English Dub Review: Jujutsu Kaisen “Perfect Preparation”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Maki returns to the Zenin home to claim their Cursed Weapons for the fight to come, but a sudden sacrifice drives her to take vengeance against the family that shunned her and her sister their whole lives.

OUR TAKE

With how much the first couple episodes hit us like a dump truck, you would think that we would have to wait at least a little while before the next wham episode, but nope! In a pretty much Yuji-less episode (I don’t think he shows up once but I need to double check), this focuses squarely on Maki resolving her issues with the Zenin clan that put her and her sister Mai down for so long. And by “resolve”, I mean that she slaughters them to the last man. And not just the men, but the women and children too! This isn’t her first plan, of course, as she initially goes there to use the loophole making Megumi the actual head of the clan to get the family’s cursed weapons to use in the Culling Game. However, once she confronts her father, she finds her sister Mai already there, probably to do the same thing, and in the ensuing fight, Mai is mortally wounded. She gives the last of her strength to Maki with the condition that she burns the whole family down, which Maki is happy to oblige. She thought that she could work her way up and fix this corrupt family from the inside to make a place where Mai could return to, but once that option was off the table, all bets were off.

I’ll admit, when we were introduced to so many new high ranking family members, in particular Naoya, I thought they would be a lot more prominent in the Culling Game itself, which is probably what I was meant to think so I could be most surprised by this mass killing. I mean, I saw the clips on social media before this episode was dubbed, so I wasn’t totally surprised, but still. The Zenin clan hadn’t been a HUGE part of the story up until now, but they were certainly present in the respective stories of Megumi, Maki, and Mai. I had kinda lost track of Mai after the last season, so for her to just show up here only to die was a bit disappointing, but hey, now Megumi can be the head of the clan with no pushback! Or at least the ashes of it, I guess. Regardless, this was a super intense and meaningful wiping out of a bunch of assholes (and apparently one good guy who couldn’t avoid it), so I can’t complain, and now we will return to stuff going on with other characters. Like Yuji!