Jujutsu Kaisen Season 3: The Culling Game Part 1

Episode 58

I thiink the eleventh episode of Jujutsu Kaisen's third season is going to be my new go to example of high quality animation not being able to compensate for an uninteresting story. While this episode does look as good as any other episode in a season that's sure to go down as impressive, Reggie Star is just not a great villain and Megumi's fight with him is not as clever as this anime thinks it is. While the couple more seconds we get with Takaba and the tease of Yuta's upcoming battle royal in the next episode do bring this episode up a couple of notches in my estimation, these moments can only do so much when the crux is so underwhelming.

The episode begins where the previous one left off, as Megumi activates his incomplete domain and begins pummeling Reggie with numerous shikigami and shadow clones. The fight gets pretty expository very quickly though, with some distracting narration explaining why Megumi's domain doesn't have the guaranteed hit effect of modern complete domains, rendering Reggie's efforts to counter this as a misstep. When their fight becomes a battle of endurance as the two are both placed under a crushing amount of weight, the episode again uses narrative exposition and a wealth of internal dialogue to over explain what's happening and why it's supposed to be interesting.

With the animation this good and legible, JJK doesn't need to lay out what's happening on screen in this way, and should instead trust its audience to recognize that what's happening is cool and intense. That being said, after the battle is over, I did appreciate Megumi further establishing why he couldn't have just disengaged from this fight with Reggie via his flying shikigami Nue in the previous episode. Megumi walking away from a dying Reggie in real time was also an affecting shot, and maybe the best instance of this show making us sit in a heavy moment from this entire season.

While I do appreciate Takaba's gag character powers being more formally established, I really don't understand what JJK is trying to say with the character Remi and her complaints about adulthood in the scene where Megumi decides not to kill her. To be totally honest, in a show where so many characters are hyper competent and well defined enough to represent different ideals or mentalities, Remi feels like a bit of a sexist stereotype. Sure, there are some women in the world who have been conditioned by a misogynistic society to both fear and be hyper-reliant on men, but her helpless complaining about her circumstances feels like a very shallow exploration of this sociopolitical issue.

And, while I'm criticizing the overarching writing of Jujutsu Kaisen, I really wish this story did more to distinguish incarnated sorcerers from hundreds of years ago from modern day sorcerers. It's weird to me that Reggie knows what a gymnasium and heated swimming pool is without explanation, given JJK's penchant for being almost overly detailed in its power system and world building. This is probably the most frustrating episode of JJK so far this season, and I can't wait to wash the taste of it out of my mouth next week with one of my favorite bouts from the manga.

Rating:

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.