Why Should Samurai Jack Go Back to the Past

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    Melee weapon

• Jack only uses a sword. A melee weapon. A weapon totally useless if the given opponent is outside his reach. So why doesn't anyone ever just try sniping him in the head while he sleeps or dropping bombs from an aircraft half a mile above his head? Aku not doing this is justifiable because he's Stupid Evil and generally a total moron, but why don't any of the innumerable bounty hunters seeking Jack's head try anything like that?
  • It's pretty well established that Jack always hears the projectiles coming.
  • One, what that guy said. Two, then the show would be over in a rather depressing way.
  • Jack spent the latter half of his battle with the three blind archers (Episode 7) purely using his hearing to dodge their rain of arrows, with virtual impunity, while blindfolded. When the sense is that good, combined with his excellent reflexes, bullets don't pose the same threat level to him as they should. Plus the average bounty hunter is simply not that strong or skilled (likely smart either) compared to him... one episode had him defeat four simultaneously in the instant it took a drop of water to fall.
  • Sniper rifles and saturation bombing haven't made any appearances in the series. It's possible that these technologies never developed (remember, we're in an alternate 'bad' future) - but more likely that they've been suppressed so that they won't be used against Aku's forces.
  • It seems that in the new season, Jack has lived long enough in the future that he has no problems using guns.
  • Jack never used any guns because his sword is just better, not to mention a warrior is best served sticking to what he knows best, and Jack never gotten any training with guns because they did not exist during his training. Jack uses guns in season 5 because he lost his sword, and also because he has had time to train with guns and get good with them. The only other time he loses his sword was to this troper's knowledge, in the graveyard with zombies and he had zero time to train with a gun nor were there any access to guns, so he does not use any guns in that case of him losing his sword. His sword is better because partially he is just that skilled with it (Jack vs the 3 blind archers), and partially because his sword is magic and aside from being one of the few weapons capable of hurting/killing Aku, is shown to easily cut through most armour and weapons in the show with only a specific robot enemy (the ultra bots),and the Scottsman's Claymore being the exception. TLDR his sword is indeed just better.

    Getting distracted

• Why does Jack constantly not take a chance to return to the past in favor of defeating an evil threatening some people, when doing so would allow him to eradicate the source of all the evil? Bring up Lawful Stupid or Failure Is the Only Option and you'll regret it.
  • Because every time he can, theres a catch. In one instance, there was a chance that the space ship he was riding would be destroyed by enemy fire with him and innocent civilians on board, so he opted to guarantee the safe passage of the civilians over the chance of dying and failing. In another, a wishing well was revealed to be ruled by a malevolent spirit, so he decided to destroy the spirit rather than fall victim to yet another trick. In nearly every case there's a clear and logical reason for Jack doing what he does other than simple altruism, although that is probably a large factor in his decisions.
  • That aside, unless Time Travel in that universe can create Alternate Timelines, won't all the people Jack has saved throughout the series essentially vanish once he goes back in time and beats Aku? Assuming it will create a second parallel timeline (the alternative is way too morally dissonant), Jack has to beat Aku twice, once in the future and again in the past.
  • Actually, based on what similar plots have done, if he defeated Aku in the past, the people of the future would be the same except more prosperous because they were never under Aku's heel.
  • I always thought it had something to do with his own personal code of honour: he simply can't ignore innocents in peril to go back in time because he places too much value in the life of innocents, and cannot simply sacrifice even one innocent person to achieve his ends, even through inaction. There's also the fact that he actually has TIME to save them: assuming Aku doesn't intervene, Jack can simply return to the past at the same point he left and finish the job, thus he can go back from any point in the future he likes, thus sticking around and sorting out the current crisis is no problem to him as long as he finds a way back in the end. Essentially, Jack's world doesn't run on San Dimas Time.
  • It still makes no sense; going back to the past completely would undo his actions in the future, unless his presence in the future would somehow create a duplicate version of him that would appear and fix the same problems in an Aku-less world. I honestly doubt that Genndy Tartakovsky planned that. Also, going back to the past and killing Aku would prevent thousands of years of suffering under Aku's reign from ever happening and would generally help the world on a much wider scale compared to, say, saving a group of generic Asian warriors - it's a much more benevolent action if you think about it. Jack's way of thinking seems illogical: "See, I could use this portal to prevent Aku from ever taking over the world, thus creating a brighter future. Or I could avoid doing that in favor of saving a small group of innocents. Yep, I'm sure that's the right thing to do."
  • You phrase it like he had much time to think about it. If memory serves, lots of problematic things were happening at the time when he saved said Asian warriors. He might not have been thinking straight.
  • It's psychological. Jack could just leave those people to their death, go back in time, kill Aku and rain happiness on the world, but it's just psychological that those people died when he could've protected them. Also, how does time travel solve paradoxes anyway? If it's alternate universes, then he really did just leave those people to die. Yes, he's saving trillions if he kills Aku, but he actually knew those people. Plus, he's a samurai, with honor and all that.
  • So knowing someone makes them more valuable? Jack has fallen prey to compassion he could go back into the past and Aku's world would never have happened, but compassion prevents him from doing what needs to be done.
  • I believe there's something you all may have overlooked - Jack has a feudal level of education. How in the world would he even be able to conceive of alternate timelines, or these people being utterly different thanks to Aku having never been there when he goes back in time? He had a struggle with the relatively simple though of being flung forward in time-so how would he be able to think of possible paradoxes or such from time travel.
  • Even if he knows about the possibility of alternate timelines, Jack wouldn't know if it were true anymore than we do. Yes, going back might prevent the Bad Future from happening, but there's just as much of a chance that it would cause a second one to form while the people in the first were still in danger. Without being certain that defeating Aku in the past would prevent the Bad Future, Jack won't risk leaving someone in danger if he has the opportunity to save them.
  • I think he's staying so he can get a few dozen extra levels so that when he goes to fight Aku in the past, it'll be even easier than the first time. I mean, look at how easily he does when he runs into him in the future.
  • This is partially confirmed in one episode. Jack is about to go back to the past when the portal's guardian stops him with a vision of his future self and tells him that he needs to get to that point before he's ready to go back and defeat Aku. To put it in perspective, this ◊ is what he looks like. "A few extra dozen levels" indeed.
  • Minor correction: Jack was out cold at this point, and the Guardian was talking to himself.
  • There's no guarantee that any of the method's he's found to return to the past would've actually worked. So, suppose he did ignore an innocent victim in order to exploit a device that failed. And later found out that traveling forwards in time is easy, but traveling backwards in time is impossible. Perhaps he can't afford to take that risk.
  • Or the risk that he'll successfully go back to his time of origin and lose anyway. Past-Aku may not have legions of robots and mutants and whatever to fight beside him, but he's no pushover either. Jack hopes he can erase Aku's Bad Future, but he can't guarantee he'll succeed.
  • Also, it might be that if Jack left Future Aku around when he was next to the portal, Future Aku could also use the portal at the same time, travel back as well, and team up with Past Aku.
  • You're assuming that Aku is the source of all evil. He isn't, he's just the most powerful evil on the block. In addition to other points made about time travel not being guaranteed. The source of your potential time travel is evil? Well then look before you leap. The alien armies are attacking and you have a million to one chance that they will interrupt your time travel, which may not work, and innocents may die. Well not worth the chance is it?
  • Isn't it possible that he's afraid? Think about it, if Jack went back and killed Aku then this timeline wouldn't have existed for him to be sent to. So maybe he realizes that if he goes back he'll fail. Alternatively he just wants to deal with future Aku on the off chance an alternate timeline is created.
  • He may be aware of the chance that going back in time could create an alternate timeline. In that case, he'd basically be abandoning the world to Aku, with nobody to stand up to him.
  • Another possibility is that, even if Jack managed to, somehow grasp the concept behind time travel, he's still not 100% positive that he will defeat Aku, if memory doesn't fail me, he's been shown to still have doubts and uncertainties, so it's a possibility. He, however, is positive that he can make the difference for the people in distress now, so he chooses this option.
  • I made this same observation to a friend while we were watching this once, and his answer was the best one and probably the most accurate to Jack's characterization: that even though Jack knows, on an intellectual level, that he might keep those people from being hurt or suffering by using the time portal, on an emotional level he cannot get past the fact that he is leaving people to die when he is capable of doing something to stop it. Basically Jack cannot rationalize his humanity into being quiet and letting him do the logical thing.
  • When he was a child, he ran from his country and his father when Aku arrived. While it wasn't of his own volition, he must have felt that because he ran, his father and countrymen suffered for decades under the will of Aku. When he confronted Aku again, he hesitated and was flung into the future, dooming them again. Jack likely has a mental barrier preventing him from leaving people behind, especially if it's possible for him to do something about it. It's also understandable that he might also know that in the universe, there's a lot more ways back into the past. He only needs one portal to set him back to the time he needs to be. Also, as someone else mentioned, Jack may have indeed gone through portals already, just that they deposited him in random places in time, so he might risk losing one chance at going back in time because he knows it might not even be the right one, but he knows that those he sacrifices now will indeed die.
  • In season 5, we discover that ignoring those people may have screwed him over and made it impossible for him to defeat Aku. Jack can only wield his divine sword because he is pure of heart. If he abandoned someone to their death, he would no longer be pure and the sword would abandon him like it did before season 5 started. While Jack may not realize that he would lose his sword if he made a selfish choice like abandoning someone, he would still lose the sword if he wasn't that kind of honor bound man. Say he went back in time after abandoning someone to die, it's likely fate would intervene to have him trip and drop the sword down Aku's pit of doom or something similar, dooming Jack to die at past!Aku's hands.
    • Except this wouldn't really be a selfish choice, since he would still do it to save other people. If you think about that, returning to the past and defeating Aku would ensure safety not only for those around him, but for himself as well, but it's still not selfish. Jack is a warrior who does put the safety of others before him and it has been demonstrated. Leaving those people might've not been a good option, but it wouldn't have been with malicious or uncaring attempt, but rather a sacrifice for the greater good. A pure heart does not mean that somebody never makes wrong decisions, it means that they are loving people with good intentions.

    Assassinating Aku

• The above makes me wonder; Jack won't take a way back if there are innocents suffering, and innocents will suffer as long as Aku is around, so why doesn't he retry to assassinate Aku? Thinking about it, it bugs me that Jack hasn't realized that as long as Aku is around he can't in good conscience return to the past, not to mention that Aku has infrequently snatched or destroyed his means of doing so. So why wander around searching for time travel trinkets when his real mission (not a sidequest) ought to be to kill Aku.
  • Because Aku doesn't want to be found. He's capable of moving his castle, disguising it, hiding it from view, etc. The closest he ever got to assassinating Aku was that episode with the gangsters. He was this close to finishing Aku off when the gangsters sap'd him from behind. After that, Aku moved his castle; who knows where he went? TL;DR, It's a lot easier for Aku to find Jack then for Jack to find Aku.
  • Jack may be eons behind the times, but he's not stupid. He attacks targets of opportunity. He doesn't waste time trying to assassinate Aku because for the majority of the series he has no idea where Aku is. So he spends most of his time fleeing bounty hunters, performing random acts of heroism, and searching for ways to travel back to his own time. Notice though that in "Jack and the Gangsters", the very femtosecond Jack senses an opportunity to get close enough to assassinate Aku he immediately drops everything and seizes it (and comes damn close to succeeding, too).
  • Aku spent the intervening years building up a power base. He knows Jack is a threat, so he's going to stay as far away from Jack as he can, while also constantly throwing armies and assassins after him so he doesn't have to deal with him personally.

