Sword of the Demon Hunter

Episode 17

After last week's touching episode, which showed Jinya regaining some contact with his humanity, this week's story is an overtly neat counterpoint, with an adversary who carves up samurai with minimum mess. The main episode is perhaps too neatly staged, centering on a schematically poised duel on an Edo bridge at midnight, while its postscript feels like a grave storytelling misjudgment. But at least Sword of the Demon Hunter is still interesting.

This unites elements from the two preceding episodes, though they were very different from each other. The wily lord Hatakayama shows up again, startling Jinya by visiting him in person in his favorite ramen restaurant. He asks Jinya's help taking down a rogue demon underling who's started killing at random – though, as Jinya sees, it's surely a job the lord could have handled internally. There aren't many references to Japanese politics this time, barring a passing reference to Choshu, a Japanese domain that will play a crucial part in the upheavals in Japan at the end of the 1860s.

Following the previous episode, Jinya now has a foster infant daughter, a role that he's slipped into with perhaps implausible ease, though Ofu and her father probably helped him out. Ofu's comment to Jinya about treasuring his “weakness” feels like a continuation of the lesson that the fox spirit went to such trouble to impart to him. Unfortunately, that all seems to be nullified once Jinya meets his new nemesis – the psycho-samurai Kiichi, who's embraced killing as his calling and has thrown off such distractions as honor or pity.

The twist this time is that Jinya doesn't just understand this philosophy, he embraces it pretty much straight off, as a meaning to life that lesser mortals would find indistinguishable from nihilism. The episode's strongest image is of Jinya after Kiichi has beaten him but declined to finish him off, the youth laughing exultantly as he lies in his own blood.

Will the show follow through on this? It seems unlikely. Kiichi's monstrousness is soft-pedaled on screen – it's hard to feel much sympathy for the three placeholder samurai he slays at the start, though he's committed far more sickening atrocities. An obvious way to pursue his “logic” would be for him to purify Jinya by taking away irrelevancies like his friend Ofu and daughter Nomari.

Or for the show to be really provocative, it might suggest how Kiichi's philosophy anticipates how Japan's moral code will “evolve” in the coming decades, as the country becomes a brutal imperial power, ravaging its neighboring countries with no more mercy than Kiichi – though the narcissist needs neither Emperor or country to justify his crimes.

I'm skeptical if the show will do anything so interesting, especially given the flash-forward at the end, the first we've had for several weeks. This reveals Kiichi will still be around in 2009, making a living as a grocery manager (!) and now on friendly terms with Jinya. Our hero declares he still respects Kiichi as he did in the 1860s, random murder sprees and all, while assuring the audience that Jinya values the excess baggage of humanity.

What's meant as a final neat nuance comes off as an insultingly empty fudge, a graceless refusal to engage with the arguments the episode has raised. I won't mark it a failure for that – there's too much meat in the preceding twenty minutes – but it's a disappointment which lowers my interest in the episodes to come.

Rating: Sword of the Demon Hunter is currently streaming on HIDIVE.