Blue Eye Samurai follows an outcast who’s a master of the sword seeking revenge in Edo-period Japan. The series is currently streaming on Netflix.
Warning: This article contains heavy spoilers
Plot summary
Mizu, a lone-wolf samurai is on a quest for revenge but on their journey to look for the merchant who can take them to the white man to hunt, Mizu gets stuck with an unexpected travel companion, Ringo, an innocent cook with no hands.
Heiji Shindo, the black market merchant, sets loose the Four Fangs on Mizu, but the warrior lives, after killing them all. Meanwhile, Taigen catches up to Mizu to regain his honor after Mizu defeats and humiliates him in the last battle.
An invite by Heiji Shindo is an obvious ambush but while Mizu evades it, Taigen gets captured before getting tortured endlessly to give up Mizu’s whereabouts, which he refuses to do.
Meanwhile, his lover, Princess Akemi runs from home and finds employment at the brothel run by Madam Kaji, the same woman Mizu seeks to learn how to penetrate through Fowler’s castle. She and Akemi confront each other before she lets her father’s guards take Akemi away.
Mizu puts all her mind and body into breaching through Fowler’s castle’s defenses and traps. Meanwhile, Akemi braces for the marriage with Takayoshi Itoh, before taking control of her life into her own hands.
Fowler arrives and takes down the shogunate with effortless ease before his advances are restricted by Mizu and Taigen. Mizu spares him and cages him inside a boat headed to the rest of the four white men among whom is her father.
Akemi chooses greatness over a happy life, which is what Taigen wants. Meanwhile, Ringo takes an apprenticeship under Master Eiji, as Blue Eye Samurai season 1 rolls the credits.
Blue Eye Samurai ending explained in detail:
What is Fowler’s plan?
Fowler wants all of Japan. He and other of his white colonialist partners came to Japan 20 years ago as traders. They traded in guns, opium, and flesh.
Shogun Itoh at the time got greedy and thought a little trade wouldn’t do much harm. Sure enough, the trade did prove to be beneficial for him. However, he could never see the white traders for their colonialist intentions.
Fowler is kept in a castle on an isolated island, where he spends all his years except for a few occasions on which he gets to go out. There, he stays scheming, planning to take over the shogunate and then the whole of Japan.
His plan involves Shogun’s counselor Chiba, who acts as his inside man in the imperial castle, as well as the black market merchant Heiji Shindo, who both also provide armies.
Fowler intends to march with his army of men armed with the gun he manages the shipment of. The occasion arrives, and it’s during the Elder Council at the Imperial Castle.
Blue Eye Samurai season 1 finale sees Fowler’s army decimate the Imperial forces standing to guard the shogunate within hours, thanks to the power scales getting tipped to the side with guns.
Why does Mizu wear glasses?
Mizu is considered an Onryō by others in Japan. She was born to a Japanese native and a white man. Having blue eyes and pale skin terrifies people.
They are prejudiced to these features and Mizu as a whole, incapable of considering her a human being and extending empathy as one.
This is why Mizu wears glasses when she grows old. The tint of the glasses helps conceal the fact that she has blue eyes.
Meanwhile, she has always lived as a man ever since childhood, and even wanted to be a man so that the man after her couldn’t find her and so that she could take her revenge against the man who gave her this wretched life.
Who is Mizu’s father?
The identity of Mizu’s father is never revealed in the first season. She is hunting for four white men who came to Japan trading in guns and opium among other things.
Her working theory has been that one of these white men is her father. However, she doesn’t know who exactly among them it is.
At the end of Blue Eye Samurai episode 8, she holds a knife to Fowler’s neck, but before she can kill him he tells her she wouldn’t want to kill a man who’s the only one who can take her to the rest of the white men.
She hasn’t met Skeffington and Routely, and so she needs Fowler alive to lead her to them.
Is Fowler dead?
No, Fowler is still alive at the end of Blue Eye Samurai season 1. He leads a very successful coup against the shogunate but his plans are thwarted by Mizu who seeks revenge.
Fowler, in a bid to stay alive, tells Mizu that killing him would deprive her of the chance to know who exactly her father is.
She keeps him as a captive inside a boat, as he also serves as her ticket to the white man who birthed her into a life of constant prejudice and torture.
At the end of the finale, they’re headed on the ocean to the location where she would hopefully find the man she seeks vengeance upon.
Do Taigen and Akemi get together?
No, Taigen and Akemi do not get together in Blue Eye Samurai. He’s an honorable samurai and she’s the daughter of Lord Tokunobe.
As a princess, she must be wed to someone equal in social status and power or higher. However, her heart belongs to Taigen and the two even have premarital sex.
Tokunobe is adamant she be married to someone else but eventually agrees to let her marry Taigen. However, when Taigen loses his first fight to Mizu, and pathetically so, Tokunobe changes his mind.
Meanwhile, Taigen leaves to find Mizu and binds her to a contract for a rematch. Tokunobe receives the shogun’s counselor for the marriage proposal to the shogun’s youngest son Takayoshi.
Akemi doesn’t want to go to Edo as the rumors about Takayoshi’s inhumane cruelty are terrifying and she would again be deprived of her freedom, something she has always wanted for herself.
She eventually does get married to Takayoshi while Taigen is out trying to warn the shogun of the impending attack. She finally takes control of her life and consummates with the stammering son of the shogun, who’s nothing like the rumors paint him to be.
She seeks to rule over the country and her own life, on her own terms. When her father Tokunobe turns out to be an accomplice of Fowler, she is disappointed and later throws him into captivity.
He suffers burns from the fire that breaks out at the castle during Mizu and Fowler’s battle and eventually engulfs the whole city. However, he does survive it.
Meanwhile, Seki, the man who practically raised Akemi like a mother after her real mother passed away, dies trying to protect Akemi from the fire and Fowler’s army. He can’t outrun one of their bullets and dies.
That’s when Akemi decides to not run anymore, as Seki had once told her. Taigen reunites with her and says he doesn’t seek greatness anymore but happiness, with her.
However, Akemi does want to be great, and decides to remain with the royal family, including Lady Itoh and her two sons, after shogun Itoh is killed by Fowler during the coup.
As Blue Eye Samurai rolls the credits on season 1, the exact whereabouts of Taigen after his paths separate from Akemi’s, are not revealed.
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