    Another sword

• Why is it that over the several thousand years that Aku had the Earth enslaved, those gods that made Jack's sword never thought to, I dunno, make another one? Or, God forbid, they get up off their butts and lay the smack-down on Aku themselves?
  • Well, they probably think Aku is a human-solvable problem. They were battling what amounted to an Eldritch Abomination of infinite evil and darkness of which Aku is but a small hammy fragment. The Scostman's sword can probably kill Aku, and several of the magical doodads encountered on Jack's journey could harm him as well. Jack himself has already been a hair's breath away from killing him at least a dozen times as well, it's mostly act of plot that no one else (that we know of) has gotten close enough to try.
  • Or it could be that many people have gotten swords, as shown by the Scotsman. It's just that those people always lose and/or Aku keeps flinging them through time. Once in the future, they try to make their way, kill themselves, or some thug/Aku finds and kills them. Perhaps Jack is just lucky to have survived Aku's fight, as well as emerging into the future. Or perhaps there are hundreds more like him, phasing in time, living out their lives as rebels, and eventually dying. Aku's reign has apparently lasted thousands of years, so that's a lot of lifetimes.
  • The Scotsman. Aside from that, those Gods have the entire universe to look after. In the big scheme of things, Aku might not be a real threat.
  • Considering the many, many threat's Aku's thrown at Jack, it's not a big assumption to say that a lesser warrior wouldn't have a prayer of lasting long enough to get near the Big A, let alone defeat him.
  • If the portrayal of Ra in "Jack in Egypt" is any indication, the gods in the Jack-verse are clearly the mysterious kind. Whatever plan(s) they may or may not have, they're not sharing it/them with us mere mortals.
  • Jack trained all over the world for years before returning to face Aku, most of the people he learned from are dead. Another thing is that the Gods helped defeat Aku the first time because it was their fault for not checking. They left it up to Jack's Dad to defeat Aku because he'd given him a physical form. They helped stop Aku the first time because it was their fault he existed in the first place. But the second time, he'd been set free in a completely different way that the Gods aren't responsible for. So the simple fact is, as mentioned before, they've got a huge job of watching over the universe, they helped took care of Aku once because they were responsible and after that, it was no longer personal enough for them to get involved.
  • In "Birth of Evil" we've been shown that the "tiny" fragment that would later become Aku is the size of a meteor, and the weapons the gods were using to fight the shapeless blob of evil Aku came from caused damage to MUCH bigger sections. If the gods were to intervene in the fight on Earth, or anywhere else, the collateral damage would be completely unacceptable. As in, Earth shattering kaboom, unacceptable. Forging the sword out of the Emperor's soul might have been pushing it, as it is.
  • It's also possible that the gods - being, y'know, gods - have some measure of perception of Jack's personal subjective future, and already know he's going to find his way back to his own time and defeat Aku. In which case, they don't need to make another sword, just wait for the first one to (eventually) fulfill its purpose.
  • Another possibility is that when Jack's father tried to kill Aku he changed the nature of the evil involved. After all he tried to kill a mass of evil using poison and fire, which gave that evil a mind of its own that seems to have incorporated the poison and fire into itself. In effect Aku became a mix of cosmic evil and human evil from Jack's father, so only the blade forged of the opposing good qualities can destroy Aku.

    Sealing the Minions of Set

• In "Jack in Egypt", the Minions of Set were originally sealed away by the power of Ra. It's also revealed that he can easily destroy the Minions. That makes me wonder: why did Ra seal away the Minions of Set instead of killing them the first time?
  • Who knows, the gods of this world seem to be clueless. And as many people have already asked before, why haven't the gods killed Aku themselves, if they were able to destroy that space blob he was made from?
  • The account of the Minions' sealing may not be entirely accurate. Ra probably never personally got involved at any step of the process, perhaps it was just some priests channeling a minimal fraction of his power.
  • It could have been an act of mercy for all we know. We don't know what the circumstances of them being sealed away did to their conscious minds. Maybe being sealed is a lighter punishment than being destroyed for Egyptian demons. The fact that they didn't learn their lesson would then be punishable by death. Remember kids, mercy the first time around can be a wise move. Mercy for the second time? That isn't wisdom; that is stupidity.

    Aku throwing Jack into the future

• When Jack is about to slay Aku, why is it that he (Aku) has the energy to hurl him thousands of years into the future, but not vaporize him?
  • He's stupid? He shows this many times in the future.
  • We don't know how Aku's magic works. Maybe flinging open random portals takes up less "mana" than his eye beams do. Maybe he was desperate and just used the first spell that came to mind. Or maybe he thought forcing Jack to live in a world that was neatly wrapped around his finger would be more satisfying than just killing him.
  • Aku had attempted and failed to kill Jack several times through out the fight. Jack was essentially bypassing all the attempts on his life with minimal effort, thus Aku was able to discern that killing him at the current time was impossible. So he did something Jack would not expect. Considering the course of the fight already, if Aku had attempted to simply kill Jack then Jack most likely would of evaded or stopped the attack and finished him off.
  • Also, the 'fling him in the future' trick worked up pretty well: as soon as he arrives, Jack is hit by three different flying cars and nearly gunned down by a fourth before he can even start to understand where he is and what's happening precisely because he has no idea where he is and what's happening. Then Jack starts understanding where he is and what's happening... And nearly had an Heroic BSoD when he learns that Aku rules and, as far as the three guys he's speaking with, it's always been that way. A lesser man would have been killed by the cars or broke down upon learning how bad he failed...
  • What if that "flung" actually was his "exit-strategy"? Just imagine some Gollum-ish Scene with Aku trying to deal with the sword he knew could hurt him, and which he was unable to find after defeating the man who originally wielded it:

    Aku(worried coice): What shall we do if someone ever finds the sword and steps forth to oppose us?

    Aku(mischievous voice): Then we'll just kill him!

    Aku(confident voice): YEEEES! WE'LL JUST KILL HIM!

    Aku(worried Voice): But if we can't?

    Aku(another worried voice): Yes, what if we can't?

    Aku(bored voice): Argh, can't we just deal with this later?

    (Realises what he just said)

    Aku(mischievous voice): Yeeeeessss...we'll just deal with it later ... muahahahahahahaHAHAHAHARHARHAR!!!!

  • In this (fake) context, the time travel would be a back-up plan Aku prepared BEFORE the battle, just in case it would come to the exact situation that forced him to send Jack away. Of course he could have made that prepared spell a lethal one as well, but assuming he wouldn't be able to kill him before, a different approach(trying not to loose instead of winning) would make this a very logical choice.

    Jack's name

• Just what is Jack's name?
  • It's deliberately never stated. In the first episode he takes up the nickname Jack, however he never states his real name, and quite possibly for good reason: considering how much time travel tech Aku has stolen/destroyed, it's possible Aku now has his own methods of going back in time. Therefore, knowing Jack's real name would mean Aku could just go back in time and kill Jack when he was a child, thus preventing him from ever rising up against him, and ensuring that he rules for all time.
  • But Aku already knows Jack's father is the Emperor - if he really needed to know Jack's real name all he'd have to do is ask.
  • It seems to be more honor related than anything else: Jack had spent his entire life preparing to kill Aku and take his homeland back, but just couldn't finish the job when it counted. He failed so badly that the entire galaxy suffered under Aku's reign for thousands of years. He doesn't reveal anything about his name or homeland because he feels that he's not worthy of taking his birthright until Aku is dead.
  • Japanese Emperors change their names when they are named Crown Prince, and again at death. Jack's father pledged Jack to the quest to defeat Aku, but we don't know if he ever formally named him Crown Prince; it could be that Jack only has his childhood name, and isn't sure if it's appropriate to change it now that he's an adult if there's no Japanese throne anymore.

    Demongo and his stolen essences

• Whatever happened to those guys whose essence was stolen by that major Aku minion, Demongo? We see him getting creamed by the numerous essences of the guys he stole over the years, I kinda wished they'd bring them back at some point...
  • Well, considering that Aku finished off Demongo, those guys probably moved on to the afterlife.
  • It is interesting to note that one of the creatures assaulting Jack in the graveyard bore a strong resemblance to Demongo, who was quickly dealt with by Jack.

    Dystopian scenery

• Why is it that this is a dystopian future where the planet has been stripped of all resources... and yet the most common scenery on the show is huge stretches of pristine wilderness?
  • Because Humanity and its various offshoots, uplifts and variants are mostly gathered into centralized areas where they can be tightly controlled. As long as the remaining areas are too low-tech to threaten Aku, he doesn't care what refugees huddle out in the wilderness. Consequently those areas are relatively unpopulated and have returned to their natural state over the thousand years or so since Aku conquered the world. (Not that that situation makes good strategic sense, but as stated above Aku gets by on pure brute force, not brains.) The "resources" stripped away are probably mostly metals and fuel, and trees can grow without iron and coal deposits under them.
  • Hm. I wonder if this is the real reason the Gods never appointed another champion to deal with Aku (see the previous discussion)... he may have slain billions, but he's good for the environment!
  • Perhaps Aku lets areas heal every so often so he can destroy them again later. (Like a twisted version of sustainable logging)

    No Ending

• The end of the "No! Jump Good!" episode. Or rather, the lack of it. It's kind of annoying that Failure Is the Only Option was just taken for granted by that point.
  • True, but consider that the episode began with Jack failing to capture the same time portal doo-hickey and being left humbled and humiliated on the ground as Aku flies off with it. If the episode ended the same way, with Jack suffering a similar humiliating failure despite spending the entire episode learning to jump good, that would be quite the Downer Ending. The real problem with this episode is that it's rather pointless from a narrative perspective. Jack learns how to "jump good" in order to help him capture the time portal, and then...fails to capture the time portal, making the whole "jump good" training montage a pointless exercise. The monkeys learn how to fight and defend themselves from the gorillas, but they're never seen or mentioned again so seeing them learn to defend themselves was also entirely pointless. This episode would have worked better if it had aired right before the episode "Jack and the Monks" where Jack becomes crippled with depression after suffering multiple crushing failures and has to be reminded what he's fighting for.
  • I think the issue is that the episode ends with Jack catching Aku completely off-guard, in such a way that it looks like he's on his way to finally succeeding in his quest... and we never hear anything about it after that; the next episode is back to status quo, with the implicit assumption that no, he failed again.
  • I always assumed it was due to Anarchic Order. That the Jump Good Episode was actually the last in the series, where Jack finally succeeded, and everything else happened before it, but was shown after. (There are probably plot points proving me wrong, but I don't care, because Jack totally deserves to make it that time.)
  • It's entirely possible that the time portal jumped Jack back in time, say, five hundred or a thousand years...or had some sort of catch preventing him from using it to get all the way back to his own time, similar to the (evil) magic well in an early episode.
  • It's also entirely possible that he beat Aku, who retreated, then the portal turned out to not be something that suited his needs. For example, it might have been a portal in space rather than time, which is certainly useful, but it won't send him back in time. Also, most time portals appear to have some sort of thing about them making them not a 'quick fix', the guardian of one portal and the evil nature of another. So beating Aku may have not been what it took to use it, maybe he needs to find a spell of some sort or something to use it. That and the ability to Jump Good was actually used quite a bit after that, so Jack did get use of it.
  • Up until this point, Aku's been trolling Jack- you can see it here. Then, after Jack learns how to Jump Good, we never see Aku screw around with Jack that blatantly ever again. Jack may not go back to the past that episode, but the way he defeated Aku was enough for Aku to remember why he was afraid of him in the first place.
  • Sicne Aku was holding the portal, it would have been easy for him to throw it in panic. Either far away or throwing it down so it smashes and breaks.
  • I always assumed the portal was just Schmuck Bait for Jack that never actually did anything that Aku just used to delay and screw with Jack. So at the end Jack got the portal just to find out it didn't work, and Aku still gets the last laugh.
  • The simplest and most probable explanation is that the first sequence is a nightmare, the second a dream, especially since the swirling spiral is entirely unlike other time portals.

    Magic mirror

• I was just watching Jack and the Zombies, and something bugs me. Aku's watching Jack through his magic mirror, sees Jack throw a stick to determine what direction he'll go in, and Aku telekinetically moves the stick. Okay...if he could that through the portal, why doesn't he do the same thing with his omega beams and just fry Jack while he's asleep? Or just send a never ending stream of minions through the mirror, directly to Jack's location?
  • The first one likely wouldn't work. The second is what he does all the time. Jack just keeps killing them.
  • Maybe because it's not a reach-out-and-touch-someone kind of portal? If it was, Aku would probably have no problem doing just that...except that he likes to play with his food, so to speak. Anyway, telekinesis only requires that you be able to focus on the object you're trying to move. In other words, you only need to be able to see it; kinda the point of telekinesis, don't you think?
  • I don't think it was even telekinesis, it seems like Aku can slightly alter probability at a distance.
  • Aku clearly moved the stick after it had come to rest on the ground.
  • Perhaps Aku's destructive eye-beams don't work the same way as his telekinesis? The mere fact that all you've seen him move telekinetically was a stick suggests his powers are very limited in that way.

