Welcome all, to the finale of Jujutsu Kaisen season two! Not a whole lot to talk about this week, and I’m a bit preoccupied with all of the reviews, so lets just knock this out and get ready for the next season.
Getting right to it, this episode was… Fine? There’s nothing to egregious or incredible about it. You could tell the production was finally flagging as it relied heavily on chibi animation and still frames, with absolutely none of the character work of previous episodes. That’s not the worst thing, as even failing at the end here Jujutsu Kaisen still never fully fell apart. While I’ll never accept MAPPA’s treatment of animators and their poor scheduling, it’s clear those very same animators worked their asses off to ensure Jujutsu Kaisen finished. So when you talk about the highs, about how good this season was if you enjoyed it, don’t praise MAPPA. Because the studio did everything it could to fuck it up. Instead praise the animators, inbetweeners and myriad of support staff who made the terrible schedule work.
Moving on to the narrative, this was again, fine. There was lot of talk about what really happened here, of what it means going forward and some generic philosophy stuff. Nothing to big. The main thing holding this back is that the two characters having this conversation, Kenjaku and Yuki Tsukumo, really aren’t ones we care about. For Kenjaku, we knew and cared about Geto, and his relationship with Gojo as well as his motivations for killing all non-sorcerers. But this isn’t Geto. It’s Kenjaku. And all we know about him is that he’s over 1000 years old. So what? As for Yuki, she really just appeared from nowhere and took over the conversation. Maybe if Yuji, or Toudo, were having this argument it would matter. But as it is, we don’t really know her and so a lot of this means very little, at least for me.
As for what we got that does matter? Well that’s mostly the aftermath. This “return to the golden era of jujutsu” stuff is pretty cool. I like that the modern world is being forced to acknowledge the existence of cursed spirits. I also like that Kenajku’s plan, for all that I don’t know or care about him, is more than simple world domination or destruction. He doesn’t want to kill everyone. Instead he wants to return the world to how it was, to have jujutsu once again be on top. And his plan supports this! He never cared who won at Shibuya. Just that Gojo was captured and a big enough metaphorical bomb went off that the world couldn’t ignore it. Combine that with absorbing Mahito to trigger his other plans, as well as releasing a shit ton of spirits, and it’s actually kind of solid. I just wish we had been aware of it earlier.
Finally we arrive at what’s next for the series. The big thing is jujutsu politics. Those in charge are using this as an opportunity to basically excommunicate Gojo, Itadori and the Tokyo Principal from jujutsu society. It’s a power play while Gojo is captured, even going so far as to make freeing him a crime, as if they could enforce it afterwards. The main issue here is that these “politicians” are all faceless nobodies. We don’t know them, they don’t even have names, so it’s really not that interesting outside of how it affects our leads. And the only lead really affected at the moment is Itadori, because he has Yuta being sent to kill him. I suspect he won’t, that he’s just lying to the politicians, but hey maybe Jujutsu Kaisen will do something interesting there. That would be nice.
So yeah, all in all this was a perfectly fine, if unexciting, episode of Jujutsu Kaisen. I’ll admit a lot of my apathy at this point is simply due to exhaustion. I mentally checked out of the series like… 4 episodes ago because it was getting repetitive? It’s a real shame, because the season started off really really strongly. Like, one of the best arcs of the year levels of strong. Even Shibuya started out fine before it got bogged down in a single fight for episodes on end. It’s really just this ending, and how poorly the narrative supports it, that let the series down. Sucks for me too because it’s really going to skew my review once I finish it. That’s a problem for future me though! See you soon once I get it done.
I hate to admit it but I finally understand why you dislike the Shibuya arc. Jjk and MHA have a few things in common. They both started out strong and with loads of potential but slowly went down hill after a major arc. For JJK it was Shibuya and for my hero it was the Paranormal Liberation war. Tomura and Mahito were set up to be major villains but ended up getting replaced by a generic big bad. At least AFO (as much as I despise him and the way he sas inserted back into the story) was established. Kenjaku comes out of nowhere. With his introduction we lost not 1 but 2 major villains (Mahito and Geto) who were more interesting. Even Jogo was more interesting. WTF Is with manga writers cutting off the momentum of their younger lead badguys and replacing them with Aizen rip offs!
And poor Yuji ended up a background character.
I respect the animators for working hard despite the cruel treatment from MAPPA.
Hear hear