Pop-Cultured Catholic #21: Revisiting God’s Transcendence of Time and the Problem of Evil, Through the Ending of “Samurai Jack”
And here is the finale to my latest trio of posts, which brings together the themes of my “Interstellar” and “The Imitation Game” posts. Now it is time to enter the world of “Samurai Jack”. It is an acclaimed fantasy adventure cartoon by Genndy Tartakovsky, the same man behind the other fantasy cartoon I posted about called "Primal".
The main premise of “Samurai Jack” involves the titular samurai getting teleported into a dystopian future, then seeking to time travel back to Feudal Japan, so he can stop a shapeshifting demonic overlord Aku from taking over the world in the first place. In the first episode, a warrior emperor has beaten back Aku, named after the Japanese word for “evil” (悪) and bearing a face possibly inspired by hannya masks in Japanese theater. Aku had sadistically laid waste to the emperor’s kingdom, being invincible to all mortal weapons. The only available weapon that can truly harm Aku is the emperor’s mystical katana blade. Channeling the wielder’s righteousness, the sword has the power to purify and cleanse away dark powers, making it kryptonite to Aku, a manifestation of evil and corruption. But Aku has returned and managed to capture the emperor before he can grab the sword, leaving the empress with no choice but salvage the sword for their son and send him off around the world, where he trains until he is ready to wield the sword against Aku. When the grown samurai prince faces Aku, he is winning and about to finish off Aku for good. As a last ditch move, Aku opens a portal in time, which yanks the prince away into the distant future. When the samurai falls out the other side, he finds himself in a world where Aku reigns supreme and various monsters are allowed to thrive. This futuristic Earth is also full of robots, sci-fi weaponry, and even aliens. Quickly earning the nickname Jack by the future inhabitants, “Now the fool seeks to return to the past, and undo the future that is Aku!”.
Seasons 1-4 of “Samurai Jack” became a favorite show on Cartoon Network from 2001 to 2004, seamlessly blending multiple genres and tones to yield a wide variety of episodic adventures. The typical episode’s formula involves Jack hunting for a portal or artifact that can take him back in time, while Aku tries to foil Jack’s hunts, send assassins after him, and sometimes fight Jack himself. Along the way, Jack also takes time to help those who have been ravaged, enslaved, or cursed by Aku and other villains. This gains Jack many friends and allies over time. His greatest and most recurring one is a loudmouthed Scotsman warrior, armed with his own magic sword, a prosthetic machine gun leg, bagpipes, and an endless array of flowery insults. Aku fully delivers as the main villain. He is ruthless and powerful enough to commit atrocities played for serious drama, yet also goofy and hilarious, thanks in large part to a delightfully hammy vocal performance by the late Mako (Makoto Iwamatsu). Episodes range in tone from simple cool adventures to sincerely emotional tales, comedy scenarios, and even horror plots. One latter episode has Jack saving a little girl and her family, who are held captive by a demon. The haunted house’s demon is played unnervingly straight and one of the few villains with no ties to Aku. Finally, there are many stylistic uses of animation, yielding uniquely memorable fight scenes, environments, and bits of visual storytelling.
When the story resumes in Season 5, airing on Adult Swim after a thirteen-year hiatus, the tone takes a darker turn and the titular samurai is at his lowest point. Fifty years have passed since Jack’s abduction through time. As an unexpected side-effect, Jack is unable to age. But Aku has destroyed the last time portal Jack could have used. This has made him finally give in to rage, become unworthy of the sword, and lose possession of it. He is left to wander aimlessly, fighting with whatever weapons he can scrounge, haunted by visions of those he failed to save, and hoping Aku never learns that his sword is lost. Even Jack’s best friend, the Scotsman, is literally on his last legs and soon dies defiantly confronting Aku. Speaking of Aku, he is now voiced by Greg Baldwin and not doing too well himself. Aku knows Jack cannot age now, everyone he sends to kill Jack fails, and Aku has become too afraid to go after Jack himself, unaware that his sword is missing. So while Jack is on the brink of despair and contemplating seppuku, Aku is also at wits end. In a moment of comic relief, Aku even starts giving himself therapy sessions.