    Rock golem

• In the episode with the warrior trapped inside the rock golem... Why didn't the warrior try to leave the mountain, attack Aku's troops, and die in battle that way? He gets to go to Valhalla, and get some small revenge on the demon who trapped him in a And I Must Scream position. Nothing ever shows that he is tied to the mountain or anything...
  • Doesn't make for a very good episode though. I guess the golem was there long enough that if he could leave he would. Since by that point in time he hadn't we can reasonably assume, for whatever reason, he couldn't. I'm sure there is a great explanation for why this is but explaining all that wasn't important to the story, would you prefer an entire episode just explaining in detail the minute specifics of a curse cast on some poor one episode character?
  • More to the point, Aku is a sorcerer. An immensely powerful one. He wouldn't have fought - he'd have just smashed the warrior into atoms and sent him back into the rockbed and made sure he stayed that way.
  • I don't think he knows Aku is still alive and is currently in control of the world.
  • The Warrior isn't capable of leaving. He's trapped in the mountain by Aku's spell, which prevents him from leaving. Sure, he eventually gained the ability to (magicially? telekinetically? I'm not sure) move the rock around him to create a body and death course, but it's limited to a certain distance. If he eventually became capable of leaving he no doubt would have, either to hunt down Aku or find a warrior that could kill him, it would have been a lot easier and quicker than what he did do.
  • Perhaps he just wanted to die on his ancestial grounds of his people. Plus, he had set up some pretty impressive traps and hazards that he used to test warriors. He could wander around random and attack people hoping they were strong fighters, but spreading rumors of incredible treasures hidden behind a series of deadly traps in a mountain is a better way to ensure that only the most dedicated and hardy of warriors come to him.

    Jack and the Scotsman and the handcuffs

• Why exactly didn't Jack and/or the Scotsman just cut off the handcuffs in episode XI, instead of waiting for the humongous bullet?
  • Cutting a chain in half is not easy. Not even (I would imagine) if you're using super-duper magical swords to do it.
  • ...harder than cutting through armored, solid metal robots on an hourly basis with no apparent difficulty? The sword's cutting ability has only ever once been questioned, that I can think of, and that was against revolutionarily advanced war robots.
  • Yes, harder than cutting through armored, solid metal robots (potentially). Chains don't sit still when you hit them, and that blunts the impact. Also, it would have been an awkward angle to cut from. Also also, we have no idea what kind of super-awesome un-cuttable metal alloy those chains might have been made of.
  • Another thing, both of them wield two-handed weapons. The power of a stroke from a double-hander is from changed angle of your hands as well as the swing of your arm. The two of them being chained would have little arm swing and no hand angle, reducing or eliminating their cutting power.
  • Maybe they couldn't agree on who should be the one to cut the chain because neither one of them trusted the other not to, say, chop the other guy's hand off.
  • Rule of Cool: Jumping up and letting a huge bullet shatter the chain is way cooler than just cutting it.
  • This is most likely the reason. Given what both of these swords are capable of cutting through, a simple draw cut would have almost certainly gotten through the chain with any kind of logic and consistency applied. But that isn't as flashy.

    Aku being freed

• What was it that freed Aku from being sealed by Jack's father? At first I thought the seal weakened on its own after a few centuries, but Jack was shown to have been born just prior to Aku being defeated the first time. Aku is then shown coming back when Jack looks to be about four or five years of age. A really short amount of time for the swords effects wearing off enough for Aku to break free. I also don't recall it ever being mentioned someone intentionally freeing Aku. On a related note why didn't the Emperor just kill Aku in the first place instead of making him Sealed Evil in a Can? The sword seems to have the ability to destroy him permanently.
  • I always assumed it was part of some elaborate Gambit Roulette on Aku's part. Maybe he tricked Jack's father into thinking he was dead by sealing himself into the tree until a set of astrological circumstances were met. That way he can use the time in the tree to recharge his mojo, same as he did to jack, and then catch Jackdad off guard. O.K. not that brilliant, I just like to think that aku and jack are 12th level intellects and that the shows non-sequiturs are part of the elaborate chess game they play with one-another. Jack never get's back in time because Aku has put multiple levels of blockage in place that make most methods of time travel ineffective. Aku can't be assassinated because Aku's lair cannot both exists in a sub dimension and has it's entrances shuffled around the universe randomly, and aku never leaves said lair without everything planned out. Wow, I'm way off topic.
  • About the Emperor not killing Aku, he explained it in the very first episode: he thought that the sword would do all the job, and all he managed to do was to seal Aku away. When Jack expressed a similar view, he immediately corrected him, warning him that it was only a tool and that his mind would set the path to slay Aku in spite of his deception. Long story short, the Emperor tried and fucked up, but realized where he failed and told Jack how to do the job.
  • The first episode opened with an eclipse and the Aku-tree reacting to it in some way that undid the seal, setting him free.

    Poison arrow

• Speaking of Aku and Jack's father: what was with that poison arrow that brought Aku to life? The monks gave it to the emperor with the promise that it will finish the threat once and for all, so I guessed that it was blessed by the gods or something, but no: it was just some mysterious liquid without any explanation whatsoever. Giving consciousness to an all-powerful genocidal demon as a possible side effect seems like a pretty serious oversight on their part.
  • Delving into WMG territory, but it's possible that the Emperor's men tried to pull the same trick as the Gods did with the sword - imbuing a weapon with human righteousness to destroy the evil - but they failed. The elixir's creators did not have the pure heart required to damage the Black Mass, so instead, the arrow only imbued the formerly mindless substance with human spirit, without destroying its innate pure evil. It's also a possibility that the Emperor had an Evil Chancellor and the arrow was deliberately sabotaged.
  • Pure speculation: They thought the ooze was pure Death (since it was killing everything it touched), so they sought to counteract it with pure Life. But it wasn't Death, it was Evil, so mixing it with Life didn't nullify it, it just made something that was both alive and evil - turning it from a mindless ooze to a living being with a mind and name. Luckily, that wasn't for nothing: since it's alive now, it can now be killed.

    Jack and the Viking

• In "Jack vs. the Lava Monster." I was totally waiting for the Viking to, as the Valkyries took him to Valhalla, say to Jack something along the lines of "I will save a place for you in the mead-hall, my friend. I eagerly await your coming." But it didn't happen!
  • He knew Jack wouldn't die in battle, as we seen Jack will surely die from old age after ruling the his kingdom after beating Aku, that still surely wont prevent him visiting, though, with enough titles as he already has.
  • Jack isn't a Viking for one, and doesn't follow the Norse faith. Most likely there are three afterlives since there are three gods shown in the series, it's likely that Jack's people worship the Vishnu stand-in.
  • Just because three deities were shown, it doesn't mean that they're the only ones who exist in this show's universe; you're forgetting that the Greek Titans were also shown. Also Vishnu is a Hindu god, and doesn't have much of a following in Japan. The Japanese people worship the Shinto/Buddhist pantheon.

    Quicksand

• During the quest to get the time travelling jewel, Jack falls into a pile of quicksand. Why didn't Aku just let him sink? Aku explicitly tells Jack that he destroyed the stone to prevent Jack from going back through time. Well, he would have a hard time travelling back to the past if he is drowned by sand.
  • He's stupid?
  • Perhaps he has some degree of respect for Jack? Letting him die in quicksand probably would've been an 'unworthy' death for his ultimate opponent. There's also the possibility that Aku simply believed Jack could've got himself out of there. If he hadn't helped him, then Jack might've realized the trick, escaped, and now known Aku was tricking him, ruining the plan.
  • Think about it this way: By this time in the series, Jack has spent, let's say, a couple months in the world run by Aku. That means his fight against the dark lord could inspire others to tamper with time and wipe Aku's reign away. Remember, Jack was the only one who knew the location of the gem, and the test required to use it. As long as that crystal remained, so did the threat of Aku's destruction. Additionally, it could be that Aku doesn't want him dead yet; he wants him broken spiritually beforehand. Killing Jack in battle (letting him die while on a quest to stop him) would make him Martyr Samurai Jack. Convincing the warrior that his is a fruitless effort would be a grander victory (and almost happened in a later episode).
  • Kill him? Without seeing the expression on Jack's face when he realizes he's been tricked and used? I think not!
  • At that moment, before Ikra pulled him out, the look on Jack's face was one of rejection, not impending death. He was sad that Ikra seemingly abandoned him (she didn't miss a beat while running off into the distance). He probably had a way out of it, and Aku knew. This is the same guy who survived being hit by a car and blown up on a regular basis.
  • At that point, Aku still needed Jack's aid to locate the gem.

    Throwing Jack to the future again

• Okay, so why doesn't Aku, upon the very first time he has difficulty with Jack after having thrown him into the future, throw him further into the future? Any time Jack gains allies, Aku could throw him into a future in which those allies have aged to death. Any time Jack learns a skill, Aku could throw him into a future wherein that skill has effectively become obsolete due to the latest technology. Any time Jack's questing after a MacGuffin that'll get him back to the past, Aku could throw him into a future in which Aku's already found it and dealt with it. No, it probably wouldn't make good storytelling, but it'd make a modicum of sense; just saying, it'd be nice if they could at least provide some explanation as to why this doesn't happen, other than just assuming Aku's an idiot.
  • Maybe Aku can only use that spell once, or once per person. Of course, that's a pretty weak answer, so I submit the following as well. The first time Aku used that spell, he was on his last legs, and caught Jack completely off guard. Also, Aku seems to need to be there in person to cast that spell, let's just say that he does confront Jack again, and he tries doing what you say, Jack might be expecting it this time, and he would be able to react to it better than the first time.
  • Without knowing the default rules for time travel in the SJ universe - and without knowing the rules of Aku's particular style of black magic - how can we know the limitations of either? The fact that he doesn't is the only evidence that he can't. No, the real nasty move would have been to get Jack's sword from him - it was managed a few times - and then hurl the sword into the past.
  • That kinda happens in issues #11-15 of the comic books (or book 3 of the collection) and the result of jack not having the sword pretty much sends every single assassin and bounty hunter after him and his situation is pretty dire to say the least.
  • The time portal was a last ditch effort by a beaten foe on an opponent far stronger than him, Aku CAN do it again, but he'd have to get close to Jack to do that, and Jack wont fall for the same trick twice.

    The Four Seasons of Death

• Was "The Four Seasons of Death" a WTF? episode, or was that just me? Yes, some of it was very coolio, but what was with the whole spring part? Did anyone get that?
  • It might have been a Secret Test of Character, to see if anything can distract Jack from his quest. It might have been an intentional parallel to the "Summer" segment that began the episode - unlike that segment, the antagonist isn't a mirage and could very well entrap some other unlucky traveler in the future. It might even have been intended as something of a Subversion of the typical Jack formula; the nature sprite is one of the few antagonists that Jack never defeats/kills; he brushes the whole thing off as a hallucination.
  • Its just a visually interesting story, it doesnt have any deeper meaning.
• So was that little blue guy who tried to poison Jack in the fall segment working for Aku and trying to kill Jack, specifically, or was he just an independent mad scientist out to kill just anyone For the Evulz?

    Unleashing evil

• In the opening narration, Aku mentions that he unleashed an "unspeakable evil". It sounds like he's talking about an Eldritch Abomination, but the image is pretty much Aku. So he unleashed himself from a prison?
  • Aku IS an Eldritch Abomination, so yeah, that's exactly what he did.
  • The "unspeakable evil" refers to his actions. Not an entity.

    Ikra and Aku

• Was it supposed to be obvious that Ikra was really Aku because I'm not really sure honestly.
  • First time watching it I had no idea. The second time however, it is pretty obvious. Ikra shares the same colors as Aku (black, green, and red), the person Jack talks to at the start warns of great evil just as Ikra arrives, and the shape-shifting toward the end was a good giveaway (even first time viewers started to catch on by then). However this episode set up Aku's transformations and made them easier to spot down the line, making it more obvious now.

