“This should be exciting,” I remarked to my wife while settling in to watch the sixth and final episode of the first season of Last Samurai Standing. “I’m expecting some impressive battles.”

She chuckled. “I think that’s a pretty safe assumption,” she replied.

“True,” I conceded. “But I had similar expectations with Shōgun.” The point being, just because it’s the finale of a show centered on combat doesn’t always mean action is guaranteed. However, when an episode is titled “Mortal Combat,” like this one, you can be pretty sure there will be some thrilling fights.

And wow, does this season finale deliver on that promise.

While the episode is packed with more than just fight scenes, the action and our group of protagonists are divided between two main locations. One scene unfolds at the festival by the shrine, where Shujiro and Futaba are drawn. Aerial views reveal the stunning choreography of dancers moving in concentric circles, with Futaba among them, as they revel in the festivities.

Until, that is, Bukotsu shows up with his bastard sword to start slicing up civilians and pick a fight with Shujiro. An opening flashback reveals that the two men last met as the smoke cleared from that beach massacre that ended the reign of the samurai. Bukotsu, mad as a hatter even then, forced a reluctant and traumatized Shujiro into fighting; Shujiro, or Kokushu the Manslayer if you prefer, defeated Bukotsu, giving him those nasty facial scars. But the so-called Manslayer spared his opponent’s life, despite his pleas for death and subsequent vow of vengeance. This is why the Savage Slasher has been gunning for Shujiro this whole time.

The two men fight their way through the panicking crowd — as is consistently the case on this show, innocent bystanders really need to take “stop gawking and just run in the opposite direction already” lessons — in a battle with many memorable moments. Futaba, devastated by the deaths of the innocent, takes up arms to try to stop the monster herself; she is taken hostage, then freed by the deft Shujiro.

In a shot that seems, well, impossible, the two men race, duel, and tumble their way down a huge, sloping stone staircase, slashing and hacking all the while. They then make their way into the festival’s fireworks tent, where the heat of their combat makes their blood sizzle on their sparking swords. The sparks set fire to the structure, then launch the fireworks, which explode around them in an Empire Strikes Back–style shower of white light. 

Burning alive and running in slo-mo like the guy in Spike Jonze’s video for Wax’s “Southern California,” the two warriors plunge into the nearby river to douse themselves. Bukotsu, whose psychopathic murderousness cloaks a black, bone-deep depression over the end of the samurai, makes one last move, and pays for it. After blood gushes from his side in a pulsing fountain in classic samurai-movie fashion, he says he is finally happy, and dies.

Of all the season’s battles, this may be lead actor, producer, and action choreographer Junichi Okada’s masterpiece. The staging he and director Michihito Ochiba come up with, multiple times, had me grinning in sheer bloody delight. That one slo-mo zoom on the two men in the exploding fireworks tent? Jeez louise!

Meanwhile, Iroha is stalked by the ghostly Gentosai in a fight that owes more to horror movies than samurai ones. Gentosai pursues Iroha from room to room in a cavernous house, stabbing at her slasher-style. He chases her slowly but inexorably, implacably, unstoppably, like the original Terminator or the entity from It Follows. With his sepulchural sighing, his shaggy hair dangling in his face, and his final big fight scene taking place near a well for crying out loud, he’s like Sadako from Ring’s grandfather.

In the end, Iroha is rescued by her samurai-school siblings Shikura and Sansuske, who narrowly escape death at Gentosai’s hands themselves during a two-on-one fight staged in balletic bullet-time. After they escape and regroup with the injured and recuperating Iroha, the three vow to unite all their surviving siblings and take Gentosai down once and for all.

This would of course include Shujiro, who’s on the move with Futaba. It also would mean finding Jinroku, the cowardly lion of the crew, who we see as he comes face to face with a purple-and-black-clad killer who’s clearly being set up to be the next season’s answer to Bukotsu. 

But in a development that had me shouting “No!” at the screen, we learn Gentosai has help, too. Kyojin, your friendly neighborhood ninja, was the one who supplied Gentosai with the siblings’ location. Shinnosuke, his formerly adoring sidekick, is aghast. So am I!

As for other samurai of note, Kamuykocha is the first to make it through the next checkpoint. And Sakura, the scarred ex-samurai turned chief enforcer of the Kodoku game-masters, plays a momentous role in the events of the story on two separate occasions. First, he’s the man who springs Bukotsu from prison after his participation in a failed rebellion and subsequent disappearance off the grid. 

Second, he assassinates the goddamn Home Minister.

In real life, Lord Okubo was, in fact, killed by samurai, so it’s not that huge a stretch, but it still comes as an enormous shock. The gnarly sight of the Home Minister’s blood squirting out of him in pulsating squelches drives home the horror of the moment. Okubo is murdered on the orders of none other than Kawaji, his own police chief, for the crime of potentially getting in the way of the Kodoku. If these guys are willing to go far enough to change the course of Japanese history, what chance do our heroes have?

As Kawaji, actor Gaku Hamada delivers one of my favorite performances on the show. Looking like no one so much as a Japanese version of Tom Lennon’s Lietutenant Dangle on Reno 911!, his affect is all the more frightening for his unassuming appearance. He seems like exactly the kind of weird little guy capable of orchestrating a coup in order to further his plan of killing and terrorizing people with impunity for the perceived good of the nation.

In a scene that echoes the slo-mo moving-vehicle face-off between Avon Barksdale and Lieutenant Daniels in The Wire, Shujiro and Kawaji actually face off, as the latter’s carriage drives past the former on the road. This time, however, the cop is the unequivocal bad guy, and the outlaw is the clear hero.

For all that I’ve gone on about the way the action is staged, the way the show is cut deserves mention, too. Thoughtful, almost dreamlike edits seamlessly weave Lord Okubo in the present day, worried about Kawaji, with Lord Okubo in the past, fighting with Kawaji over whether or not to arm the police and put down the shizoku once and for all, as Kawaji wished. (You can tell the exact moment he made up his mind to go rogue, with his back to the camera.) Similarly strong montage marks Shujiro’s connection of Futaba dancing around the bonfire, with his own children happily playing, with his daughter’s corpse burning on her pyre. The Gentosai/Iroha chase is almost entirely a matter of tight slasher-movie editing.

Smarter than its silly English-language title would suggest — in Japanese, it’s God of War, which is much cooler — Last Samurai Standing isn’t trying to pretend it’s blazing new trails. Whether it’s samurai in Japan, gunslingers in the American West, or Jedi in the Star Wars galaxy, stories of the last warriors and the dying of their ways are common across multiple genres. What isn’t necessarily common is the skill with which this particular familiar story is being told. A deft blend of bloody samurai-movie action entertainment and murky rumination on whether a way of life ultimately dedicated to death is worth preserving, it has me eager to return to Tokaido Road next season.

Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.