The anime world is buzzing, and The Elusive Samurai Season 2 ‒ Episode 3 has become the centre of attention. With fans across the globe debating every detail, this latest update is one that no otaku will want to miss.
The Story So Far
I have to admit that I am of two minds about The Elusive Samurai's overall direction this run. On the one hand, I can't help but get the sense that we're starting to see the creeping symptoms of Too Much Goddamn Shit Is Happening Syndrome, what with all of the fresh characters and narrative developments that the show is juggling just a few episodes into the run.
We already met nearly half a dozen fresh bad guys just a couple of weeks ago, and here we've got Yorishige dropping a trio of fresh Hojo-clan retainers for us to add to the growing roster of names and confronts to keep track of. Then again, the show makes such a glorious farce out of all the nonsense that these heroes and villains get up to, so I can't exactly act like it is failing in its duties to entertain us.
The best comparison that my broken brain can conjure up is this: Watching The Elusive Samurai is basically the modern anime equivalent of catching an installment of The Muppet Show on the telly back in its heyday. Sure, the show technically has a narrative to tell, and there are plenty of concrete narrative goals for its characters to accomplish, but let's be honest: The real reason we're here is to watch the colorful troupe of freakish idiots cause chaos and make funny confronts until we double over in laughter.
We get the usual cutaways to our villains as they slaughter innocents and make grandiose monologues about their evil intentions, but it is impossible to take this literal gang of killer clowns seriously, and I mean that in the most complementary possible way. Even our heroes are little more than a rag-tag box office haul of vaudevillian street orphans who just so happen to be lethally skilled with traditional Japanese martial arts and military tactics.
The fresh allies we meet this week are no less ridiculous. General Unno, for example, is a 30-Year-Old Virgin who gets his superhuman stabbing powers from all of the pent-up sexual frustration that he has stored up over the decades. He announces this fact very loudly to his underage siblings-in-arms, and the show even throws in a few random shots of live-action metal workers handling a cauldron of molten lava to emphasize the raw, piping hot potential energy swelling up deep inside this man's humongous balled-up fists.
If all of that sounds like made-up nonsense that would have made Jim Henson and his Muppeteers chortle with naughty delight behind those velvet curtains, well, you've clearly missed a lecture or two from Osawa Koichi, the esteemed research expert from The Japan Institute of Imaginary Sports Science. For the love of God, people, do your due diligence and educate yourselves about the proven medical and military benefits that come from locking that thing in your pants up tight and starving it to death.
This seemingly limitless font of energy from which The Elusive Samurai draws its goofy spectacle is probably why I can still be so charmed by the series even when the narrative doesn't give me a whole lot to work…
What happens next is anyone's guess, but one thing is certain: this development has added a fresh chapter to an already fascinating entertainment saga. Stay tuned to TeraMovies for all the latest updates from the world of cinema.
