Jujutsu Kaisen Season 2

Episode 42

I'm honestly glad that we got those little timestamp titles near the end of “Right and Wrong" because it helped put into perspective why some major elements of this Shibuya Incident Arc have failed to resonate with me, even when we're getting a lot of individual pieces that I genuinely enjoy. As of the end of this week's episode, we've gotten to roughly 11:30 PM on the night of Halloween, give or take ten minutes. When Gojo first arrived through the veil in Shibuya and kicked off this whole mess, it was, what, 8:00 PM? This means that Jujutsu Kaisen has managed to cover a little over three hours' worth of in-universe time over the last three months.

If you don't include the time spent on commercials and opening/ending credits, we've spent around four hours of real-time to cover the three-ish hours that have gone by since Gojo stepped foot into Shibuya. Factor in all of the slow-motion, narration, monologuing, cross-cutting, and interstitial stuff that we never even see on screen, you can maybe see how this season has sometimes felt like watching events at an agonizingly slow pace. This arc has not been boring. The issue is that there has just been so much happening in a massively compressed amount of time, which makes it impossible to know where to direct my emotional energy. It's like watching a fifty-car pileup at .0001x speed. There's no shortage of carnage to behold, but there's also only so much chaotic stimulus that a guy can take before his brain just starts tuning things out completely, if only out of a desperate sense of self-preservation.

This is all my very long-winded attempt to reflectively analyze why “Right and Wrong" left me feeling somewhat cold by the end, despite featuring the death of one of my favorite characters in the whole damned show, not to mention the long-awaited rematch between an emotionally shattered Yuji and the ever mirthful Mahito. Out of everything we've seen go down throughout the season, this should have been the episode to finally get me feeling something about the Shibuya Arc. Nanami's tragic final daydreams; Yuji's fury being unleashed all at once; the claustrophobic and moody battle with Mahito. It's all stuff that should work like gangbusters for me.

Yet, despite everything, all I could find myself saying once the episode ended on the arc's hundredth cliffhanger was, “Damn, that sure sucks for Nanami and Yuji. And probably Nobara, come next week. I guess we'll see what happens next week, then.” The only conclusion I can reach about why such a theoretically powerful episode came and went with such little fanfare would be that this arc has simply exhausted me. There have been so many twists and deaths and half-finished stories crammed into just three hours of this story's timeline, but we've yet to get the full scope of what it all is supposed to amount to. It's just car after car slamming into one another, with no end in sight.

There was good stuff here, though, despite the issues that the larger structure of the arc creates. Nanami's death did impact me more than any other emotional beat of this storyline, so far, even if the contrast between his Malaysian vacation dream and his violent death was so on the nose that it threatened to cross the line into self-parody. This is largely thanks to Kenjiro Tsuda's expert voice acting, which sells the very human and mundane pathos at the heart of Nanami's character, which has always been his greatest appeal; it keeps the whole sequence from becoming too shmaltzy for its own good. I also was quite fond of the mood of Yuji's fight against Mahito. The occasionally bland background art and wonky CGI notwithstanding, the scrap made good use of the frenetic situation and the confined geometry created by Mahito's powers. I just wish it all added up to more. This should have been one of the biggest bombshell moments of the whole season, if not the entire show thus far. Instead, it just feels like another drop in an ocean of spectacle and plot machinations. I guess we'll see what happens next week, then.

Rating:

Jujutsu Kaisen Season 2 is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.