    Jack's sword, the innocent, and the evil

• Is Jack's sword harmless against an innocent, or is it useless in the hands of evil? I've seen it described as both on TV Tropes and I'm trying to figure out which is correct (yes, they're not mutually exclusive, but I doubt it's both).
  • If I had to guess, I'd go with "harmless against an innocent." While not the best reference, in The Aku Infection Jack (being possessed by Aku's evil) slashes at several of the salamander monks, but none die. However because Aku's evil is possessing Jack, if the sword was useless in the hands of evil, it wouldn't do any harm at all. To add to this, earlier in that same episode Aku-Jack killed an innocent robot, so the sword is able to harm at least some things when used by evil. It just can't kill innocent people I guess; the real question is "what is considered innocent?"
  • I remember the quote as "In the hands of evil, it can never harm an innocent." Meaning only a good person could harm an innocent with it, but an evil person can harm non-innocents.
  • This. If you think about the episode named The Aku Infection, Jack killed an innocent robot without any effort whatsoever, while when Aku was in charge, he couldn't even make a scratch on the monks defending the portal. (Not to mention the case of X9.)
  • As I recall there was one episode where Jack tries to kill a deer for food, and it turns out the sword can't cut it. So it's probably just that it can't harm the innocent no matter what the morality of the one who wields it is. Also, I think killing an innocent robot is allowed because the sword doesn't recognize it as a living being. Or maybe because the sword was forged long before robots were invented.
  • Or maybe, the sword could cut through that particular robot, because it was not actually innocent?
    • Or robots are not counted as living beings and therefore constitute a loophole in the sword's enchantment.

    Aku's spawning

• The entity that spawned Aku. Bizarre as the question may sound, is there any indication, besides superficial, that it was even evil in the first place? In those brief scenes that featured it, it was just roaming through cosmos, minding its own business, and those three gods chased it for no good reason! It even tried to escape, and only retaliated after being attacked. Couldn't Tartakovsky have it devour some planets or something, so that we would at least know it deserved being brutally murdered? Because otherwise I can't shake off a hilarious assumption that it was perfectly harmless or at least not overtly malicious, and Aku only came to be such a terrible being because those Jerkass Gods killed his parent, so he's taking revenge on their domain.
  • So in the comic that continues the story, Ra tells Jack (long story there) that the big black thing was a formless void of ultimate evil, and later he also use the word corruption when talking about it. Seems like they weren't guessing that the thing was evil, but did what the Aku pool did on earth, just on an intergalactic scale. We just never see that.
  • In "Birth of Evil," the formless entity was not just "roaming through the cosmos, minding its own business." It actively lashed out at the gods, grabbed one, and tried to corrupt/consume him. Had he been alone, it would have succeeded. It's only because there were three gods working together that they had a chance, and even then, all they could do was whittle it down, a little bit at a time, for a very, very long fight, during which a "tiny" piece escaped destruction and crashed to Earth.
  • Actuall, no. The gods attacked first, after the creature tried to flee from them. Grabbing and corrupting was only done in retaliation.
  • Perhaps the correct question is "was the space blob actually evil, or simply too dangerous to be allowed to continue existing?"
  • Probably both, considering what would be evil for us is causing harm intentionally, which the formless evil likely was not concious enough to have an intent, but what is evil for the universe/gods could be "a danger to all of the cosmos". It's corruption that we see it try to do to the Gods might fall into the former though, if indirectly. As for the original question, we are not shown The Black Mass doing anything on its own, but considering how utterly horrible Aku is, and that he comes from it, and that we have no real reason to see the Gods as untrustworthy or unneccessarily antagonistic (they also want to stop Aku, and help Jack, with or without Aku directly being the problem, if only briefly), this Troper feels that there's no reason to doubt what is implied to us about the Mass. Add in the above point about the small part of it corrupting everything, and it had no known conciousness at the time, it was likely attacked and (mostly) destroyed for solid reason that the universe not be smothered by it.

    Aku's fingers

• Aku's fingers. Sometimes there's four of them on each hand, sometimes there's five. Is it simply an instance of Off-Model, or am I missing something?
  • I can dismiss it as "...I, Aku, the shape-shifting Master of Darkness..."

    Aku's gender

• Why is Aku constantly referred to as a male? I highly doubt that an immortal being of darkness would care about such puny human concepts as gender.
  • That's the point. Since Aku doesn't care, he won't bother himself by correcting any wrong assumptions people have on that matter. Also, his beard and his voice are things usually associated to males, aren't they?
  • Maybe because he refers to himself as male? When challenging Jack to a duel, he explicitly says "man to man." Are you going to tell the Eldritch Abomination he can't be male?
  • To be fair, there's nothing saying an Eldritch Abomination can't be male in the first place.
    • Very true. Aku is, after all, "the shape changing master of darkness," and so can be be man, woman, both, neither... as Aku sees fit. Aku seems to regardless as male by default, and who's going to argue the point?
• Probably a couple of things:

  • 1) Sexless entities with no discernable traits of sex tend to be referred to with he/his pronouns (for example calling an animal a he despite not knowing if it's a male or a female). This is often the case for sexless entities in other fiction as well.
  • 2) It could have something to do with how Aku has the ability literally impregnante living beings.
  • 3) As noted above, Aku could also simply be male.

    Jack, the Scotsman, and the bridge

• When Jack first met the Scotsman, the two crossed paths on a bridge too thin for them to keep walking in opposite directions. They started arguing about who should walk all the way back to the side they came from, which escalated into a three days long fight. Thing is, to deal the first blow, Jack leaped higher than the Scotsman's head... So ,why didn't he just jump over him, which would have allowed them both to keep on walking towards their respective destinations ?
  • Given episode chronology, this had most likely happened before Jack learned to jump good, so he might have been afraid of accidentally missing the bridge and falling to his death (the Scotsman is not an easy fellow to jump over). Alternatively, since the behaviour of the Scotsman so far has raised some serious issues about his combat ethics, Jack might have suspected that he would pull some trick on him or just rudely dismiss the idea like he rejected his previous one.
  • The bridge didn't seem to be very resistant and some boards were easily broken during their fight.
  • Most likely a case of Honor Before Reason, especially since this scene is likely an homage to when Robin Hood first met Little John. Plus, Jack had suggested clinging to the underside of the bridge so the Scotsman could pass over, but the Scotsman shot that idea down on the grounds of he's wearing a kilt.

    Robot emotions

• Aku's robots have shown emotions like: self preservation, sadism, fear, happiness, and a sense of humor. Yet its said in X9 episode, the titular Hit Man Witha Heart was the only to receive an emotion chip, and thus have a sense of preservation. How does this work?
  • It could be that the regular robots have pre-programmed routines to follow, whereas X9 has the freedom to choose how he feels. Aku's robots enjoy the same destruction and cruelty that Aku indulges in; they fear death just like Aku does. X9 can form attachments beyond his programming; he's willing to take on a suicide mission to save Lulu.
  • X9 is an old, outdated robot. My impression when he said he was the only robot with an emotion chip is not that he's the only one who ever had one, but he was the only one at the time. In other words, X9 was the first robot with an emotion chip.

    Aku not knowing about the sword

• How would Aku not know that Jack lost his sword? Last time I checked, Aku has 24/7 surveillance on him (with the exception of holy/sacred locations).
  • After 50 years and who knows what happened when he lost the sword Aku probably lost this ability, there might be a reason why we don't see him in person.
  • We see Aku in episode 2; he's apparently very withdrawn and even depressed over the fact that Jack hasn't died of old age by now, as was apparently his plan. It's to the point that he's decided his obsession with killing Jack is unhealthy and he's taken a very hands off approach to it, and isn't even keeping up on surveillance anymore. Apparently all efforts directed towards killing Jack are being taken without his direct instruction at this point.
  • However, he apparently is aware that Jack has grown a beard, which is somewhat strange as the flashback indicates Jack lost the sword before he grew his Beard of Sorrow. If he was watching Jack long enough to find out about the beard then he should also know about the sword.
  • Well, when we first see Jack in Season 5, he does have the bear,d but he also has armor and such too. He could easily be hidinf the sword on his person somewhere, especually since the hilt and sheath are black like the armor. This troper assumed he simply was using the other weapons before resorting to the blade, before we find out he doesn't have it.

    Scaramouche spelling

• Is the robot bounty hunter named Scaramouch or Scaramouche?
  • Season 5 Episode 6 has since proven that they spell it "Scaramouche".

    Scaramouche's flute

• How does Scaramouche play a flute if he's a robot? Does he have lungs/ventilation valves like X-9 (a robot who can play a saxophone)?
  • He doesn't seem to be talking using a speaker so he probably can exhale in some way.
  • Also the flute was magical, the robot itself could've had some magic in it as well.

    Scaramouche not running

• Why was Scaramouche unable to run away when Jack was slowly walking over to him with the scimitar? Was it due to his sense of pride or was he too injured to get away?
  • He was probably too damaged to get away quickly.

    Guardian's portal

• According the season synopsis, apparently all of the time portals and artifacts that could return Jack to his original time are destroyed, but what about the Time Portal which is defended by the Guardian in episode XXXII? Surely the portal would still be intact?
  • Yes, kept by the Guardian and Jack doesn't have his sword anymore. So it's not something that could return him if he has to fight an unwinnable battle.
  • It's entirely possible that Aku killed the Guardian. Jack being able to beat Aku and not being able to beat the Guardian doesn't equate to the Guardian being able to defeat Aku. We've got no reason to believe that any weapon that the Guardian possesses is capable of harming Aku the way Jack's sword can, and without that, it doesn't matter how strong and skilled and tough the Guardian is, he can't beat Aku.
  • Or Jack just thinks that portal was destroyed. He probably got ground down after 50 years of searching for a usable portal and just assumed there weren't any left.
  • Also keep in mind in that episode Aku never once made any attempts on that portal. It could be he either doesn't know it exists or he figured it was a moot point. Aku never was the most reliable info source after all.
  • It's possible that portal is still open and operational, I'll grant you, but we have no particular reason to believe it is, either. With both Jack and Aku claiming that every time portal has been destroyed, I'd think the implication is for us to believe them. Jack seems certain to the point that I would believe he's checked. And Aku not being featured in that particular episode doesn't necessarily mean anything; there were several episodes that didn't feature Aku because he wasn't source of the conflict in every given episode. That doesn't equate to him not being aware of that episode as we also don't have any indication that his ability to remotely view Jack was being disrupted during that episode.
  • There's every chance Aku missed a few. Evil and powerful as he might be, he's been shown time and time again to not be omnipotent and is prone to the same errors as anyone else. He hasn't even realised that Jack's sword is gone for crying out loud. However, even if all the time portals are destroyed that doesn't necessarily mean they are gone forever. In The Aku Infection, the lizard monk tells Jack that while the portal of the episode was destroyed, the nexus still exists and in time it could be rebuilt. Of course the same may not be the case for all the time portals, but it's a possibility. Since Jack essentially has all the time he wants (and has already gone through 50 years of it), there should be some time portals that have been rebuilt/remade by now.
  • XCVIII Gives us a flashback of Aku destroying what he claims was the last time portal - it was one that hadn't previously been shown on the show. The suggestion was that Jack was re-checking each of them one by one only for Aku to have destroyed them right before he got there, just to mess with him. He had apparently destroyed enough that Jack believed him - I don't see why Jack wouldn't have rechecked the Guardian's portal being that he definitely knew where that one was, whether he thought he was up for a rematch with the Guardian or not, if he knew Aku was going after them that would be worth a look. As it stands, it seems clear that Jack has given up on going back in time to kill Aku; and now that he's regained the sword, is focused on killing him in the present. There are no hints or suggestions in the show itself thus far or any of the synopses provided for future episodes that there are any remaining time portals; that fix is gone and Jack is going to have to settle for ending Aku's reign rather than undoing it from the start.
  • It's still odd how Jack has never aged from his stay in the future. That alone suggests that his Fish out of Temporal Water status has to be resolved eventually. Whether or not that will happen in the finale is yet to be seen (and quite frankly would be odd to leave the above unresolved, but I digress), but once he destroys Aku his trip back to the past is all but guaranteed; it's only a matter of time.
  • Season 5 has shown that it's, for the most part, resolved.
  • Wrong kind of resolution; the one that gets him back to the past.
  • As it turns out in "Episode C"... even the Guardian's portal has been destroyed, and it's heavily implied the Guardian himself is dead...
    • I don't see any evidence in the episode to lead to that conclusion. I do see the numerous mega skeletons and giant robots that the Guardian has killed. Furthermore, the Guardian only spared Jack originally because an older bearded Jack contacted him (we never saw that) and told him don't kill my younger self. The Guardian's comment strongly implied Jack would return one day, defeat him, and use the portal. I think its pretty clear the creator screwed up. Or is planning a sixth season.
    • That isn't correct. The portal itself told the Guardian not to kill Jack, showing a picture of what was implied to be future!Jack who would be able to use the portal. The prophecy doesn't seem to come true, but the point is it was the Portal who saved Jack not future jack.

