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Even the most hardened assassins sometimes retain a flicker of humanity. All it takes is someone untouched by such darkness to help reignite that spark.
The latest installment of Last Samurai Standing picks up with the intense confrontations that concluded the previous episode. At police headquarters, Kyojin showcases his remarkable ninja prowess, evading armed foes with agility reminiscent of Batman. He navigates the building with precision, using parkour to ascend stairs and leap through a window, barely escaping a final shot. Shinnosuke follows closely, determined not to lose him.
Elsewhere, Shujiro engages in a fierce duel with Sakura, an old comrade marked by scars. Their battle is a whirlwind of rapid strikes, each blow intended to be lethal. As the fight escalates, their swords splinter under the relentless force. They incorporate whatever weapons they can find, from hook-and-chain to spear, until Iroha, using a smoke bomb given by Kyojin in the last episode, creates enough chaos for the nearly overwhelmed Shujiro to flee.
Our group of five reconvenes to exchange findings. Kyojin and Shinnosuke reveal that the police force is entangled with Kodoku, though as Shujiro points out, not all officers are involved. The murder of a Kyoto policeman at the temple in the series premiere suggests some are not complicit. They surmise that only the national Police Bureau possesses the influence required for such an undertaking.
Simultaneously, Shujiro, Iroha, and Futaba have returned from the Mitsui bank, which they discovered is the resting place for the bodies of slain contestants, delivered by cops clad conspicuously in Kodoku uniforms. This revelation leads them to suspect that the powerful zaibatsu behind the bank, and possibly others, are bankrolling this exorbitantly costly operation.
Going up against other samurai was bad enough. Going up against the Police Bureau and big business? Good luck, gang — unless, that is, Shujiro, once a high-ranking officer in the army, can get a message to some of his old political connections. (How Kyojin knows all this about Shujiro is a mystery to him.) Shujiro is able to get a telegram to the Home Minister’s assistant, Maejima (Tanaka Tetsushi), who proves loyal and reports the samurai’s cryptic request for protection to Lord Okubo as requested.
Meanwhile, Okubo’s other loyal assistant, Shinpei (Ayumu Nakajima), burns the midnight oil to crack the cipher being used in telegraphic communications between the game’s organizers. A European cipher manual proves key, because the man who devised the code trained in Europe: Kawaji, founder of the Police Bureau himself, revealed last episode to be the game’s central Organizer.
Kawaji’s role in all this runs even deeper. Once a samurai in the same company as Shujiro and Sakura, it was he who opened fire on Shujiro’s victorious forces during that battle on the beach, wiping out both sides. They have quite a history, in other words, just as Shujiro and Sakura do.
They’re not the only people involved in Kodoku with a keen interest in Shujiro’s fate, obviously. Bukotsu, the mad samurai leaving a trail of dead bodies everywhere he goes, is out to get him. His samurai-school “siblings” — including Iroha and her friends Shinsuke and Shikura (Taichi Saotome), whom Kyojin tries to recruit to their cause. There’s Jinroku (Taiiku Okazaki), a lovable lug whose music-interrupting request for directions at the end of the episode — the heroic music comes right back once he’s done — is the funniest moment in the show to date.
Of course, our contestants must continue to pass checkpoints, and that’s where we reach the centerpiece of the episode. Shujiro, Iroha, Kyojin, and Futaba all have enough wooden tags to continue, but Shinnosuke, who seems to have been too timid to ask for help before the moment of truth, does not. The adults all walk away prepared to leave him to die. Only Futaba convinces them to save the guy’s life, and she leads by example, giving up one of her precious wooden tags. Shamed, the adults all do the same.
But it isn’t just shame, it’s inspiration. For a time it really does look like Futaba is going to have to stand there and watch as Shinnosuke is hauled off by the game’s guards for execution. But the following words of hers are what prove persuasive: “I might be killed, but if I turn my back on a life that’s right in front of me, then even if I survive, I won’t be able to hold my head high in front of my mother.”
Walking along the tree-canopied road afterwards, Futaba apologizes to Shujiro for disobeying his wishes in that moment. (Both the guards and the contestants were in agreement that saving Shinnosuke was a waste of time since he’ll never make it anyway.) But Shujiro says no, it was he who was in the wrong. They can’t save everyone, but they can take care of the people who are within their power to save. That way, he can look his wife in the eye when he returns home.
Kawaji justifies Kodoku, as do the members of the four conglomerates, by noting the way samurai were able to flout the law because they were the law. The bankers in particular seem to have been routinely ripped off by ex-samurai seeking loans they have no intention of repaying, because who’s gonna get the money out of them, some clerk? And one need look no further than Bukotsu, whose rampages against civilians are protected by the game guards, to see what happens when you give some lunatic a sword, extensive martial arts training, and the belief that he exists in a different class of people from the hoi polloi. Hell, you can look around the streets of Chicago or Los Angeles or Washington, D.C. to see that too. (Minus the extensive martial arts training, of course.)
But is Kawaji’s new system any better if it, too, deals out death so indiscriminately. In addition to overseeing the whole bloody game, Kawaji’s underling Ando also sees to it that Shinpei is strangled to death before his decoded telegrams definitively tying Kawaji to the game can make their way to the Home Minister. Moreover, all the guards are capable of seeing that Futaba and Shinnosuke have no business playing a game designed to pit samurai against samurai, but at no point have they been given the chance to bow out. It all feels very Fall of the Galactic Republic, doesn’t it? (Or the other way around, perhaps.) The Jedi made some terrible mistakes, especially toward the end, but do you prefer stormtroopers?
Everyone seems to be converging in a rather unfortunately timed festival for this season’s final showdown. Still, there’s some hope for our heroes. A maximum of nine contestants can make it through the final checkpoint in Tokyo, though what awaits them on the other side is anybody’s guess, and likely to be unpleasant. But they wouldn’t have known this if a guard hadn’t let it slip in response to Futaba’s protestations over Shinnosuke. By being a decent person, Futaba accidentally gave them all a concrete reason to keep going. That’s what decent people do.
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.