Jujutsu Kaisen Season 3: The Culling Game Part 1

Episode 59

To begin this review, I'd just like to say,

YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!!!!

God, this episode kicks so much ass and, while I know this is the last time that Jujutsu Kaisen really fires on all cylinders unless the anime deploys some fairly significant rewrites to punch up the events of the manga, I can't think of a better way to close it out.

Off the cuff, this episode is absolutely gorgeous, and future dark, edgier action series are going to strive for these visuals in the years to come. With the first two episodes of this season being lifted out of the Jujutsu Kaisen: Execution film, there was a real concern about the animation quality falling as the season went on, or the team at MAPPA working on this being out of gas by the end of the season. While MAPPA leadership still deserves a side-eye for their history of brutal labor practices and the short leash they give even their top level animation talent, season director Shōta Goshozono and the rest of this team absolutely stuck the landing. Beyond the fights in this episode being big and exciting, so much energy is poured into making things look gross and weird! Between the cockroach Cursed Spirit Kurourushi's attacks making bugs burst out of wounds and Uro's distorting space to make things bend and stretch unnaturally, this episode used the affordances of the animation medium incredibly well.

The pacing of this episode was also terrific. Beginning with Yuta killing Dhruv, whose abilities are the most suppressive of any combatant in the Sendai Colony, the episode continually builds and escalates as he faces off against the other big players in this arena; Kurourushi, the aggrieved Uro, and the battle hungry Ishigori. Helping set this escalating tone is Yuta expressing early in the episode that he doesn't want the other combatants to know that he can use reverse cursed energy to heal himself, or deploy Rika as she's protecting civilians who are trapped in the colony. These enemies being too powerful for Yuta to hold back against even one of them, even though JJK is constantly hyping him up as being the strongest living sorcerer next to Gojo, quickly establishes how dangerous everyone is and executes splendidly on this promise.

The thing that makes this episode the best of the season, though, is the writing and how well these characters define each other through juxtaposition. Outside of the Jujutsu Kaisen 0 film and the prequel manga, Yuta hasn't gotten a ton of screen time and, in both of those works, he's a pretty boiler-plate shonen soft-boy who needs to learn some confidence through the power of friendship. Now that he's resolved those issues and became one of the strongest characters in the show, it's a great evolution of his character to have him feeling like it's his sole responsibility to end the culling game out of an obligation to his friends with the comment that he's going to earn 400 points by himself. However, his past internal turmoil and confidence in being able to take on this situation alone makes him a kind of opposite to Uro, who spent most of her previous life exploited by those in more powerful positions than her. Basically, all of Yuta's issues could be fixed through internal work while Uro's problems are external, which Yuta's worldview and values infuriating to Uro.

Meanwhile, Ishigori fits the stereotype of incarnated sorcerers that Megumi described in previous episodes, and is just here to fight and have a good time. His mentality and priorities are completely antithetical to Yuta's, who would not be participating in this violence at all if the consequences to the people he cares about weren't so severe. Jujutsu Kaisen's action is at its best when it treats the characters participating in these fights as people who have dedicated themselves to the craft and skill jujutsu sorcery, and I can't help but love seeing these people who rose to the top of this world while having completely different perspectives and motivations butt heads.

Also, THANK GOD this show decided to trust its audience again and keeps the narration to a minimum! The fight in this episode flows so much better and the participants in it are so much more interesting than the Megumi vs Reggie Star fight from the previous episode by the sheer fact of them piecing together what's happening along with the viewer, rather than the narrator just info dumping. Jujutsu Kaisen wears its shonen battle influences on its sleeve and often borrows from past greats like Naruto and Hunter x Hunter, but this episode displays a mastery of this kind of storytelling that makes me believe this anime can rise above its predecessors.

This is a great close to a season of mostly highs and only a few overt flaws. The logical part of me knows that Jujutsu Kaisen cannot sustain this level of quality forever and that there were only a few parts of the manga that stood out to me after this plot point, but I don't care about that right now. This episode finally got me on the JJK hype train and it is one hell of a ride!

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.