Jujutsu Kaisen Season 3: The Culling Game Part 1

Episode 51

Oh god, how am I supposed to review an episode of television that is exceptional in every regard except for the writing? The fourth episode of Jujutsu Kaisen's third season is nothing short of a visual feat, conveying a level of action and intensity that I'm more accustomed to seeing from theatrical animation than a piece of televised media. In the midst of these impressive and often symbolic visuals, this episode somehow also manages to be FUN! With musical accompaniment that makes the gore on screen feel like a moment of elation for the episode's lead, Maki, and hosts of ridiculous shots that would feel more at home in a Mortal Kombat fatality than the most popular shonen anime airing today.

Now if only the show made me care more about the characters involved…

Before getting into the weak points, I should make clear that this episode focuses entirely on Maki's assault on the Zenin clan headquarters. As someone who read the Jujutsu Kaisen manga weekly, I remember Gege Akutami's art style becoming much sketchier during this encounter, and him needing to take a break for health reasons shortly thereafter. However, I also recall feeling like this sketchier style benefited these story beats quite a bit, and made the fights here feel all the more intense and like they were so incredible that they couldn't be rendered in Akutami's usual art style.

This episode manages to marry this frenetic energy with the anime's usual visual quality and delivers a Kill Bill-inspired all out assault. From Maki losing her sister Mai, to her killing her petulant father, to her eviscerating every jobber in the clan, and then pounding the Daddy's Money POS Naoya into the dirt; this episode is balls to the wall from minute one and packs so much into its twenty-eight minute run time.

However, a part of me can't help but think that spectacle is used as a shortcut to make me care about characters that Jujutsu Kaisen hasn't done a great job of building up and trick me into engaging emotionally with this work. While Maki has always been a sympathetic character due to her ostracization, she's always been framed in relation to other, more defined, characters in the series like Yuta and Toji. Similarly, Maki and Mai shared a few scenes together back in season one that established their relationship, but their dynamic has been virtually untouched since then; making Mai's death for the sake of Maki's power-up feel more like a gimmick than something genuinely affecting. In regards to Maki, it very much feels like Jujutsu Kaisen has gone through the motions of establishing her character and the relationships this episode is grounded in, but doesn't do enough to make the characters involved feel unique and create genuine emotional investment.

Also, while it's tonally appropriate for Maki to defeat Naoya at the end of the episode as the death of this nepobaby symbolizes the exploitative, repressive, and sexist system that the Zenin clan has propagated for generations; we just saw this dude get his ass beat in episode two! While the show has narratively built him up as a big deal, we've yet to actually see that on screen in a meaningful way and this undercut's Maki's big character moment when this episode is examined with any kind of scrutiny.

This episode is absolute fire in a “turn your brain off and don't think about it too hard” kind of way, and MAPPA has once again broken their own record for most impressive shonen action sequence. I am so excited to watch clips from this episode to get amped up during my pre-workout routine for at least the rest of the year! While I wish that this incredible animation was in service of better writing or that this work better understood the posturing and framing that's a big part of what's made battle shonen so affecting throughout the years, after this episode I'm finally prepared to say that Jujutsu Kaisen is back and better than ever.

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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.