Jujutsu Kaisen Season 2

Episode 29

The number one question posed by this brief flashback arc of Jujutsu Kaisen's second season was, “What caused Geto to become Gojo's mortal enemy, hell-bent on eradicating mankind?” For some reason, I was expecting this storyline to last at least six episodes, but no, the show manages to get us to Geto's fated heel turn by the end of “Premature Death,” leading us back to the present-day story and the return of the series' main trio of protagonists. With all of that backstory (more or less) wrapped up in only five weeks, then, the flashback's central question transforms into something else: “Was the explanation of Gojo's descent into genocidal villainy done well?”

A week of unexpected delays due to international travel has granted me much more time than usual to contemplate the answer, and I believe I can state that Geto's story works…mostly! As has consistently been the case for JJK Season 2, its successes are buoyed by the fantastic and moody direction of the episode, which does a lot to compensate even when the narrative threads are being pulled just a bit too thin in the meantime. The haunting echo of the cheering cult that killed Riko is such a perfect motif to underscore Geto's fracturing mental state. The camera constantly emphasizes his exhausted, sunken gaze, and the way he is utterly isolated from everyone around him, even when this episode consists almost entirely of his interactions with the other Jujutsu Sorcerers. The last time we saw him, Geto was insisting that Gojo couldn't just go about killing a bunch of “normal” people for no good reason. Here, with a year gone by and nothing but time to let his resentment simmer and fester, it is clear that Geto would love nothing more than to kill all of the lowly humans that he is increasingly seeing as nothing more than a parasitic nuisance on the world. He just has to find a good reason to do it.

The script of the episode sometimes struggles to capture the blossoming of Geto's darker instincts, though it isn't for lack of trying. To its credit, the extended conversations that he has with the doomed Haibara and the mysterious Yuki at least do a good job of setting it all up. Poor Haibara gets fridged as a reminder of the sad and (depending on who you're asking) pointless deaths that await practically every Jujutsu Sorcerer, while Yuki, the newest Special Grade Sorcerer to join the cast, is here to ask a question that Geto has never considered: What if, instead of trying (and failing) to destroy every single Curse as it pops up to wreak havoc, what if we managed to eliminate the problem at its root source: Humanity itself? Now, Yuki doesn't seem like a deranged sociopath on the outside, so I don't know if she intended to plant the seeds for a campaign of ruthless genocide on Geto's part, but the damage is done the minute she walks out the door and drives off to leave Geto to his thoughts.

The troubles with the episode's pacing start to become more apparent here, with Geto's inaugural slaughter sessions (along with the murder of his parents) getting reduced to a couple of montages. Given the pedigree of the artists working on Jujutsu Kaisen, it's a ridiculously good-looking and effective pair of montages, but still. I liked the playful detachment with which Geto applied the long overdue punishment to those murderous cult members, but everything from the destruction of the village to Geto's big confrontation with Gojo felt just a bit…rushed, I guess. It's nothing bad enough to derail the story, but I couldn't help but feel that even one more episode of breathing room would have made it easier to feel Geto's fall from grace. As it stands, I understand it perfectly well, but it doesn't provoke the kind of emotional reaction in me that I would have liked.

In the end, I believe this peek into Geto and Gojo's past had more hits than misses, and if nothing else, it has managed to reignite my excitement for this world and its characters, which made the return of Yuji, Megumi, and Nobara in this episode's final moments that much sweeter. We may have to wait a few more weeks to start on the main storyline, but we've been given so much delicious anime goodness to enjoy for the past five weeks that I can hardly complain about having some time to digest it all before the gigantic second course arrives.

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Jujutsu Kaisen Season 2 is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.