A year after Riko and Touji’s deaths, Satoru continues to develop and refine his abilities, while Suguru looks worn out. He’s haunted by the Star Religious Group’s applause the day Satoru reclaimed Riko’s body, such that both the shower and rain sound like their horrible clapping.
His eyes narrow and darken as his hatred for non-sorcerers stews within him and he struggles to see the point of protecting them. While we know he’s the big bad in season one, it’s still rough to see the acceleration of his descent, particularly as it happens under a preoccupied Satoru’s nose.
After a lighthearted interaction with his kohai Haibara Yuu, who is headed off on a mission, Suguru is aproached by a tall, mysterious blonde: Special-grade sorcerer Tsukumo Yuki. A Jujutsu High apostate, she has her own ideas about how to solve the cursed spirit problem.
Simply put, rather than treat the symptoms—killing cursed spirits when they’re born—she wants to treat the cause: create a world where cursed spirits aren’t born. She sees two ways of doing that: eliminate cursed energy from mankind, and make it possible for all of mankind to control their energy.
Fushigurou Touji was an example of a non-sorcerer who could perceive cursed spirits and energy yet his own had dropped to zero. Yuki wanted to pick his brain so that she could try the first method, but he refused, and then Satoru killed him. That leaves creating a world where everyone can control their cursed energy.
Whether Yuki intended to draw it out of Suguru, discussion of this topic and the fact it starts raining outside (reminding him of the clapping zealots) causes Suguru to suggest that killing all non-sorcerers would achieve the same goal as making them all sorcerers. She agrees that’s a way for sure, but she for one isn’t crazy enough to do it.
When Suguru talks to her at length about his current internal crisis: hating both non-sorcerers and the part of him that harbors that hatred and has those dark thoughts. But Yuki tells him he’s neither of those people…yet. The choices he makes in the future will determine which of those possibilities become his true feelings.
That future comes faster than even Yuki might have expected. Haibara Yuu returns from his mission in a body bag—another sorcerer on the growing pile of sorcerer corpses being created out of deference to ungrateful masses. Then he’s summoned to a village where two twin girls (Nanako and Mimiko, his future supporters) are caged and beaten as scapegoats for cursed spirit attacks.
I don’t know if Suguru sees a bit of Riko in the twins’ faces, or just sees two innocent kids being abused for no good reason, but it’s the last straw for him. Rather than “do something” about the girls, he turns his powers against the villager who mistreated them. It amounts to a massacre of 112 people, and when Satoru learns that Suguru is the culprit, he can scarcely believe it.
In this way, Suguru goes through a three-strikes-you’re-out progression. Losing Riko in that awful, awful way (and learning from Yuki that she was essentially expendable, as another vessel ended up stabilizing Tengen), losing his kohai to a stronger-than-expected cursed spirit, and finally the outrageous injustice of the imprisoned girls.
Wanting to kill all non-sorcerers is obviously not okay. Suguru is not a good guy. But unlike Star Wars Episode III with Anakin, JJK did an excellent job showing his downfall and heel turn. Combine that with the fact he and Getou and Shouko were basically shattered as a friend group, leaving him increasingly isolated.
I don’t know Tsukumo Yuki’s whole plan in speaking to Suguru was to give him her tacit blessing to do things she wasn’t “crazy” enough to do to in order to achieve her goal of eliminating cursed spirits from the world, but she definitely seems like a catalyst to get Suguru into that state of mind. Not that discouraging him at that point would have made a difference.
After the deed, Suguru meets up with Shouko in the middle of bustling Shinjuku, and confirms what he did and why: he wants to create a world without non-sorcerers. Shouko calls Satoru, who speaks to Suguru in the middle of a dense crowd of passersby as cars, trucks, and buses zoom past.
When Satoru says such an undertaking is impossible, Suguru calls him arrogant, as he believes Satoru to be very much capable of eliminating all non-sorcerers should he choose to do so. Saying someone else can’t do it when he can is basically admitting he believes he’s the strongest. But he’s not strong enough to execute his best friend.
Tsuguru learns that a new religious group bought the church that was once owned by the Star Religious Group, dons the traditional robes he’ll wear as the big bad of season one, musses the hair of the liberated twins, takes the stage, and declares that he’ll be taking over and renaming the group. When there is an objection, he brings that person to the stage and smashes them into jelly with a cursed spirit. No doubt no further objections followed.
The last scene in the flashback that has occupied these past four episodes involves Satoru meeting a young Megumi for the first time, and being shocked by how much he resembles his father Touji. He also learns that Megumi is extremely precocious, and has no interest in his father, only in protecting Tsumiki’s happiness.
That’s when Satoru wakes up in 2018, with Juuji, Nobara, and a grown Megumi looming over him in his office, having summoned them there before he nodded off. Now that the three co-stars of season one are here, this season can get started in earnest, flush with the context of the tragedies and darkness of the prior decade that drive Satoru to be the best damn sorcerer he can be, and train the next generation to do the same.
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