Jujutsu Kaisen Season 2

Episode 46

I think you can perfectly sum up the issues I've been having with this entire Shibuya Incident Arc with the way that Jujutsu Kaisen uses Miwa and several other side characters in this episode. Here we have a character that has more or less been given a trajectory for her emotional arc: She discovered MechaMaru's feelings for her too late to intervene in his untimely death, and now she is one of the Sorcerers on the ground that is moving in to try and solve the mess in Shibuya, which allows her to step into the spotlight and harness that anguish to kick some unholy ass. It's a bog-standard way to handle this sort of minor character, but it's also a handy way to inject some emotional stakes into the proceedings, which JJK has desperately needed.

So, what does "Metamorphosis, Part 2" do? It has Miwa make that grand entrance onto the battlefield to clash with Brain Monster Getou, even going so far as to give her one of those little flashback monologues that tells the audience that shit is definitely about to go down, and then…nothing. Getou easily blocks the attack, Miwa has to be saved by the likes of Kusakabe and all of the other even-more-secondary-characters who have been given literally nothing to do this season but stand around being helpless, and then she isn't featured once in the remainder of the episode. Choso shows up to scream about how Brain Monster Getou is actually his cursed-spirit father and how Yuji is, his long-lost littler brother, which I guess would make Brain Monster Getou the secret villain father of our protagonist, which…okay? Sure, whatever. The show has never given us a reason to care about Yuji's family and origins outside of his Grandpa, who died before the first episode of the first season was even done, but why not? Maybe Yuji has an evil Brain Monster Getou for a dad, or maybe it's just JJK doubling down on the Todo gag all over again. Who knows! Who cares?

I want to double back to Miwa, though. You might be thinking to yourself, "But James, didn't we just spend two whole paragraphs establishing that Miwa's scenes in this episode were completely irrelevant to both the plot of this episode and the larger story of this arc?" Why, yes, Hypothetical Reader, we did establish that, but it's that baffling pointlessness that I find so maddeningly fascinating. What the hell was even the point of including Miwa in this episode or even this whole season? Sure, I guess there could still be a scene coming up that pays off all of the time spent developing her and MechaMaru's tragic dynamic, but let's be honest with ourselves and admit that there is absolutely nothing that has occurred throughout the last eighteen weeks that gives us any reason to believe that will happen.

So, if we go by the logic that this arc has been operating in and assume that each and every piece of this plotline's overly complicated puzzles exists purely to service the onslaught of endless battles that Jujutsu Kaisen has become, what does all of the time and effort spent setting up the Kyoto School's arrival—and the whole Miwa/MechaMaru subplot that has been the sole emotional hook of that entire segment of the narrative—end up contributing to this fight against Brain Monster Getou? As best I can tell, the result is that a minor heroic character that we know virtually nothing about unsuccessfully tries to attack a major antagonist character that we also know virtually nothing about, except for the fact that he's super duper strong and evil, which…shows us that he's strong and evil?

I'm honestly at a loss here, and I know that folks probably want me to talk about the rest of the episode. Still, the whole reason I'm obsessing over this one stupid non-moment is the same reason that I can hardly be bothered to dig into the rest of this episode's contents. Not only am I finding it increasingly difficult to care about anything happening on screen anymore, but I'm also beginning to wonder if Gege Akutami ever cared that much. The previous arcs of the show weren't subversive masterpieces of epic proportions or anything, but those earlier stories carried so much mood, heart, and humor with them and did so with such effortless coolness, that I was convinced that Akutami must have gone to great lengths to plan and craft every scene and set piece meticulously. Now, though, it feels like we're stuck in the half-formed improvisations that come from someone frantically trying to build the tracks in front of a moving train.

I can imagine the pitch to the Shonen Jump editors now: "Um, I guess now the villain is actually an immortal body-snatcher that also used to be, like, the Voldemort of Sorcerers, yeah! And he's so scary and evil that he'll just eat old bad guys like Mahito and turn them into…Uzumaki! He'll turn them into Junji Ito Uzumaki spirals! And, uh…maybe he's also Yuji's dad! So, he's like a body-snatcher Voldemort that's also Darth Vader that's also the other super evil bad guy that I already established, and then he's gonna fight everyone, and they're all gonna be, like, 'Oh no, he's too strong!' And the other, less powerful bad guys already killed, like, all of the cool characters everyone likes, so you know that this new bad guy is, like, ten times stronger. I could probably spend a dozen pages alone describing the intricate mechanics of his special moves…"

Can you tell that I'm exhausted with JJK, yet? If all you're interested in is more incoherent spectacle, then sure, this episode has more of that; Brain Monster Getou goes boom, Choso goes boom, Yuji probably goes boom somewhere in there, and I think even that one witch girl gets a boom in at some point. If you were ever once like me, though, and you sincerely held out hope that Jujutsu Kaisen had anything interesting to say in between all of those booms, then you'll probably be feeling pretty burnt out by now.

(Okay, to be fair, turning Mahito into a Junji Ito Spiral was pretty sick, so screw it, I'll toss in an extra half-star.)

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.