The Elusive Samurai Season 2 ‒ Episode 12
Oh dear. I've been around the block to know a, “Whelp, that's all we've got, now go and read the manga!” ending when I see one, and that's exactly the message we're getting from the finale of The Elusive Samurai's second season. I have long imagined the horrifying and soul-crushing disappointment that might come with an utterly botched finale for an otherwise excellent series, like a hypothetical second season for The Promised Neverland, by way of example. This conclusion is not quite as bad as that completely fabricated scenario, and thank God for that, and I recognize that anime studios don't exactly get to choose when and how their runs will end. That power belongs to the people with their fingers on the purse strings, after all. Still, I am duty-bound to give you my honest feelings about the media that I cover. If this really is the last we'll see of The Elusive Samurai, then it is a shockingly disappointing and cynical ending.
What if we just take this episode as the conclusion to the season, though, and not the televised story of Tokiyuki Hojo in its entirety? Well, it would still be pretty bad, since it isn't a proper conclusion whatsoever. Last week, we got the first real inkling of a thrilling rematch in the making, with Shokan returning to the stage as the next rival that Tokiyuki will have to take down. Despite the plot's lack of shape and direction, Tokiyuki has clearly matured a good deal since the series began. It makes a lot of sense to pit him against an equally evolved foe from the first season so we can see our hero put all of his lessons to good use. What do we get after this episode spends its whole runtime building up the armies and setting the Hojo Clan Warriors loose onto the battlefield? A shameless cliffhanger that freezes right as the season's climax is about to begin. If that wasn't bad enough, the anime literally waves the pages of the manga in front of our faces to taunt us before rolling credits.
I've made no secret of the fact that this whole season's lack of narrative focus and momentum has made it much less satisfying than the first, at least for me. I absolutely understand the need for the story to both conform to the more-or-less real contours of history while also giving its characters room to fail and grow. The problem is that this season has felt like nothing but a series of false starts and stalling tactics while Tokiyuki and his companions try to figure out what the hell they're even doing. Battles have been lost; assassinations have been attempted and subsequently failed; enemies have been confronted only to slip away from our heroes' grasp as quickly as they arrived. It would be one thing if the characters had been allowed to truly evolve in compelling ways or simply find more creative methods by which to advance their long-term goals, but we haven't gotten much of that either. Instead, The Elusive Samurai's second season has mostly been content to give us some fun individual episodes and a bunch of wacky antics that have done well enough to pass the time, but not much else.
With how much I loved the first season, I'm feeling pretty bitter that The Elusive Samurai ended with such a wet fart of a finale. Even if a third season was on the way in the near future, I'm so much less inclined to give it a chance than I would have been just a handful of weeks ago, because I no longer trust that this anime respects my time or my intelligence. What a waste.
Episode Rating:
The Elusive Samurai 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 BlueSky, his blog, and his podcast.
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