The original post: /r/television by /u/demigodofnothing on 2025-10-26 16:08:31.

I’m a little late to the party but bear with me since I had to write something after watching this. Any movie or TV show, its usually considered good if it falls into one of these two categories; Intricate story with a tight narrative that goes with already established characteristics or a simple story presented with a good screenplay and excellent character work. Rarely, few satisfy both the areas. Blue Eye Samurai falls perfectly into the latter category.

Do no mistake me by any means, while I say simple story, its not one dimensional in any sense but I will come to this a bit later. The first thing that made the show stand out was its character work, either the characters had an exceptional arc (ones like Taigen or Mizu) or the characters who didn’t change much had a solid base to start with (Ringo or Swordmaster). This was the soul of the show. Their motivations conveyed not through expositions but through plain actions. Taigen in particular stood out for me since by the time we met him we already had an idea about how he is as a person. A show having a strong core in this way will hardly find ways to mess up and in fact acts as a leverage for any improvements, which takes me to my next point - narrative.

The most easiest and laziest way to present this story would be a linear screenplay. While it may not have had the same level of binge-ability, it wouldn’t have missed much on the impact. But what the writers did was take a hyperlink, non-linear route. What started as a simple revenge story for the injustice done in childhood blossomed into this story about freedom, culture, honor, war and obviously, vengeance. I love how similar to several other shows that follow the non-linear path of storytelling, the show dropped a bomb midway, aka episode 5. Mizu’s reason for reason for revenge was acknowledged by us till episode 5, but from there onwards it also made us understand her too. To go from a mere acknowledgement to understanding takes more than just character work and here, as stated previously, the narrative acted as a leverage.

I’m a bit late to reviewing this and I’m not sure whether one can call it underrated too given the number of video essays that have spawned. Although I do wish it was just a miniseries since I have an opinion that quality of great season 1 is always followed by not so great or even mediocre season 2, but I do hope I’m wrong!