    Tall helmet

• Why does Jack wear such a tall helmet in Season 5? Wouldn't that make him a bigger target?
  • It doesn't really matter much, Jack's a One-Man Army. Besides, the big helmet/mask serves a dual purpose: protecting his head and concealing his face (identity).

    Vacuuming

• Aku has his floors vacuumed? Couldn't he just use his eye beams to instantly clean them?
  • Well he is acting like an Orcus on His Throne. Why do menial tasks like cleaning when you have minions to do that for you?
  • Even a God of Evil likes to keep a tidy lair.

    Finding Jack

• How did the Daughters of Aku locate and identify Jack so easily?
  • Scarily Competent Tracker is a thing. If I had to guess, they tracked down rumours about "the Samurai" saving that village in the first scene of episode one and followed the trail off his bike until they found him.

    Killing

• Regarding the killing of one of the Daughters; Hasn't Jack killed people before? It was never particularly explicit, granted, but I'm sure there were a couple episodes in the original series where he definitely killed bounty hunters who weren't robots.
  • Perhaps Jack is more shaken by the fact he had actually killed a young woman. In Episode 44, he did fight Princess Mira, but he spared her and wiped out the rest of the bounty hunters.
  • Up until recently Jack's magic sword was determining who was innocent and who was evil with absolute magical certainty, he's in a very delicate mental state with his own subconscious pushing him towards suicide and regular vivid hallucinations brought on by some pretty severe combat for fifty straight years, and as mentioned above unless they proved to be irredeemably evil he's always had something of a soft spot for women in general. This and his little Madness Mantra of how Aku's machines couldn't beat him because they were "just nuts and bolts" has just been completely blown out of the water.
  • According to this interview with Genndy Tartakovsky, the bounty hunters survived or weren't fully human. He admits he completely forgot the episode, though.

    Jack and the name

• After being recognized and referred to by name in Season 5, I wondered... how often has Jack been referred to explicitly by others as "Jack" without him offering the name himself? Rather than just "The Samurai"?
  • I recall kids calling him that in an episode where he broke his shoes, granted he was singing the intro song too.
  • Yes, his reputation precedes him to not just kids, but a whole Japanese family in "Jack's Sandals", episode 26, and technically a group of robo-bikers ran over his footwear while he soaked his tired feet in a lake- Jack only wrecked up the shoes that a generous salesman was trying to replace them with.

    Jack's spear

• In Episode XCIV, Jack plummets to the ground, and he's barehanded. So why does he suddenly have a spear when he wakes up in episode XCV?
  • He started off by fighting the Daughters of Aku with several wooden spears in the previous episode, and had who knows how many spares on hand hidden in the snow for surprise ambushes. He also dropped at least one out in the open in the fight, at which point, he started using the Daughters' own weapons against them and made no attempt to go back for the spear as the fight escalated to the treetops. He was probably lucky enough to fall where he could retrieve one.
  • Because he never actually had a spear in the first place, notice how the spear disappears when he yells at the crows, along with Ashi's body, and the blood trail? It's a subtle way of showing his fragile mental state.

    Rebel army

• Why the hell did the Scotsman and his army of rebels think it was even remotely a good idea to directly attack Aku himself? Not only is it common knowledge that Aku is virtually indestructible and can only be hurt by one weapon they don't have, but the Scotsman got 99% of his troops (including himself) massacred while achieving nothing even close to resembling a victory. This could only be chalked up to the Scotsman's fearless bravery getting combined with senile stupidity.
  • Aku hasn't been seen nor heard from in over fifty years, and the Scotsman assumed (correctly) that he was too afraid of Jack to be proactive anymore. Given the Scotsman's usual temperament, waiting fifty whole years to overthrow a cowardly, apathetic demon was showing phenomenal restraint on his part.
  • Also, while Jack's sword may be the only thing capable of killing Aku, there wasn't any proof that other weapons wouldn't at least hurt. He may have (wrongly) assumed that enough firepower would affect Aku like pepper spray or a taser; painful enough to utterly ruin someone's day, but short of death.
    • The backstory to "Jack and the Gangsters" back in Season 1 indicates there are magical forces on Earth still capable of driving Aku off or at least fighting him to a standstill.
  • More from a practical standpoint, they would be able to take care of Aku's mooks while distracting Aku himself. The Scotsman never really directly fought Aku (to my knowledge), and had likely assumed that his own magic sword would be capable of harming Aku (as many fans had also assumed). Basically, as long as they were not holding him back, it was better to have them there than to leave them to twiddle their thumbs at home.
    • We get to a look at what this plan should look like in episode CI- the army is capable of stalling Aku for some time while the guy with the sword goes in for the kill.

    Did Aku father the Daughters?

• How the hell did Aku have sex with the High Priestess without killing her? He is literally made of evil, oil and is practically a tree. Any reproductive fluid he has should be toxic as hell (to humans at least). Then again, this is a woman who walked off giving birth to seven kids one by one.
  • It's just a name, she probably had septuplets with some random guy and said they were Daughters of Aku. She probably doesn't even want to meet Aku, giving it kind of kills her whole dark cult when the guy complains like an old man.
    • Why the hell does anyone still think that "Daughters of Aku" is a literal name, when it is totally metaphorical? The very first episode of the season already established that they're just ordinary humans without any superpowers. If they really were Aku's offspring, they would look demonic and inhuman.
    • Well for one, The High Priestess has never mentioned anyone else being their father, leaving Aku the only potential patriarch. Second, The High Priestess at one point says "You will again honor us with your presence", which heavily implies Aku dropped by at one point and had his way with her.
    • No. That statement only implies that they've been waiting a long time to have an audience with their god, not a sexual encounter. As stated before, the "Daughters of Aku" is not only a figurative title, but they're normal humans, with no evidence of unholy hybridization.
  • While we have no idea who their father is, another (far more likely) theory is that they're somehow the offspring of Samurai Jack. Which is a potential (if cliched) plot twist that they could possibly reveal.
    • Jack is a potential father. The High Priestess could have seduced him; he is a normal man, albeit an extraordinary one, and a very lonely man, so for a beautiful woman to seduce him over the course of a few days is hardly impossible, or even far-fetched. Why would she do such a thing? Because she believes that only children of his could become great enough to kill him. Judging by how much closer they came to killing him than anyone else, this belief would seem to be true.
    • Jack and Ashi becoming a romantic couple seems to joss this theory, because otherwise it would be incest if they're related.
  • It's also possible that we won't find out who their Disappeared Dad is, because he's irrelevant to the story, if he isn't Jack or Aku.
    • As it turns out, Aku really was their father. He filled a cup with fluid that the High Priestess then drank, impregnating her.

    Ashi's suit

• Apparently, Ashi and her sisters weren't wearing black jumpsuits (or any clothes for that matter), but had their skin covered in burning hot charcoal. So... why don't Jack, the Dominator, or anyone Ashi met in Episode XCVII notice she's completely naked the whole time?
  • Also, since Ashi and her sisters covered themselves neck-to-toe in hot ash and charcoal so deep into their skin that Ashi had to remove it with a rock, wouldn't they eventually die from skin suffocation? Yes it's a real thing look it up.
  • That's a myth and they should be more worried about potential overheating.
  • Also why is her body not covered in scars or marked in some way? When she scrubs the ash off, her skin looks perfectly unblemished. The only logical explanation is that burning coal had magical properties.
  • I think it was tar (or a supernatural tar-like substance) and she was screaming more from the horror of the situation rather than burning. My guess is they boiled the tar to liquid and then let it cool off to a steaming sticky solid. Tar would stick to/stain the skin semi-permanently and dry so it doesn't wipe off. (Though her skin should be raw and red from scraping it off) And I like to think after the first go around the head priestess realized she hadn't fully thought this through and let them wear tiny black g-strings the next time.
  • Word of God said that they were not naked and it was magical darkness, so you can assume that it was thick enough to function as clothing.

    Character in graveyard

• Who is that character who helps Ashi find the graveyard where Jack is preparing to commit seppuku? Is it Kuni (the girl from the Haunted House episode)?
  • That seems the most likely to me, but I've seen people make a bunch of different guesses.
  • So, was it ever actually revealed who this was?

    Scaramouche's eyes

• Why are Scaramouche's eyes white in "Episode XCVII"? (They were originally blue in XCII.)
  • Dude got de-bodified, as he'd probably say. I think enough serious freaking damage was done to him that something shifting color isn't too far fetched? (That said, it could be a 'low power mode' or something.)
  • What's really odd is his eye color keeps waggling between blue and white between shots, so it's probably an animation continuity error. Although his eyes do turn back to blue when he borrow others' bodies, which makes it seem like having a body causes his eyes to change color, they also turn blue at intervals when he doesn't have a body.

    Ashi's name

• Does Jack know Ashi's name?
  • Yes, he addresses her by name in "Episode XCVIII".

    Jack in Space

• So the Season 1 episode "Jack in Space" has Jack attempting to travel back in time by utilizing faster-than-light travel. Why did he never try this again? Unlike portals it's not really something Aku could destroy. And sure, Jack may not know enough about how spaceships work to do it himself, but surely there's someone in Aku's intergalactic empire who could help him out. Or hell, since he is immortal and could spend decades studying if he needed to, why not try to learn how to do it himself? Either way, this seems like something he should have tried again.
  • IIRC, using "faster-than-light speeds to travel through time" was simply a theory the Astronauts suggested, we don't know if it would actually even work. Also, Jack may not have the time, resources, and assistance to try out a crazy space-time experiment; note that he never once leaves Earth for another planet throughout his journey in the future.
    • Really? I recall him taking a spaceship into space in an episode once.

    Atom bomb

• What if Aku dropped an atomic bomb in a place where Jack is with a blast range so large he couldn't get out of the way?
  • Jack would jump in a refrigerator, leaving his clothes to get destroyed in the blast while he remains unscratched. Aku waves his fist in the air vowing to get revenge while flying into the sunset. Like it says in the first Headscratcher on the page, it's possible that technology like this was never developed or was actively suppressed by Aku (who was capable of destroying cities without the need for WMDs, giving him no real incentive to let anyone else have the possibility of using them.)
  • Probably no one knows anything about nuclear energy in that reality.
    • Futuristic technology is prevalent in this world. Scientists probably have the skills and knowledge to make an atom bomb, but the need to do that never arose.
    • Also, Jack doesn't even age anymore. It's possible that he would be just straight up immune to radiation at this point since after 50 years, he hasn't developed any debilitating diseases, cancer, or injuries. Plus, he survived a fall from orbit. On top of this, Jack has survived Aku's eye death beams that turned even the Scotsman to ash. Cartoon logic is in effect here to some extent, but Jack is so unbelievably strong and tough that Aku probably wouldn't accept anything less than Jack's head on a plate as proof that he's actually dead. If that explanation doesn't suit you, then maybe Aku just banned nukes since, if he had one, it could be stolen and used against him. Aku's brand of rule utilizes a lot of anarchy and lawlessness as a terror weapon. It suits him personally to allow chaos to rein as it disunites the world and amuses him greatly. Hell, an army marched on his palace unopposed until Aku attacked it, himself. He doesn't even bother with guards anymore, but he has scientists and people delivering gifts to him without him even knowing they are there until they're literally standing in his central chamber. And if one of those supplicants suddenly had a change of heart and decided to denonate one of those nukes in his palace (because, honestly, where else would he keep it since Jack and some other warriors can break into his other facilities at will)... Well, let's just say if Aku gets upset with having mud tracked into his palace, he definitely won't appreciate a nuclear firestorm and ass tons of radiation flooding the place and ruining the carpet.

    High Priestess and Ashi's sisters

• How did the High Priestess know Ashi's sisters were dead?
  • When they failed to return, she probably followed their trail and found all their corpses.

    Lulu

• So... um.... Whatever happened to Lulu (sweet thing)?
  • Who knows? That's a mystery for the ages. Whether Aku killed her or not, she would invariably be dead (at least from old age) after the 50-year Time Skip.
  • Unless something happened to prolong her life somehow... we've seen humanoid dogs, too... Who knows?

    Sword harming the goats

• How was Jack's sword able to harm those three goats?, I thought the sword could not be used to harm the innocent.
  • The goats were turned into monsters by Aku trying to kill him and given Jack had fought against countless non-robotic monsters in the past, this was never a problem. It was the fact the goats reverted to their true form upon dying with Jack's blade in their bodies that made him realize he used it to murder innocents and it ended up abandoning as a result.
  • The exact words were "In the hands of evil, it can never harm an innocent". So a non-evil person can harm innocents with it.
  • I think more likely than not, the sword can be used to defensively kill any aggressive attacker, even if they're an innocent being turned into a violent monster.

