04:59 GMT
Just gonna necropost this fucker.
Well, the long awaited final season of Samurai Jack is over. I saw the last episode last week, and tonight Adult Swim is going to show the whole season in it's entirety for those who missed it.
My initial reaction was positive for the first few episodes, but I don't think 10 episodes was enough to do everything they set out to do. As a result the end felt very rushed. I actually kinda hate how it ends.
No, scratch that. I really fucking hate how it ends. I was pissed that after all that time that was the best they could do.
Anyone else see it? More importantly is anyone else planning to see it before I really go on a tear about the ending? Cuz I don't wanna spoil it for ya.
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Post by Canuovea on May 28, 2017 0:10:49 GMT
Na, haven't seen it.
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Post by Harkovast on May 28, 2017 14:23:05 GMT
Yeah should have been longer. I thought it was good, but needed a bit more to finish everything off.
Something I didn't like was that they made Aku a bit TOO jokey. Like he was funny sometimes but here he felt like he was cracking wise all the time. In the original he was a lot more serious and dignified, so when he said something silly or got exasperated it was a lot funny. Making his so silly kind of undermined what a serious threat he was. Almost every line from him was joking or being goofy now. He is the shape shifting master of darkness, not a big black clown.
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Post by wordweaver3 on May 28, 2017 14:54:20 GMT
Alright. Y'all were given an opportunity to object. I woulda ignored it anyway.
I'm going to do this with the assumption that the readers had seen the entire season.
The final season of Samurai Jack started out fairly well. It subverted what I was expecting and gave me a much darker Jack than I'm used to. There's still a little bit of Jack there, but he's kinda gone feral. He appeared to be suffering from some sort of PTSD. Alright, he's ageless and his situation seems hopeless, I guess that's to be expected. Cue the Daughters of Aku.
The Daughters of Aku are a cult that had some of Aku's essence that he bestowed onto them as a gift, probably as a lark. One of them drank it (I half expected there to be a turkey baster involved) and birthed seven daughters tainted by Aku. These daughters were ritualistically and brutally trained from birth for one purpose only, to kill the Samurai. I expected there to be more to learn about this cult, but that's all the show gives us. Even the mother has no story to tell beyond that she birthed the daughters, specifically Ashi. Ashi is an assassin turned follower turned lover for Jack. She's handled poorly and the show starts to lose its cohesion once we realize where they're going with her. We'll get back to her.
Once the daughters finally meet Jack they seem to be overwhelming for him. He can barely touch them. It's kinda implied that he's going easy on them, but since Jack makes it clear that he thinks they're just more robots sent by Aku, there's no reason for him to do that. In fact, once he realizes that they're human (cuz he kills one of them and she bleeds) he just decides to straight up kill them all. The justification being that they chose their fate. But they didn't really and the story kinda forgets that. In a sense they are robots, just doing what they're programed to do. Jack never really feels bad for killing all of Ashi's sisters, for that matter Ashi doesn't even seem to care either. She had no connection to them? Really? They were the only people she ever knew.
Ashi's turn to “the light” is rather abrupt. She just sorta decides not to kill Jack because ladybug. Or something. This really needed to be a more difficult journey for her. Everything she was taught from birth was wrong, it's hard to get past that. Like people who are raised in a racist household it takes a lot of introspection to see the truth. She simply accepts that what Jack is telling her is truth even though she should be falling back onto her own “truth” in defense.
Also Demongo shows up for no reason and is never seen again.
Getting the sword back was kinda weird too. Jack sat down and meditated on it until the sword came back to him. Not only did the sword come back to him but it also shaved his beard, fixed his hair, and got him a brand new gi. Neat. I guess. Of course the whole point of that story wasn't so much to get the sword back but to have a final confrontation between Ashi and her mother. After which we still don't learn anything else about the mother or the cult.
The romance between Jack and Ashi was handled like middle school crush. All awkward and uncertain, with a bit of “eww”. Which I guess would be about right for Ashi since her social development would be so stunted, but Jack has about 70 years of life experience. Old people don't handle romance like kids do. They're typically confident enough to wade right into it. They've been there before and they know what to expect. I guess they thought it would be creepy if Jack seemed excessively confident next to Ashi's awkwardness, but a relationship between an old man and a young girl is what they gave us, so...
Let's just skip to the end. Ashi is under Aku's power and the sword is taken from Jack. Things that should be difficult to overcome, but come off as mostly a minor inconvenience. Everyone shows up to fight Aku. All the old throwbacks from the original seasons, who, aside from the Scot, I didn't really care about. Even the Scot didn't need to be there. This is supposed to be a fight between Jack, Ashi, and Aku, everything else is just fan service. You can't fit that much into 30 minutes plus commercials. So Jack confesses his love for Ashi and it breaks the hold that Aku has over her. She also realizes that she has all of Aku's powers so she makes a portal to the past that she and Jack can use to go back to the exact time that Aku had sent Jack into the future in the first place and Jack kills Aku.
Yep, that's how it happened. He just sliced up Aku. No final words. No big speech. It's almost like an execution cuz Aku is basically fuckin powerless.
Then we cut to Jack and Ashi getting ready for a wedding. As she walks down the aisle she collapses. Jack runs up to her and she says something like “Since Aku is dead I never existed.” and she disappears.
I'm sorry, what? What kind of a “fuck you” is that? You wanna talk paradoxes here? Since Aku is dead you never existed so therefore Jack couldn't have come back into the past to kill Aku. This was the whole issue with the show from the beginning, if Jack ever went back to the past to kill Aku there would be no reason for him to go back to the past in the first place because Aku would already be dead and he wouldn't have been sent into the future. I thought this was what we were going to learn. That his mission was impossible and he needed to find a way to defeat Aku in the future and live with the consequences of that future world. The world, by the way, that I loved. I could give two shits about the peaceful past Jack was trying to get back to, I was sold on the dystopian feudal/sci-fi world.
