Samurai Jack 2.07

Jack and the Three Monks

- the episode opens with Jack fighting beetle robots who are defending a magic portal; Jack defeats the robots but the portal is destroyed by one of the robots before the fight is over
- Jack is frustrated and wanders off looking dejected
- a breeze comes along and sweeps his hat off his head and it goes sailing away; he chases it and eventually recovers it but not before meeting three monks who are headed up a nearby mountain
- Jack decides to join them on their quest to reach the mountain top; along the way he fights a group of goat men, a mountain ogre or troll or possibly a yeti, and the elements; sometimes he travels with the monks other times, usually when he is fighting, he is on his own
- eventually the weather gets to be too much and he slips and falls on to a ledge; once again he feels frustrated and dejected; he has a flashback of his parents and Aku, from when he was a boy; possibly these were scenes lifted directly from the three-part story that opened season one; he gets up and starts climbing again and reaches the top of the mountain only to discover that there are other taller mountains in the distance
- Jack screams at the top of his lungs that he is coming for Aku and that he will never give up

- this is a plot light episode; it is very much about Jack falling down and getting back up again; it is very much about showing that Jack is human and can be knocked down but that he doesn't allow setbacks to break him
- the monks for the most part seem to glide everywhere they go; the exception is one of the last time Jack sees them from a distance climbing the mountain ahead of him; it isn't clear what happens to the monks in the end but that doesn't bother me because the episode is really about Jack
- it took me three tries on three different nights to get through this episode; the first two times I was just too sleepy when I turned it on and ended up missing big portions of it