    Ashi and the Omen

• How come Ashi is powerful enough to literally solo an entire army of orcs by herself, but she is unable to defeat the Omen?
  • It's implied the Omen's power is directly linked to Jack's emotional state. When he fights Ashi, Jack is teetering on the edge of the Despair Event Horizon and the Omen is practically invincible. But once she talks Jack out of it, he defeats the Omen with trivial ease. Also, we don't really know how powerful the Omen is to begin with. It's entirely possible that he alone is more powerful than the monster army Ashi faces in Episode 7.

    Aku traveling back in time

• Why doesn't Aku travel in time and kill Jack when he was a baby?
  • Because it would make the story completely meaningless.
  • Jack's father was still around, and was capable of protecting his child from Aku.

    Staying at the bottom of the pit

• Why didn't Jack just stay at the bottom of the not-so-bottomless pit instead of meditating topside where he was clearly vulnerable? No one would think to find him in the hole because they'd assume it's bottomless.
  • Well first of all, it's likely the High Priestess had some method of tracking Jack (it seems pretty unlikely she was just wandering around aimlessly with an army and just happened to stumble upon him). Secondly, why would they assume it's bottomless? Of course it's got a bottom somewhere, the earth doesn't just have holes straight through it. Third, hiding out at the bottom of a hole would be an extremely poor defensive position if they were discovered -Ashi would have basically no way of attacking the bad guys from that far away while all they'd have to do is drop a bunch of large, heavy objects down the hole.

    Sword abandoning Jack

• Why did the sword abandon Jack for slaying the Goats? He didn't just assault a helpless critter out of spite, Aku had turned them into aggressive and dangerous monstrosities. Jack was getting slammed into stone walls hard enough to bleed; killing them was a legitimate act of self-defense.
  • This is especially glaring when one also considers the daughters of Aku; Ashi lampshades latter on in that episode that it's her mother who bears the blame for her sister's deaths because she turned them into weapons, rather than Jack who was simply defending himself. Why doesn't that same sentiment apply to the goats?
  • Normally, Jack would work out a way to defeat them without killing them. This isn't the first time (or the last) Aku manipulated something innocent into trying to kill Jack. The blue children are another example, they are a legitimate threat but could be defeated without needing to slaughter them. Jack simply let his anger and frustration get the better of him, causing him to lash out without thinking first. The goats were magically transformed, thus it stands to reason they could be magically returned to their normal form (as they do when they are killed). In comparison, the Daughters of Aku were brainwashed the mundane way, making it difficult to save them. The fact that he managed to save one is impressive enough. In addition, he didn't know they were brainwashed until Ashi's rant after they were all defeated-when he should have realized that the rams had been magically transformed immediately. Basically, he shed innocent blood when it could have been avoided, without even trying to work around it.
  • Jack could have retreated from the Monster Goats. He'd done so to avoid fighting many times before. Even if he'd been forced to eventually fight them because they were The Determinator, he'd have at least tried to avoid killing them. In the case of the sisters, they'd demonstrated they were determined to track him down and kill him and Jack had given the remaining six of them the opportunity to walk away, which they had refused. There's also the matter of motive: when Jack fought the Goats he was enraged and not thinking clearly—he clearly didn't care what he was fighting, he had to strike back at something. When he fought the sisters, he knew what he was doing and the consequences of it, but had no choice.
  • Jack had for all intents and purposes snapped by that point. He wanted something to take his aggression out on, and if Aku was going to keep dodging him then the evil goats that Aku brought up would provide some catharsis instead. He was also not sound of mind at that point either, not realising what he had done until after the goats were dead. If you really think about it, had Jack gotten at least a few swipes on Aku there he probably would've felt at least a bit better.
  • Imagine if Jack killed any corrupted and aggressive being he found in the series in self-defense. The Rave Kids would've have been totally slaughtered.
  • Which would've been a problem had Olivia's father not pointed out that they were only children. (Okay, mostly teens actually but it still applies.)
  • Harming innocents in self-defense, perhaps it wouldn't have. But Jack was angry, far too angry, and didn't try to run from the fight or avoid any blows that he didn't have to- he deliberately went for killing blows, when he had no reason to with those opponents, and in some of the most cruel, brutal ways to boot. Is it any wonder that he was no longer worthy at that moment?
  • I always thought the sword abandoned him after the goat massacre because of Jack's resulting state of mind, not because of the act itself. Jack was so upset by what he did, he gave into despair and self-loathing. The sword didn't care about what he did before that but about the fact that he gave up. It was the giving up and hating himself that made Jack unworthy of wielding the sword, not the slaughter of the goats.

    Jack's aging and the last time travel

• Was it possible that when Aku snatched back Jack midway through the time portal, it could have affected Jack's aging stopping?
  • Possibly. But Aku doesn't seem to believe this, seeing as he blames the initial time travel (i.e. his spell that sent Jack to the future in the first place) for Jack's biological immortality, which he says during his therapy session with himself.
• And now that Jack is back in his time, what happens now? Does he continue aging like he would have? Is he still immortal? Or will it be like what happened to Aang (i.e, the fifty years he spent 'frozen' in time catch up to him and he dies in just a few years)?

    Sending Jack to the future, part 2

• When the Final Battle arrives, what's gonna stop Aku from sending Jack even further into the future before Jack gets a chance to kill him?
  • Given that Aku had a Nice Job Fixing It,Villain! moment when he realised that his time displacement desperation move practically gave Jack biological immortality,i HIGHLY doubt he will attempt the same move again (plus Jack will be PREPARED for that trick again should he ever try to attempt it)...unless of course if it can somehow reverse his aging process.And whose to say doing it again wouldnt give Jack a blank cheque to a Superpower Lottery anyway?He cant age now so it might even give him an unwanted bonus that can be Aku's undoing
  • Perhaps it was a one-off spell?
  • The first time Aku used the time portal, Jack had a few seconds to land the killing blow before it actually sucked him in, and only stopped because the casting of the spell itself distracted him. That will likely not work a second time, merely resulting in the spell either fizzling with the last spark of Aku's life being snuffed out, or flinging Jack into a future where he is hailed as a martyr for dying in battle destroying a forgotten evil.
  • Or, alternatively, Aku would be subject to Villain Forgot to Level Grind, because he hasn't faced Jack in 50 years. Jack has already grown in skill, so Jack will likely anticipate any trick Aku has.
    • When Jack comes back to the past, he does so right after Aku had sent him into the future. He completely surprises Aku, who at this point has already suffered a brutal beatdown and is out of power and tricks, and assaults him immediately, with a sword that seems to do even more damage than before... Yeah, Aku didn't really have any chance of pulling the same trick again.

    Aku's scientists

• Isn't it a little dubious Aku's human scientists haven't aged in Season 5? They're clearly the same ones from "Tale of X9". Yes, I know animated shows have a tendency to make human characters not show signs of aging when time passes in-universe, but in this series, all characters age unless there's anything supernatural involved. There's no way the scientists could look the same as they did 50 years prior unless Aku used his magic to prevent them from aging.
  • They look nothing like the new scientists. In the X9 episode, you can see a line up of the scientists around 3:18, and pictures of the other scientists are readily available. There is one who looks vaguely alike, but its mostly just the blue hair.

    Episode numbers

• An out-of-universe one: the episodes in season 5 are titled as sequential numbers in Roman numerals. That's fine, we all understand Idiosyncratic Episode Naming. But why start at 92? There weren't ninety plus episodes before it, and it doesn't seem to correlate with anything in or out of universe.
  • Apparently they wanted to represent the time skip by skipping a bunch of episodes too-with the implication being that Jack was still being Jack between when we last see him and the first episode of season 5.
  • The skip is kind of exactly that of 40 episodes.

    Ashi making new clothing

• I'm surprised that no one else has questioned this. After Ashi removes that ash coating from her skin, she makes a fine dress out of leaves from nearby plants. How does she know how to create clothing, if she's never worn anything in her whole life? And fashion design would be totally irrelevant to her military training for hunting down Jack.
  • Perhaps more to the point, why would a girl who's apparently never worn a stitch in her life feel the need to make clothes?
  • Ashi may be naive, but she isn't stupid. Every person Ashi has encountered thus far has worn clothes, so she must have inferred that wearing clothes is the norm. She may not understand WHY people wear clothes, but that they do is unmistakable
  • The question was asked poorly. Why would Ashi feel the need to make clothes, especially given her total ignorance of the fabric arts? Why not simply find some detestable schmuck (in this world, there's rarely a shortage), flatten him, and take his clothes? Or her clothes, if Ashi's picky about that. We see clearly later in the series that the girl has exactly no modesty.
  • She may have no modesty, but as stated above, it's basically the norm in the world that people wear clothes. If that weren't the case, she would've gone around naked with no issues, but since the norm is clothes, she makes herself an impromptu set for that reason alone. Even if she doesn't understand the specifics, adapting herself to the situation would be her first choice.
  • Or maybe she just wanted to wear something pretty (not motivated by modesty but by pleasure). One of her "weaknesses" growing up was her attraction to beautiful things, after all. If she likes the way some clothes look on people in this world and wanted to wear something beautiful on her body, it would be in-character... and probably empowering, symbolic of adopting the new identity she's decided to embrace.
  • Also, as to how he can make clothes, she's basically just wearing bandages made out of leaves and vines. Medicine and first aid probably was included in her studies especially since she probably needed those skills to survive the numerous beatings her mother and her followers gave her and her sisters...

    Name of Jack's clothing

• This may simply be the product of not understanding the names for traditional Japanese dress as well as I thought, but Jack refers to his robe as a gi? I always thought what Jack wore was called a kimono, with "gi" being the term used for the sort of white-jacket-and-trousers outfit worn when practicing judo, karate, BJJ etc.
  • That's properly a keikogi, "practice clothes". Gi just means "clothes/clothing/dress". Which means, amusingly, that Jack was entirely correct. He told Ashi to take his clothes.

    Destroying the tree

• After Aku's first defeat, why didn't the Emperor use the sword and destroy the tree Aku was encased in?
  • It's possible that he assumed that imprisoning Aku was the best he could hope for. Maybe he assumed that's what "dead" looked like for Aku, maybe he was afraid that any further attack on Aku would just wake him back up and start the battle over again. It does raise an interesting point that while we know the sword is the only thing that can harm Aku, we don't actually have any evidence that it can actually kill him, what with Jack's dad failing to do so when he had it.
  • Episode CI confirms that in order to destroy Aku, he had to be struck down while immensely weakened or his essence would prevail. He had the strength to run away when Jack's father sealed him in the sword the first time. When Jack himself sealed Aku in the sword and thrust it into the ground, Aku's essence was cleansed away and destroyed as the sword pierced him one last time.

    Aku unaware of the cult

• What evidence is there that Aku is unaware of the cult that raised the Daughters? It's clear that the High Priestess has a grossly overdeveloped idea of the cult's importance to Aku, but she does say "grace us again," indicating that he has visited them at some point, and so is at least marginally aware of them.
  • The sentence is as goes, "You will again honor us with your presence". It's not out of the question that Aku perhaps did visit them, but it's just as likely that he showed up one day to destroy a city or something and the High Priestess, bearing witness to his "presence" decided, "I'mma build a cult around that."
  • It's not 100% clear, but my assumption was that her comment about Aku gracing them again was not referring to her cult specifically, but rather, the world in general. Aku went in hiding after destroying the last time portal, most people haven't seen him in decades. The High Priestess knows this is because he is trying to avoid Jack and hopes that if Jack is eliminated he will show himself again.
  • Well never mind then. He actually did visit the cult. He even gave them some Aku goop in a cup as a parting gift, which was ultimately used by the High Priestess to create the Daughters.

    Aku's essence

• If the Daughters of Aku were born with Aku's essence (who has Complete Immortality save for his Weaksauce Weakness towards Holy Burns Evil items), wouldn't that mean that the six remaining Daughters of Aku are not actually dead? They were not killed with holy means (e.g. Jack's magic sword).
  • The Ultra-Robots had Aku's essence inside them too, which Aku put into them in the exact same way he put it into the cup. And while Jack did destroy the majority of them with his sword, he destroyed several of them by tricking them into destroying themselves or one another with their weapons and it STILL 'killed' them just as effectively. While it's likely that Demon!Ashi has Aku's full array of powers, simply having Aku's essence doesn't seem to be enough to give one ALL of his powers, just a large boost.
  • Keep in mind that Jack killed Ashi's sisters long before Aku could activate their powers. So for the time being, they're going to stay dead... unless Aku decides to magically resurrect them as his demonic henchwomen.
    • Aku doesn't know about them. He's deduced he has one daughter, and figured how that happened, but that's because she was right there and he could sense her. No one's told him about the others.

