‘Jujutsu Kaisen’ review: “Right and Wrong, Part 2” shifts perspective

Season 2 of Jujutsu Kaisen has been a drawn-out funeral procession: heroes, villains, and child soldiers alike all marching to their unfathomable deaths. We mourned the loss of innocence and promise of Gojo and Geto’s early blue days and watched as Mechamaru made an actual deal with the devil to try and save his friends. Gojo is sealed and with him the greatest bastion of hope the protagonists had, while Shibuya has been left in ruin thanks to the boredom of a petty, all-powerful sorcerer. Yuji nearly lost his will to fight while strangled with survivor guilt while Nanami, one of the few adults looking to secure fruitful futures for the teenage sorcerers, was beaten, singed, and executed. Now, in “Right and Wrong, Part 2” and in perhaps the greatest display of the series’ innate hopelessness, they’ve (most likely) killed Nobara too. 

“Right and Wrong, Part 2” works in particular, isolated segments. Yuji’s realization that he wasn’t alone when he recognized one of Nobara’s curses is chill-inducing, especially as we’ve watched him go dead behind the eyes in the past episodes after awakening from Sukuna’s control. Similarly, Nobara’s cutthroat fighting style is lovely to behold, brutal, and charged with a ferocity that outweighs her skill. It’s why she and Yuji work so well together as a fighting duo, even when they’re working separately. Nobara is handling the double of Mahito, who can’t transform humans. Both sorcerers are full of sheer strength and power, something we see ignited in Yuji after Nobara’s arrival.

There’s a certain gratification with an enlivened Yuji kicking the shit out of Mahito and the way he bodily refuses to allow Mahito a single moment to recover. Moments such as Yuji punching Mahito in the throat or tossing him by his hair into a nearby pillar land with significant impact. Yuji’s athleticism is even playfully utilized through combat, such as when he slides into a split-off piece of Mahito in a desperate effort to stop him from going after Nobara, mimicking how he might’ve slid into home base of a baseball diamond if his life were normal and he’d decided to get into sports instead of the Occult Club. 

In the end, though, his fight is again for naught as Mahito manages to touch Nobara, bringing forth her untimely demise. Once again, the voice performance by Junya Enoki is sublime, especially when he yells at Nobara to run, his voice infused with the type of plea someone makes only when they know in their heart the outcome is inevitable. He, like us, like Nobara, knows she’s now facing certain death. 

Before that, though, before she tells Yuji to let people know she had a pretty good life, we get a flashback to what built Nobara’s character, and it’s here where one of the more disorienting, effective, and frustrating choices happens. She doesn’t get ownership of her backstory. Instead, her childhood friend, Fumi, takes the reigns. Nobara was a spirited child who couldn’t stand the small minds of her small countryside town and sought a future where she’d escape its confines. She met an older girl whose influence was immense and whose latter departure emotionally wounded Nobara. It’s beautifully done in one regard because we’re seeing how Nobara positively influences and changes another girl’s life through her friendship. It also sets up the following moments when the dream ends, and reality begins again because now, Nobara is a story for someone else to tell, someone who knew her when she was still living, yet to face the horrors of the world we’ve seen her face. 

But that’s what makes it frustrating, too, because Nobara does get her moment where she apologizes to an imagined Fumi for not reuniting and living up to her parting promise. Standing in a circle of primarily vacant chairs, the sequence recalls when she told Yuji that only so many people get to occupy one in her life, indicative of their significance to her and the small opening she allows people to enter into her circle. This moment that pulsates with profound loss that we haven’t even experienced yet is moving, and it’s a shame that the writing of the flashback couldn’t have allowed her that same agency. She chose this fight, yet the show seems to memorialize her too soon, just another passing face in a series where she was never going to get to be the main player anyway. 

Maybe she’s not dead, but considering the injury and the tone of the episode that ends with Nobara making peace with her lot in life, it certainly looks final. It’s a frustrating turn of events for a character who blazed so brightly in season one and offered an excellent antithesis to other shonen female characters who are relegated to love interests or background characters. Her death comes in a long line of them this season, with characters decommissioned or killed to prove the full extent of evil that Yuji and co. are up against, and while it’s undoubtedly effective, it leaves a sour taste. Surely, there was another way to make the same point, and if it had to be made, wouldn’t it have been nice to be given this context of what made Nobara who she is for longer than one half of an episode and not through the eyes of another? 

Nobara was a robust and vibrant character who brought a fun and brutalist fighting spirit to the series. She was never going to get to be the hero of Jujutsu Kaisen, but she deserved a more extraordinary moment to shine than the mere minutes we spent with her in Season 2. 

Jujutsu Kaisen Season 2 is available now to stream on Crunchyroll

---

Featured Image © Gege Akutami/Shueisha, JUJUTSU KAISEN Project