Is nobody gonna talk about how rushed Episode 7 was? Because holy fuck, it was bad.
For starters, Ashi's fight with her mom came out of dick fucking nowhere. Where did she come from? Where was the buildup? It's not like we got treated to any scenes involving her (don't say that hallucination scene that lasted like 20 seconds long counted, dickclown) or anything like that. It just happened. Like, oh wow, there's her mom. Okay.
The army scene, while providing us with a neat contrast between Aku and Ashi and giving us some action, doesn't really do anything else besides that. It's a generic One-Man Army scene that you've seen a million times before.
As mediocre as the B-plot was, Jack's segment (save the flashback) was where everything really fell apart.
The episode's biggest failing, easily, was how the hallucination just died.
Now, unlike the High Priestess, Jack's conscience got his buildup. For more than half the current run, he has consistently been in opposition to Jack. He has berated him at every turn. He has tried to convince him about how there is no hope, about how there is nothing honorable left to do but kill himself, about how he should abandon everything and everyone and drop dead. With Aku being mostly absent and never in opposition to Jack over the course of S5, his conscience has been the antagonist of the show, the one that always comes in conflict with our hero. He's half a century's worth of inner demons made manifest into a being that runs counter to everything Jack had ever stood for.
And he dies in like, what? Seven seconds?
We never get our climax with Jack and his demons. We don't get a revamped, improved Mad Jack-esque fight where Jack finds inner peace one last time after a brutal fight with his own burning inner hatred.
No, he just says "Oh, you're bad!" and fucking rids himself of the emotional manifest of fifty years' worth of mental degradation instantly.
Then, he reverts back to normal in about one minute.
Jesus wept.