Don't get me wrong, it's not cuz I'm a JacAshi fan or something. The romance is fine, I guess, but that's not the point. Jack spent most of his life in the future. That was his world. That was more his home than the idealistic past was. All the times he fought against the forces of Aku he made that world a little better, a little more livable for peace loving inhabitants. All of that is undone. The entire story of Jack is undone. The sacrifices and heroism was all for naught. Jack the hero is now just the unnamed samurai who executed a helpless Aku. Even the name “Jack” isn't appropriate anymore because that was bestowed onto him in the future.
Fuck that ending.
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Post by wordweaver3 on May 28, 2017 14:59:35 GMT
Yeah should have been longer. I thought it was good, but needed a bit more to finish everything off. Yes, considering how the pacing of the show typically works, the end was jarring how fast everything happened. Aku didn't really feel like the threat he was. In fact, he barely threatens Jack directly in this entire season. Every time they cut to him they undermined his cruelty and wickedness with his jokey or depressed attitude. He doesn't feel like the threat he's supposed to be, certainly not the linchpin of the entire show.
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Post by Harkovast on May 28, 2017 15:10:35 GMT
I didnt like the whole thing of him being kind of depressed. The tone seems to be that he had won and it was hopeless, but then they make him kind of miserable. He should have been stronger than ever and have everything going his way before the big final battle.
I didn't dislike it as much as you, it had some good stuff, but it had problems. I need to go over your poitns in more detail later.
I will say I also didn't like demongo showing up for a cheap joke. He got destroyed and is incredibly powerful, so him still being aroudn is a big deal.
I was kinda disappointed that the armies that came to help Jack didn't battle all Aku's beetle robots. Also we saw Akus evil scientists again in an earlier episode, I would have like to see them get taken out. This needed about 2 or 3 more episodes to make it properly satisfying.
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Post by wordweaver3 on May 28, 2017 15:46:42 GMT
Yeah, when I saw episode 9 and how that ended I thought: "Okay, now we're getting somewhere." Then I learned that episode 10 was the final episode and I'm thinking: "What the hell?" I figured it would be a typical 13 episode season. There's no way they could cover everything they needed to cover in one episode. So I thought it must be an hour long finale. Nope.
Everyone showing up and fighting Aku directly was just suicide. I mean, they made a point to show that in episode 5. What the hell did they hope to accomplish? Hell, the Scot and his daughters were there! They definitely needed a better enemy for them to fight.
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Post by Canuovea on May 28, 2017 18:24:11 GMT
I hate these kind of endings.
Okay, so my girlfriend and I watched the Scooby Doo Mystery Encorperated (or whatever it was called). It was probably the best version of Scooby Doo I've seen, since there were actual characters and arcs and such involved. But god did I hate that ending for similar reasons.
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Post by wordweaver3 on May 28, 2017 19:51:03 GMT
That was a fun version of Scooby-Doo. They explored their relationships a bit more than any previous version of the show ever did. But they did have a reset ending. I think there was actually supposed to be another season but it was shitcanned.
The dirty little secret at Cartoon Network is the execs HATE any show with a story line. They can't stand having to work schedules around shows like Steven Universe and Adventure Time. They fear that any new audience they get (cuz they function under the delusion that their target audience is 7 years old) will be put off by a show they can't understand because there are numerous seasons they have to catch up on. That's why they show so many episodes of Teen Titans Go and to a lesser extent The Amazing World of Gumball, nobody has to know the history to get the show in one random episode. They can show it in any order and not think about it. That's why they tend to "bomb" the schedule with their story shows. They'll show an entire season in two weeks so they can go back to their easy schedule of Teen Titans Go for 8 hours a day. So if a story show doesn't get a huge audience really quickly they'll just quietly toss it into a dumpster somewhere, and if it does get an audience they'll treat it like a red-headed stepchild.
Being a branch of CN, Adult Swim has the same kind of mentality. By the end of the summer you'll never see a rerun of Samurai Jack, but you can bet they'll play the shit out of 8 year old episodes of Squidbillies and Aqua Teens.
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Post by Canuovea on May 28, 2017 20:00:09 GMT
Ugh, yeah, that's disgusting.
I actually thought the ending for Scooby Doo Mystery Inc was literally sadder than anything else up to that point. Those people weren't just reset, everything about them and their experiences were reset. Who they were was definitely killed. All the effort put into helping them? For nothing. Death of personality is murder, even if you put a different personality in there.
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Post by wordweaver3 on May 28, 2017 20:25:08 GMT
That's true. Someone might argue that it's all theoretical, but for the reality of the show those people are dead.
And therein lies the problem with Samurai Jack. Ashi wasn't the only one that ceased to exist with the altered timeline. The further you travel into the future the likelihood that any of the characters that Jack encountered in the future actually will exist becomes slimmer and slimmer. They don't die they simply never become, which may actually be worse. You can say, well other people were born in their place, but they're still gone.
I don't wanna come off as if this is the worst thing ever. I mean, episode 2, where the daughters are chasing Jack around in the ruins, is simply sublime.
The mood, the tone, the music... everything just works perfectly. But all that was building up to some really sub par storytelling.
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Post by Canuovea on May 28, 2017 20:50:04 GMT
Yeah, sounds like Jack killed all those people he saved... even if he saved countless others at the same time. That's fucked up. He wasn't really a samurai, he was a ronin, and ronin are supposed to be bloody moral not duty obsessed idiots.
But that's the problem, the world you bonded with is now gone. All those you liked? Dead. Never existed in fact.
That was a good scene. Now... he kills them because they are human and had a choice, but they didn't have a choice, but did he know that? I guess that is the real question.
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