As Season 5 unfolds, Jack soon meets a new enemy that will change the course of his battle, Ashi, one of the “Daughters of Aku”. During Jack’s journey, one woman has founded an all-female cult dedicated to worshiping Aku. The one time Aku visits her cult, he leaves behind a cup of his essence and the High Priestess drinks it. She later gives birth to seven daughters, one of whom is named Ashi. Their mother indoctrinates and hellishly trains them for the purpose of killing Samurai Jack, as a dark mirror of Jack’s childhood training to destroy Aku. Once their mother deems them ready, the seven assassins are sent out on their hunt. Over the course of many skirmishes, Jack is nearly killed by the Daughters of Aku multiple times and struggles with having to now kill flesh-and-blood human beings. But the tide slowly shifts and Jack whittles the assassins down, leaving Ashi as the only one left.
When Jack safely subdues Ashi and tries to help her, they eventually go from being worst enemies to best partners. Jack is bewildered to see Ashi so brainwashed that she believes Aku is the universe’s benevolent creator and ruler, while the samurai is the evil one. Ashi rejects all of Jack’s attempts to teach her the truth and continues trying to kill him while shackled, even as the two are trapped in the gut of a colossal beast and Jack still keeps her alive. Ashi finally realizes the truth, after they escape the “belly of the whale” and she sees him gently handling a ladybug, while her mother would callously squish such "distractions". From there, Ashi comes to learn more about Jack, then repays the favor by helping him to overcome his inner demons and finally reclaim his sword. In the process, she even defies and slays her fanatical mother. Over the course of other adventures, Jack and Ashi’s camaraderie evolves, slowly budding into a romantic relationship.
Jack and Ashi’s relationship reaches its climax, when Aku receives outdated news of Jack losing his sword, then rushes out to confront him. When Aku encounters Ashi with Jack, he senses his own essence lying dormant inside her and takes advantage. Aku is able to awaken his powers in Ashi, possess her body, and turn her on Jack. With seemingly no way to free Ashi without killing her, Jack relapses back into despair and surrenders. Aku gloatingly broadcasts Jack’s capture and plans to have Ashi execute him as the world watches. Thankfully, all of the friends Jack has made in the earlier seasons come to Jack’s aid, including the Scotsman in ghost form. While Jack’s allies distract Aku, the samurai tries once more to free Ashi. When Ashi hears Jack utter that he loves her and she focuses on that, only then does Aku’s control over her weaken. As cliche as it is for the “power of love” to be a villain’s kryptonite, I can buy it here, finding it consistent with Jack’s sword harming Aku with “righteousness… the strength and power of the human spirit”. To their surprise, Ashi not only frees herself from Aku’s control, but also discovers she can wield Aku’s powers… including his ability to create time portals.
Using her powers as a literal Daughter of Aku, Ashi is able to take both Jack and herself back in time to finally stop Aku in past… but at a tragic cost. Jack and Ashi emerge from the time portal, mere moments after Aku originally flung Jack into the future. The samurai wastes no time finishing off the surprised and terrified Aku. Once and for all, Aku is destroyed, and Ashi feels his power leaving her. For a while, it looks like a clear happy ending, with Jack’s family and homeland saved, the dystopian future averted, plus Jack and Ashi preparing to wed. Unfortunately, Aku has the last laugh, for it appears the world of “Samurai Jack” operates on “Back to the Future” rules of time travel. During the wedding procession, Ashi suddenly collapses. When Jack rushes over and begs to know what’s wrong, Ashi can only reply, “Without Aku… I would have never… existed”. Ashi then fades away before Jack’s eyes, as the rest of the crowd shares his heartbreak. The show ends on a bittersweet note, with Jack sitting amongst the cherry blossoms and eying a ladybug that lands on him. The insect flutters away, reminding him of his fond memories with Ashi and her sacrifice.
When I first saw the ending, I found it a resonant and thought-provoking note to close on, which left me pondering for the next day. I remember calling it, when I predicted the show having one of two possible endings. I figured that one possible ending would be him going back in time to avert the future with Aku’s takeover, at the cost of Jack’s friends in the original future all no longer existing. The other possible ending I imagined would have Jack ultimately deciding not to return to the past, instead focusing on destroying Aku in the present, so the current timeline’s people can now experience a future without Aku. Surprisingly, I looked up that before the show’s revival, the creators toyed with the latter idea in a series of (now non-canon) comic books titled “Tales of the Wandering Warrior”. There, Jack resolves to do that.