    The Daughters' training

• The Daughters are crack athletes, unsurprisingly, but they're also highly skilled divers and swimmers. So, how and where did they learn that?
  • Their temple must've had a swimming pool. It's as simple as that.

    Can the sword even kill Aku?

• Aku has taken a lot of punishment from the magic sword including but not limited to amputation, cut in half, decapitated and he's even been bisected with it. Can Aku actually die? If the sword was capable of actually killing Aku, why didn't Jack's Father just finish the job when he had the chance? Can Aku truly be destroy by the sword or only trapped within it?
  • In "The Birth of Evil" Ra says the sword possesses the power to "destroy this evil force" (referring to Aku) implying it can indeed kill him. He can probably just take a lot of punishment because he's AKU, THE SHAPE-SHIFTING MASTER OF DARKNESS -even when up against the one thing that can hurt him, he's still a god-tier Eldritch Abomination and is not going to go down easily. As for why Jack's father only managed to seal him away instead of killing him, I don't think there is a clear answer. Maybe he just didn't stab him enough times.
  • It seems that the only sure-fire way to kill Aku is to completely prevent him from escaping and destroy any bit of him.
  • Aku himself has directly stated that the sword is the only thing that can slay him.
  • Pretty much confirmed in Episode CI.

    Ending to Season 5

• Ashi uses her newfound powers to transport herself and Jack back to the moment Aku originally sent Jack to the future and Jack kills him. This causes Ashi to fade from existence because she was never born. So if she ceased to exist because Aku died before she was conceived, then how exactly could she have returned Jack to the past to kill Aku in the first place?
  • Because that is how time-travel works in this setting-she continued existing for some time after Aku was erased (at least long enough to set up a wedding with people from around the world able to attend using sail technology). Is possible that the Gods did something to keep the timeline stable, or the magic of the portals work to prevent paradoxes, but whatever the reason its just how time-travel works here.
    • It's also possible that Aku's time portals work by creating stable timelines. If Samurai Jack and Ashi had used a normal time machine or any other time travel method, it's possible that she wouldn't get erased from existence.

    Aku not following Jack and Ashi

• After Ashi used her powers to create a time portal to send her and Jack back to the past, why didn't Future Aku just make a time portal for himself and follow them to prevent his downfall?
  • Because he was killed in the past by Jack, thus Future!Aku was erased and can't follow Jack to the past.
    • Aku at the very least didn't vanish right after Jack and Ashi went back to the past, and if what happened to Ashi is any indication, he probably didn't cease to exist for a while. Which IMO is actually a pretty good final punishment for Aku, spending agonizing days not knowing when the changes in the timeline would catch up.
  • It's possible the time portals won't allow you to travel into a time where you already exist. Jack and Ashi arrived after Aku had thrown Jack into the future, so Jack never overlapped himself. Aku in the future couldn't go back because he was still in existence.

    The Spartan King's return

• Wasn't he bedridden at the end of Episode 25 in the future? Unless that's an identical descendant in Episode CI, did he just get better?
  • It was in the future, at some unspecified point possibly after this fight. Given his speech implies he never saw Jack again (and that it implies none of the other Spartans did either) its possible its just not canon. If it is still canon, then it must be referring to the final battle were he apparently vanished (and would imply that the rest of the future still existed).
  • To be honest there are some differences between the king in the original spartan episode and the one we saw, so if you asked the creators they would probably say it was just a near identical looking descendant.
  • OP here after a rewatch of "Jack and the Spartans". It's likely that it's the son of the king we saw in episode 25, because the old king had a distinct facial scar this one doesn't and said after his time came, his son would be king. That's probably his son all grown up and around the same age as his father now, and he has a matured voice that sounds just like his father's.
  • It's also possible that it's a grandson or perhaps one of the king's later sons. Nothing is to say that the 1st son, the one in episode 25, didn't die during the 50 year time skip. Kind of a dark thought, but they are Spartans. At minimum, the king's son in episode 25 would be 15 or 16, so he would be around mid 60s in the final battle against Aku so it's entirely reasonable that it could be a different descendent (or usurper or some other claimant if the king's immediate family line died out without a viable heir) who we see in the future. Any way you slice it, the Spartans as a whole still felt loyalty to Jack regardless of who the king was at that point.

    Aku Keeping The Sword

• Aku should have known by now given the countless years he has fought Jack that he is a resourceful mofo who can even the odds, with or without his sword. Having watched episode CI,one question comes to mind; why in Odin's name didn't he just get rid of Jack's sword by chucking it into space or throw it in a volcano where he could never reach it?! Keeping your only known weakness in the CLOSE PROXIMITY OF YOUR MORTAL ENEMY is pretty much 11 on a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of stupidity!
  • Aku's not that bright, and has always valued theatricality over efficiency.
  • He is the mustache twirling type of evil, not the cold calculating and pragmatic kind. Besides, we know it wouldn't have worked. Jack was capable of meditating to get it back one time, if he could do that again with a clear mind it would probably take no time at all. Aside from that, the inside of his tower was the most secure space he could keep it. Throwing it into space or a volcano risks that someone else eventually gets it, locking it in his tower means they would have to get through him to use it (which they can't do without the sword).

    Inconsistency in Episode CI

• In "The Premiere Movie" we see that Jack's dad is a malnourished, decrepit slave and Jack's mom has greyed significantly. However, in "Episode CI", when Jack finally kills Aku (around the same time Jack's father was enslaved) they look exactly like their younger selves (albeit still a bit aged.) What gives?
  • Aku is dead, he feels better and is getting better nutrition. And hair dye is a very old concept, as are wigs.

    Ashi's delay

• Why didn't Ashi fade away the moment Jack killed Aku instead of still being able to live for what had to have been a few days, if not months, later?
  • Pretty sure that's just Rule of Drama. There really isn't much consistency to how the time travel works in Samurai Jack (Or in most kinds of Time Travel fiction). I'd make a Hand Wave but to be honest I'd rather just stick with the Doylist explanation.
  • Perhaps the rules of time travel in the series work like in Back to the Future, where there is only one active timeline but any changes made by a time traveler have to "propagate" through it and are not instantaneous.

    What happened to the Jack sent to the future at the end?

• When Ashi opens a time portal to the past, they arrive right after Past!Jack is sent to the future. After Aku is killed, what happens to the Jack Aku managed to send into the time portal?
  • It becomes a stable time loop, there is the main time line, and then the point where jack gets sent into the future happens as a branch that eventually loops back to the main time line into the final episode. It would look like this ___O___
    • Wouldn't there be 2 Jacks in the future? Let's say Past Aku sends Past Jack to the future, and Future Jack kills the Past Aku, taking Past Jack's place in the past. Wouldn't Past Jack be sent into a peaceful future where Future Jack is an old man? Sorry if this is a bit confusing.
    • If Time Travel worked that way in this story, yes, there could be, but this story functions on rules similar to Gargoyles' Phoenix Gate. There is no "alternate timeline" to the one we saw or multiple possibilities we didn't see; Jack was thrown into the future, spent fifty years, then returned to the past 50 years ago, and neither of the two Jacks ever were/ever will be in a place different from where they are/were/will be that we saw. (The adjective "implied" and adverb "canonically" apply to everything in the preceding statement.)

    Aku throwing Jack further into the future

• Why doesn't Aku try the same move on Jack in the future and sends him further into the future allowing Aku to continue to rule without Jack trying to kill him?
  • Because Aku will just have the same problem he had the first time around—stuck with dealing with an ageless Jack FOREVER. After Jack is absent for a thousand more years, he will come back again to try and kill Aku.
  • Granted, if he could do this, eventually he would send Jack to a point where the earth has been consumed by the sun as it goes supernova. Maybe he doesn't do that because he doesn't *know* that's what's going to happen - assuming that's what would happen in the Samurai Jack verse - and thus assumes that he'd be stuck dealing with Jack forever, but it's also possible that *he* can't send Jack further into the future for whatever reason.
  • It's also possible that Aku can't "aim" where he sends Jack. Jack was supposedly launched into the future while still in Japan. Aku didn't even know Jack had landed in his time period until he heard rumors of the Samurai. It's possible that he just simply forgot to what time he sent Jack or he could have been more precise if he had taken more time to compose the spell, but it's unlikely. 1. Aku's magic doesn't follow any clear set rules. 2. Aku is a chaotic being and is frequently surprised by how his magic interacts with the world just as other people are (his "flu" possessing Jack, the birth of the Daughters of Aku, and his spell making Jack The Agelsss being three instances of him taken by surprise by his own magic). 3. Jack not only ended up in a random time, but he was really faraway from where his homeland was. It took many episodes before he stumbled across the ruins of his ancestial home. 4. That's clearly not a common spell that Aku uses. There's a chance that he used it multiple times that we don't see, but Aku isn't exactly the type of person who experiments with his powers empirically. If he flings someone to the future, he just goes back to whatever he was doing before he was interrupted, not giving the faintest crap where his opponent went to after he launched him forward. 5. Even if Aku was willing to experiment or hone that spell in the thousands of years between the past and the future, he had no reason to believe that he had to. He believed full well that he could easily kill Jack in the future where he would be much stronger. He never thought that he might be wrong and that he would need to practice to succeed or kick him to another future. And all this is justified because 6. since we can assume that Aku can't or just didn't remove the random effects of spell, he might just send Jack straight into his future self's palace, allowing Jack to kill him in his sleep. And 7. Jack was found by Aku in the future because he didn't go to ground, starting his heroics almost immediately. If Jack was smart the second time, he would hide his identity in the second skip and Aku would be paranoid wreck waiting for Jack to resurface while Jack be sneaking up on him any damn second and he would never know it. During the first skip, Aku barely knew Jack, basically considering him his good version version of the villain of the week. After years of fighting Jack, he became a major source of fear for the tyrant. Aku rather know during which time period Jack is stuck at and not wait for his second resurfacing.

    Why send Jack back to the past?

• Why have Jack go back to the past? Doesn't that defeat and cheapen the whole message about coming to terms with loss and moving on so that you and everyone around you can have a brighter future? Yes, I know that was Jack's ultimate goal for the series, but did Jack not decide an episode ago that he was willing to move on from the past and be okay with finishing Aku in the future? Plus, Jack didn't ask to be sent back to his own time.
  • Jack didn't decide to move on, he was forced to. He still wanted to go back in time and fix things, but as far as he knew, it was no longer possible. Failing that, he still wanted to defeat Aku in the future to salvage the world that was left, but it was never his first choice.
  • Yes, but it was not Jack who made the choice to go back in time, it was Ashi. Hard to say if it would've been Jack's first choice when the possibility reopened itself again. Wasn't a major theme in the fifth season about making peace with your past and living with your failures in order to move on?
  • It was kind of his idea. He was the one who noticed "Ashi, you have Aku's powers!", Ashi immediately realized the implications of this and put them to good use.
  • He also had stopped aging from being sent to the future, and after 50 years of it, he had enough. And if Jack stayed this way even after Aku was slain, there's the painful possibility of outliving his descendants if he chose to stay in the future.

     Jack's Allies vs. Aku

• How exactly did all of Jack's allies manage to rally at Aku's lair and launch an attack so quickly? Unless Aku actually spent hours trying to decide what would be the best way to kill Jack, there's no way all of his friends would be able to launch a full-scale assault mere minutes after seeing Jack captured (unless they all live in extremely close proximity to Aku's tower, which isn't likely).
  • Clearly they were travelling with the speed of plot.
  • Or Aku played 52 episodes of adventures for them to watch following his introductory narration...

     Aku in Africa

Why didn't Aku go after Young Jack himself while Jack began his training in Africa?

