Jujutsu Kaisen Season 3: The Culling Game Part 1

Episodes 48-50

The first three episodes of Jujutsu Kaisen Season 3: The Culling Game Part 1 are more or less a perfect distillation of the highs and lows of the franchise. The first two episodes feature several lavishly produced action sequences, plenty of inspired visual cues that denote a character's interiority, and meaningful emotional beats between beloved characters. However, these two episodes also have some dubious character motivations, with the conflicts feeling fairly manufactured and like the writer was looking for an excuse to stage some cool fights rather than the result of choices these characters would reasonably make. Seemingly recognizing this character's motivation deficiency, the third episode is essentially a 23-minute team meeting that offers a PowerPoint overview of the in-universe world and how the main characters plan to respond. This third episode is meant to both inform the audience and get them hyped up for what's to come, but ultimately makes it feel like Jujutsu Kaisen doesn't trust its audience to understand what's about to unfold.

To start with the positives, the fights in the opening two episodes are sick as hell. Originally a part of the Jujutsu Kaisen: Execution film, that theatrical budget is fully on display with fights between even supporting characters like Choso and Naoya being not only intense, but also visually interesting thanks to shifting color pallettes and inspired depictions of each character's cursed techniques. These opening episodes also do a great job of establishing the scope of this world, now that the series has grown past the narratively familiar backdrop of Tokyo Jujutsu High. Yuji holding his own against a city's worth of giant cursed spirits, only to be immediately put on the backfoot when Yuta shows up, further reinforces the spectrum of danger that characters are set to face. Especially with earlier seasons often using Gojo as a tool to resolve situations where characters don't otherwise have an easy out, this opening makes it feel like the conflicts in Jujutsu Kaisen are about to get a lot more intricate and intense.

Or, at least that was the feeling I was getting from the show before the third episode hit, and kept insisting that the death game the characters now find themselves in is both super intricate and important.

Battle royales are now common enough in popular culture that this degree of an explanation feels like overkill, and also has the unintended effect of revealing further cracks in Jujutsu Kaisen's writing. For instance, the nearly-omniscient-within-Japan Master Tengen reveals that Kenjaku needed to seal Gojo within the prison realm for his plan to progress because the bearer of the Six Eyes in previous generations had stopped his past machinations, but it's still not super clear what the Six Eyes does other than make the person who has them really strong. It's also further established here that Angel, the lone person who can free Gojo from the prison realm, is a reincarnated sorcerer who would not be alive right now if not for Kenjaku's efforts. I know that the JJK fandom has long pieced together the explanation for this incongruity being that Kenjaku either committed to reviving Angel before he knew the Prison Realm existed or that he doesn't care about undermining his own plans because he's ultimately a chaos gremlin, but it still kills my own enthusiasm for the show to see the current main villain so flagrantly lay the groundwork for their own defeat.

All that said, do these plot holes or contrivances ultimately matter? Jujutsu Kaisen is proudly the product of generations of battle shonen storytelling conventions and only strives to tell a compelling story within that genre while also offering some mild sociopolitical commentary. If JJK is ultimately genre fiction, does the setup for this season need to be anything more than an inciting event for some cool fights and characters having goals that they can achieve through said fights? I'd hope so, but I also can't be too upset with JJK for failing to have airtight storytelling and internal logic when it's never branded itself as such.

While a part of me wishes Jujutsu Kaisen would return to being a more intimate exploration of social failings in Japanese society, like the commentary on bullying we saw in the Mahito arc, I want to meet this work where it's at and accept that it's aspiring to be the endgame of modern battle shonen. Jujutsu Kaisen rose to prominence in the anime scene thanks to being really good at hype moments and “aura farming” while being passable at everything else, and these opening episodes confirm that season three is going to be more of the same. Chances are, you already know if this show is for you, and this opening is successful in getting the people already on board even more amped up for what's to come.

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While he's indifferent to curses, Lucas DeRuyter has long believed that he could achieve complete emotional fulfillment if demons were real, so he could dedicate his life to fighting them. That not being the case, he instead focuses on entertainment writing, contributing to ANN's This Week in Anime column, and posting about these and other exploits to his Bluesky account.

Jujutsu Kaisen Season 3: The Culling Game Part 1 is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.