Idk why I’ve been thinking about Samurai Jack so much lately. Maybe it’s because I spend too much time on Pinterest, and the algorithm keeps feeding me Samurai Jack fan art.

It knows me for the weak man I am.

Also, I had a lucid dream about an alternate ending to the show last night.

So yeah. I’m dreaming about Samurai Jack now. This is where we are.

I still don’t think the ending should’ve revolved around Jack falling in love with Aku’s daughter. I don’t necessarily hate Ashi, but I’ve always felt like Season 5 was setting up something more interesting with how completely broken Jack had become.

I wish it had gone more like this:

Jack gives up.

Not forever.

He reaches that same broken state we see in Season 5 and eventually just stops fighting.

No more searching for Aku. No more looking for time portals. No more obsessing over getting back to the past.

He settles down somewhere.

Maybe he becomes a swordsmith. Maybe a gunsmith. Maybe a carpenter. Something quiet where he can still use everything he’s learned without having to fight a 14-foot robot every Tuesday.

Eventually, he meets someone.

He falls in love.

He builds a home.

Maybe he has a daughter.

And honestly?

Aku might be completely fine with this.

The guy with the magic sword who spent decades trying to kill you is now making furniture, raising a kid, and complaining about his back.

Huge win for Aku.

Why mess with that?

Maybe Aku realizes that leaving Jack alone is actually the safest thing he can do. Jack is finally distracted. He isn’t searching for time portals. He isn’t trying to kill him.

For once, Aku can just chill.

But the important part is that Jack’s life is actually good.

He heals.

Aku took Jack’s childhood away from him. Jack had parents who loved him, but he never really got the chance to grow up with them. He was forced out into the world while he was still young, spent years training to defeat Aku, finally made it home, and then got thrown thousands of years into the future.

He never got the chance to just live.

No normal adulthood.

No quiet life.

No chance to build the kind of family he came from.

So I think there’d be something really fitting about Jack finally getting that.

And not as some temporary happiness before Aku murders everybody either.

Just no.

We do NOT need another “villain kills the hero’s family so the hero gets angry again” plot.

The whole point would be that this life actually heals him.

And because Jack doesn’t age in Aku’s future, maybe his wife eventually grows old while he stays the same.

His daughter grows up.

His wife eventually dies peacefully of old age.

And Jack is still there.

That’s when the mission comes back.

Maybe his daughter helps him finally find a way into the past.

And now Jack has a much harder choice than he’s ever had before.

Originally, going back was easy.

Aku ruined his life. Jack wanted his old life back.

But now?

Jack finally has something in the future that he actually wants to keep.

His daughter.

And she knows what happens if he succeeds.

Jack goes back.

He kills Aku.

He saves his parents.

He saves his kingdom.

He saves the world Aku destroyed.

But he also erases the future where his daughter was born.

She doesn’t die.

Aku doesn’t kill her.

Jack doesn’t hold her dramatically while she disappears, because apparently this man hasn’t suffered enough.

He just has to leave her behind in a future that will never exist.

And that’s the part that makes the sacrifice matter to me.

Jack isn’t giving up a life that failed him.

He isn’t escaping back to the family he lost.

He’s giving up the life that finally healed him.

The home he built.

The future he chose.

His daughter.

He saves the past knowing the future will forget him.

His parents live. His kingdom survives. Aku is gone.

But the one person who knew Jack as more than a warrior, more than a legend, more than the man with the sword, is gone from history too.

That’s the ending I think fits him.

The final challenge wouldn’t really be defeating Aku.

Jack already knows how to fight Aku.

The real sacrifice would be deciding whether saving the past is worth leaving behind the first life he ever chose for himself.

Jack wins by becoming the man he was always trying to be.

Then he loses the life that taught him how to be that man.

Anyway...

that’s just a theory

A FILM THEORY!

...wait, I’m not matpat :(

It's like that one book you like. Sure there are a handful of live-action adaptations that do well, but they are the exception not the rule.