5x09 C

[8.4/10] I’m still not sold on the romance here, or at least not on this show’s depiction of it. I actually like Jack and Ashi together. They make a strange sort of sense, and the star-crossed lovers idea is a poten tone through fiction. I just don’t need to see them making goo goo eyes at one another, or being grown adults (Jack is what, 70 at this point?) who are awkward around one another like teenagers, or them stealing glances at one another in the shower, or who make smitten small-talk over dinner.

Still, once “C” breaks past the meetcute energy that the Tartakovsky and company desperately try to muster, the episode taps into something real in their relationship, in particular Jack’s reluctance about it, which adds balance to what’s otherwise a mistuned attempt at romance.

The depth of the episode comes when Jack confides in Ashi that he remembers his home and his parents every day, cognizant of what he’s lost. He carries that pain with him every day. Its the kind of opening up and emotional intimacy between two people that reveals a far deeper connection than any awkwardness after a kiss ever could.

But it also gives Jack a reason to try to abandon the budding relationship. As he tells Ashi when confronted over this, he has watched so many good people die at the hands of Aku, people whom he loved, and he doesn’t want Ashi to be another person on that list. It’s the saddest way to say “I love you” for the first time I think I’ve ever seen.

This season has leaned into Jack as a world-weary immortal, the toll it would take on someone to have to trudge through an eternal life with no hope of catharsis and relief. Love is the last frontier of that. Jack doesn’t want to allow that bond to form between him and Ashi, because his experience tells him that bond will inevitably be brutally severed, and he can’t handle the hardship of that after facing and enduring so much of it in other circumstances.

It turns out that fear is well-founded, as Aku is back on the warpath. Even before AKu actually confronts Jack, I really enjoyed the comic interludes we get with him ehre. I’ve enjoyed the vein of depression explored within the shogun of Sorrows this season, showing how deflated and listless Aku feels in the absence of his greatest adversary, and his own sense of ennui at being unable to fulfill his quest of defeating Jack. But he and Scaramouche exchanging info over the supposed absence of Jack’s sword, and particularly the two of them dancing in celebration, is an absolute hoot. Aku has always had a semi-comic bent, which is part of what makes him so compelling as a baddie.

The show manages to balance that farcical tone with the tragic one in the episode-ending confrontation between the samurai and the author of so much of his pain. It’s funny, I assumed that Ashi knew she was Aku’s offspring. That should give the reveal less oomph, and yet, her horror at the revelation, and Jack’s corresponding shock, sells it as the gut punch it’s meant to be. The flashback to Ashi’s “conception” is appropriately mystical rather than carnal, while still exhibiting a sense of disbelief and terror at learning that such a bad seed could be a part of her. (Hoo boy, I sure wish Star Wars had pulled this idea off as well as it does here.)

Jack’s fears are realized, in some of the most unfortunate tones imaginable. Aku is not just lost due to Aku’s cruelty, but consumed by him, made his puppet. He has to fight the person he loves, listen to her pleas for death rather than continue to be a tool for evil, and contemplate whether to kill her paramour in the name of his quest or, once again, give up in the face of a spiritual ask he cannot bear.

The visuals match the momentousness of this dilemma. The single-shot approach to the initial swordfight is stellar. The look of the Aku-ified version of Ashi with a flaming sword matches the villain’s iconography while preserving Ashi’s. And Ashi’s yells of terror as the darkness consumes her makes for disturbing body horror. There’s so many riveting images here, from Aku’s visage rising from behind as he declares “I smell me”, to the closing tableau of a saddened Jack, having given up his sword and kneeling in the face of his greatest enemy and his possessed love.

It;s a hell of a lead-in to the series finale, one that deepens the relationship between Jack and Ashi, revives the comedy and evil that is Aku, and sets the stage for what may be the most difficult challenge -- physically and emotionally -- Jack has ever faced.