• Aku didn't recognize who Jack was until their first fight, so he didn't know Jack existed until then.
  • Then why did Aku hired the Evil Chief and his flunkies to capture Jack if he didn't know Jack exists?
  • IIRC, they were simply there to capture and enslave the tribe, not to get Jack. Aku ultimately created a dystopian world by the time Jack resurfaces in the future and we see early traces of this already when he rescues his people from Aku's mooks. With that in mind, it's not out of the question that his world conquest has already begun spreading to Africa through some corrupt connections, albeit minor.
  • Then why did the Evil Chief create a fire image of Aku and says "the great evil spirit" has promised them great treasure if they deliver "the little child of light skin" (aka Jack) to him?
  • So... Aku did "go after Young Jack [by proxy] while Jack began his training in Africa" and failed. (We've seen that he strongly prefers sending minions to kill Jack instead of doing the pragmatic thing and attacking him directly.)

     Whatever happen to that shadowy kid who helps Ashi finds Jack in Episode 6?

• I might have missed an episode or something, but I don't recognize if the shadowy girl that helps Ashi finds Jack is a character from past seasons who is among the many cameos in that episode, or an entirely new character? If so, what happens to her after that? She just kind of disappeared after she helps Ashi and there's no mention of her again. We don't even know how she knows the location of Jack when nobody else did.
  • Its generally believed to be a cameo, but its not entirely clear (some think it is Kuni from the haunted house episode, for example).
  • Will it be appropriate if I put this under the What Happened to the Mouse? trope?

     Why that ending?

• Jack is a husband and a widower (sorta) on the same day. He defeated his nemesis, but his wife is gone. Why not a cheerful ending?
  • A bittersweet ending was a better fit with the show's overall tone.

     Ashi's Powers

• When Aku died, Ashi felt it, and it was apparently pretty unpleasant. So, did she retain her special powers after that? Or was she reduced to being "merely" one of the greatest athletes and warriors in existence?
  • Probably not. If the Aku essence inside her disappeared, then it's likely that all the abilities Ashi inherited died with Aku. Not that it matters much, considering what happens to her later on.
  • And if the same thing applied in the future, Ashi would not be able to send Jack back to the past once her powers went away.

     Finale's Abandoned Timeline

• So. Jack and Ashi go to the past in the middle of the final fight with Aku, where all of his allies had rallied against the beast. We are told again and again that the ONLY thing that could stop Aku is the sword Jack wields. So, what the heck?? In logic, this timeline shouldn't exist anymore after Jack defeats Aku, right? So all of his friends stopped existing, right? So he didn't actually save anybody, he just erased them all entirely. OR, he left that timeline for a new one and they both exist... in a stable loop where the future Aku would never be defeated, leaving everyone to suffer eternally in the timeline Jack abandons. Or something like that. But if that one is true, then Ashi shouldn't have disappeared because she's from an alternate timeline... Honestly, is anyone else trying to figure this out, or have we all left it as 'weird Samurai Jack logic'?
  • Honestly, the creators probably didn't bother trying to make sure it was all 100% logical and consistent. But generally, the show seems to run on Back to the Future logic -There's only one timeline, and that timeline can be changed. When Jack returns to the past and kills Aku, he changes the timeline, so the future he visited doesn't exist. It is possible that his friends are now living happier lives in the new, Aku-less future or they may have just all never been born. Even in the latter case though, Jack still saved everyone in the past, as well as the billions of people who will exist in the future and the hundreds of years between the two eras who would have been killed or enslaved by Aku in the 'original' timeline. They just may not necessarily be the same people he knew in the future.
    • Well in that case, what happened to the other Jack that was sent to the future? If it's one timeline then he wouldn't be returning to the past to defeat Aku because Aku doesn't exist in that future, right? But in Back to the Future, Marty almost disappears because things change in the past so much that he doesn't exist. So, by that logic, the Jack that returned to the past with Ashi should have disappeared, too, because his own past changed so much that, like Marty, he shouldn't exist...
    • So in regards to the original post; Samurai Jack's ending seems to simultaneously run on both a single timeline where the future Jack existed in is erased altogether (because of Ashi's disappearance) and a fractured stable time loop where every other timeline is an Aku Dystopia. Original Jack now exists in Timeline B, the Aku-free Timeline, while the second Jack, who was sent to the Aku Dystopia, is in Timeline A. But like the original post says, this makes it sound like Timeline A will never be rid of Aku and so all of Jack's friends and allies are doomed. Clearly these two things can't happen at the same time so... I'd go with 'weird Samurai Jack logic.' Honestly, they just wanted to get rid of Ashi to make things unnecessarily sad imo.
    • There's only one Jack. The one we see getting sent to the future in the finale is the same Jack from the first episode. Jack doesn't change the timeline until after his past self is sent to the future. So that Jack would have had 50 years of adventuring in the future before meeting Ashi, returning to the past and killing Aku. The thing is, even though those events are chronologically in the future, from Jack's perspective they are in the past (meaning they are things that happened to him previously). The Aku timeline doesn't cease to exist until he's already gone through all of that.
    • So that means that Jack has to exist outside of time, so he can't personally be effected by the timeline shift. Otherwise, like said above, he would have changed the future so much by defeating Aku that there wouldn't be an Aku to defeat in the future. So past!Jack wouldn't need to return to the past, and future!Jack wouldn't exist, like Marty in Back to the Future.

     The Cult of Aku

• Does anyone have any idea how the High Priestess' predecessor ever got the idea that Aku is a benevolent entity? They're the only group we ever see that gives Aku reverential worship.
  • She could have been brainwashed by Aku himself at a young age. It wasn't exactly rare for Aku to attempt to sway children to his side, whether they liked it or not.
• What did the High Priestess plan for the Daughters to do after they killed Jack, assuming she'd thought that far ahead?
  • Cults aren't known for lucidity or benevolence. The High Priestess would have most likely try to find more enemies of Aku for the Daughters to kill.

     "You're back already?"

• Past Aku's final words were funny, but it doesn't make sense. Why would he say that? He didn't know Jack would return to the past/present.
  • He no doubt assumed San Dimas Time was in effect. Aku's vastly powerful and can be very intelligent when he takes the effort, but he's usually a bit dim.
  • Or to put it in simpler terms, he did send Jack to the future but assumed that he had miscalculated and only sent him 10 seconds into the future.

     The Scotsman being overshadowed

• Why were the Scotsman and his daughters completely looked over in favor of Ashi? They barely had a role at all! He's Jack greatest and most iconic ally for Pete's sake!

     The Daughters in Winter

• Episode XCIV takes place at the end of fall, XCV at the start of spring. Considering how pig-ignorant they are of the greater world, unable even to recognize a deer, how did the Daughters of Aku survive the winter?
  • Maybe their...uh..."catsuits" kept them warm?

    Hiring Tara Strong and Grey Delisle

• Tara Strong performs Ashi in a voice that sounds identical to Grey Delisle's. I constantly forgot it wasn't Grey Delisle doing that voice, comparing the character to Princess Azula and such. Not complaining (it's a great, fitting voice and a great performance), and not surprising, since the actresses are friends trained by the same mentor... but why did the show hire both of them for the 2 most prominent female roles this season when clearly one of them could have done both? In the scene where Ashi confronts and kills her mother, their voices sound almost exactly the same, just like one actress playing a dual role. Is this an unplanned coincidence, or is there some subtle symbolism in the performances and/or casting choices I'm missing?
  • Simple: The people in charge wanted similar but not identical voices, to best represent the two being mother and daughter, so hired the two performers. Remember, they also hired Kari Wahlgren to voice two of the other Daughters.

    What if Jack did commit Seppuku?

• Even if Jack did go through with his Seppuku, not all should've been lost, right? The three gods held onto the sword those many years, so shouldn't they still be able to find another warrior worthy to wield the sword and defeat Aku?
  • Theoretically. Though there probably aren't many people both pure enough to wield the sword and skilled enough to defeat Aku with it, especially in the Crapsack World that is the future. The gods never gave it to anyone else during the 50 years Jack was without it (and the centuries if not millenia he was lost in time) or otherwise intervened to stop Aku -Whether that's because they knew Jack would eventually succeed, there was never any other viable candidate, or they were just lazy is unknown.
  • First of all, the millennia Jack was lost in time? That's because the sword was travelling with him, so both the sword and Jack became unstuck from time itself, and the gods wouldn't have had it at the time. I was under the impression that the gods existed outside of time, and that if Jack did go through with his Seppuku, they could still search every year between the time Jack disappeared and the time Season 5 takes place for a warrior worthy enough to receive the sword. But if there was any other viable candidate other than Jack, obviously the Scotsman is a spirit, so Ashi would've been a close second. She has effectively achieved purity of heart by overcoming the evil she grew up in, and obviously, her skill nearly equals Jack's. Even if the gods don't know Ashi's connection to Aku (or alternatively, if they did know), they could've given her an enchantment during the "bestowment ceremony" that would prevent Aku from unlocking her demon powers. Plus, with Aku rejoicing that Jack is dead, Ashi could still strike at him and catch him off guard before both of them even discover she's his daughter.

    Ashi always being easily distracted & unfocused as a child

• Okay, so I remember watching the series, and there's one thing that bothered me about young Ashi. So The High Priestess always subjected young Ashi to (harsh) physical discipline for getting easily distracted by nature (peeking outside, playing with ladybugs, etc.). So how come after the brutal beatings, young Ashi still allows herself to get distracted?
  • Beatings are a surprisingly poor method of modifying primary aspects of someone's personality.

     Bounty Hunters going after Jack for a promised reward from Aku.

• So how come Bounty Hunters still attempt to go after Jack even after the others who already did have ended up seriously injured or dead after doing so. They don't care about their own lives? Also, why would they even think that Aku would even reward them with anything, given the times he's betrayed everybody he's worked with?
  • Egotism, denial and greed.
  • Aku may be evil, but he's not completely untrustworthy: he repaired Scaramouche as a reward for telling him about Jack's missing sword. And considering Jack is Aku's number one threat, his bounty is likely to be unfathomably large.

    The killing blow

• How exactly did Jack kill Aku by stabbing the sword into the ground with Aku trapped inside? When his father did the same thing, Aku was only sealed into a tree. What did Jack do differently?

    The fate of the other sister who fell

• In Season 5 episode 3, Jack fights six of the sisters, stabs three, and throws the rest of them off a cliff before falling himself. Both he and Ashi survive, and he finds the body of another in the next episode, but what happened to the final sister? Ashi may not have fallen as far since she was dangling at the full length of her chain, but Jack fell the full height of the cliff and suffered no permanent injury, so it was by no means a certain death.

    What killed the sister at the start of episode XCV?

• In Season 5 episode 4, Jack finds the body of one of the sisters he had thrown off a cliff, yet both he and Ashi survived the drop without damage. She also seems to have left a trail of blood, implying she was cut or stabbed (if the blunt trauma of the fall was enough to result in that much blood, Jack and Ashi would have become Ludicrous Gibs ). What finished her off?

    Magic weapons

• It's been shown that Aku can be harmed by Jack's sword, since it was forged from the righteousness of Jack's father, and that regular weapons have no effect on him. So can Aku only be harmed by magic weapons, or is the sword truly the only thing that can kill him? If it's the former, could the Scotsman's claymore have dealt damage to Aku? And in CI, if Jack's allies had time, couldn't they have enchanted their weapons with Celtic Magic or the local equivalent. If the former is true, ignore my question.
  • Something from CI that supports the former option: In that episode, the Aku clones were visibly worried when the Scotsman and his daughters showed up. Also, the Scotsman's bagpipes seemed to hurt Aku, and caused Ashi to be hurled away from Jack.

    Aku's location on Earth

• The fragment of the Black Mass that became Aku was shown to be responsible for the impact that killed the dinosaurs. But that impact occurred in what is today Mexico, so why was the evil forest that spawned from it in Japan when Jack's father fought it?
  • Either Aku moved the evil forest into Japan, or he landed in Japan in the universe of Samurai Jack.

    Why wait for Jack to grow up?

• The Emperor met with all of the other kings and chiefs around the world and planned to have them all train his son to eventually defeat Aku, but by that point Aku had consolidated his power and spread his influence over the globe. Wouldn't it make more sense to just give the sword to an experienced adult warrior (Many of Jack's teachers would do) and have them fight Aku instead?

    The Scotsman's daughters

• How can all his children be daughters? Surely a man who managed to produce this many kids would have an equal quantity of sons, right? Furthermore, considering that a pregnancy lasts nine months, and The Scotsman has a full 29 daughters, then even assuming mom always conceived the next one the very day she popped out the previous one, the oldest daughter would still be nearly twenty two years older than the youngest. So how do they all look the same age?

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Why Should Samurai Jack Go Back to the Past

Source: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Headscratchers/SamuraiJack

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