The show’s ending made me imagine the Problem of Evil in another way, when I first combined it with my observations of “Interstellar”. In my “Interstellar” post, I focus on the scene with Matthew McConaughey’s character floating in the tesseract, which allows him to view his daughter’s bedroom at infinite points in time and send messages to her past self as the “ghost”. I have wondered if that scene is a taste of what it would be like to see everything through the eyes of God, who transcends time. There, the past, present, and future are all perceptible at once. With that in mind, is it possible that every time God chooses to act through divine intervention, it is the equivalent to Samurai Jack altering the timeline by going back to slay Aku in the past? That is, in the sense that God knows/sees every potential “Ashi”, whose very existence will be prevented by his intervention? While undoing Aku’s future reign no doubt saved countless lives and allowed countless new people to be born, the ending of “Samurai Jack” points out that there are also good people, whose existence was only possible because Aku’s reign happened in the first place. Those invested in Ashi’s character still found it an emotional gut-punch, when she fades away. Jack ends up with the power to transcend time, but does not feel the cost of meddling with it until he has already intervened. Would this give God similar reservations about directly intervening in his creation, versus leaving it to its own agency?
Things also got deeper, when I added my observations of “The Imitation Game”. There, Benedict Cumberbatch’s fictionalized portrayal of Alan Turing is eventually faced with ethical decisions, where he might need to allow certain attacks by the Nazis to come to pass, in order ensure greater victory in the long term. Speaking of Benedict Cumberbatch’s roles, I forgot to mention that even my very first “Pop-Cultured Catholic” post on the Avengers films references a scene in Infinity War, where his portrayal of Dr. Strange chooses to let the villain have his way in the short term, since it is the only way to enable the villain’s defeat in the long term. That is, after he examines 14 million possible futures… which is still nothing compared to being omniscient. Also in my post on “The Imitation Game”, I make a callback to George R.R. Martin‘s quote, that the battle between good and evil is chiefly fought within the human heart and not something to be decisively finished by a mere external fight. I used that to suggest God cannot instantly end the war between good and evil to the fullest he would want, merely by smiting evil forces, and he might still have to make similar decisions as Turing even with his omnipotence. With the themes of “Samurai Jack”, one is reminded of the fact that there are even people, whose very existence is only made possible by evil being allowed to have its way in the short term. For example, think about a refugee meeting someone in a foreign country, starting a family with them, and having one of their children accomplish wonders. This is yet another layer to the 4D Chess games that God is playing, every time he chooses when to intervene and how to answer every prayer.
While I do not claim to have definitively solved the Problem of Evil, my G.R.R. Martin post, these three latest posts, and the brief callback to my Avengers post might collectively be my best exploration into that conundrum’s possible answers. With the end of “Samurai Jack” marking its conclusion, I will be linking some clips from that show and its finale episode…
1.) "Samurai Jack" Seasons 1-4 Intro
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iBU_D36-AA
2.) Jack's Father Battling Aku in Prequel Episodes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdrFp6GIWoE
3.) Jack vs. Beetle Drones
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCFkynCQWsM
4.) Aku Trolls Jack
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnPmtwBiD8I
5.) Aku Dial-a-Henchman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwWG82hB4zQ
6.) Jack Fights Ninja
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qp-L_Xei-Lg
7.) Jack vs. Haunted House's Demon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM2lnSDvuHA
8.) Scotsman Compilation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nv-Ocz6d-WI
9.) "Samurai Jack" Season 5 Intro
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXyaNrMswFU
10.) Jack Loses Sword
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_otB2Oxnd9s
11.) Sword-less Jack vs. Beetle Drones
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qg6thQja0Mw
12.) Jack vs Daughters of Aku
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKd_7d22nRk
13.) Ashi Sees the Light
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogfJaz_ymdw
14.) Ashi Helps Jack Overcome His First Demon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mTtYxyI7AI
15.) Ashi Defeats Her Mother
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnTDlsAQVHY
16.) Aku Possesses Ashi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJy8DttoDRw
17.) Jack's Friends vs. Aku
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnDFu4tF8sw
18.) Ashi Regains Control
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzUOynKu7-w
19.) Aku Slain
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noBt2WwyWjQ
20.) Ashi's Death and Ending
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Own4pDDmpoU
