Episode 9: Forged travel documents. Prison sentence. Mugen fetch quest. Forest full of bandits. Warrior monks. Large quantity of weird burning plants. Hallucinations. Chase sequence. Episode 10: Jin does the housework, while Mugen recreates Samurai Showdown on the NeoGeo. It’s a week of contrasts.
Alyx, Jon, and Sam cover \"Beatbox Bandits\" and \"Lethal Lunacy\" this week, Episodes 9 and 10 of Samurai Champloo, a pair of episodes that are basically polar opposites.
\"Beatbox Bandits\" is told in flashback by an elderly checkpoint guard named Yamane the Ogre, reflecting on the one day in his career he never wrote into the official logbook. Mugen, Fuu, and Jin get caught with forged travel permits at the Hakone checkpoint, are sentenced to death, and Mugen is offered a deal: deliver a package through a nearby forest of bandits by sunset, or his friends face the consequences. The forest turns out to contain warrior monks who are plotting to overthrow the government. Mugen naturally tries to fight them, but when their crops set on fire things quickly take a turn for the weird.
Then \"Lethal Lunacy\" is another episode built around Mugen. A Shaolin-trained swordsman who has developed a technique powerful enough to split a boulder is looking for someone worthy to fight. He finds Mugen, and the two prepare for an epic duel. Jin, meanwhile, has decided to get domestic.
We discuss the specific genius of \"Beatbox Bandits'\" framing device, how \"Lethal Lunacy\" uses its fight to say something about the difference between Mugen's style and any trained tradition, and why Jin might be the best househusband ever.
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