‘Jujutsu Kaisen’ Shibuya Incident Arc explained

Warning: Spoilers for the entire Shibuya Incident Arc (manga chapters 79-136)

If you’d thought that the first season of Jujutsu Kaisen was fast-paced, the Shibuya Incident Arc is going to give the term a whole new meaning to you.

It’s not that it starts fast-paced from the onset, or that it’s a completely linear rising of tension and conflict. It sprinkles high-intensity moments here and there until it all just explodes into irredeemable circumstances and the stickiest situation the characters have ever been faced with in the story thus far — arguably even trickier and more grim than the Night Parade of a Hundred Demons featured in Jujutsu Kaisen 0, which took place the year prior.

There’s a lot to understand about the Shibuya Incident as there are multiple players in the game, new and old, some with shared as well as individual goals, not to mention a fair share of plot twists as well as plot points that may go over some people’s heads upon first watch.

Leading up to the Incident

The Shibuya Incident had been teased back in season 1, with the potential sealing of Gojo having been mentioned somewhat early on, as that had long been part of Pseudo-Geto’s plan. Another key aspect that had also been mentioned back in the first season, in a conversation between Utahime Iori and Satoru Gojo, was the possibility of a traitor. Gojo asks Utahime to investigate the students at her school, which, despite her initial disbelief at the potential of a mole among her students, she accepts, and her investigation would yield results revealed to viewers the following season.

In the first episode of the Shibuya Incident, episode 6 of season 2, or chapter 79 of Gege Akutami’s manga, appropriately titled “A Taste of Things to Come,” Kokichi Muta, whom we know better as Mechamaru, is revealed as the traitor. Although he’s not a traitor in the typical sense, as he remains loyal to his fellow jujutsu sorcerers at heart. But the prospect of having a normal healthy body that can freely interact with his classmates, especially Kasumi Miwa, led him to make a deal with “Suguru Geto” and Mahito. Kokichi gets his body, only to perish fighting Mahito immediately thereafter.

Even in death, his role wasn’t done. However, he fails to warn Gojo, or any of our beloved characters, of the terrible events to take place about 10 days later, on Oct. 31, 2018.

When Halloween gets too real

It’s 7pm on Halloween and the poor non-sorcerers hanging out in the extremely popular Tokyo ward are about to have the worst night of their lives – and for many, their last. They get trapped inside a veil and 3 teams of jujutsu sorcerers, veterans as well as students, most of whom were up for promotion to first grade, are called to Shibuya. Later, a total of 4 veils would be active, each with its own specific intent.

The scared civilians, at the behest of the villains, start yelling out for Gojo to be brought to the location. Lo and behold, the legend himself crosses the barrier 1 hour and 31 minutes after it’s set up.

One of the difficulties in keeping up with the events of the Shibuya incident is that multiple things take place at around the same time, including Yuji fighting the grasshopper curse, and Gojo’s encounter with Hanami, Jogo, Choso, and later Mahito. Worse still, when these events are episodes apart — like Choso versus Yuji, and the group fight against Dagon — it’s easy to fall behind, plot-wise.

At the 9h 15m time stamp, not-Geto uses the most underhanded trick in the book to distract Gojo long enough to seal him. A few minutes thereafter, outside the veil, discount psychopathic Barbie doll Haruta Shigemo, who’s going on a murder spree of all the black suit-wearing assistant managers, stabs Ichiji four times, but thankfully, is later found by Kento Nanami and taken to Shoko Ieiri. A little after being visited and warned by a mini-Mechamaru, Yuji goes to a rooftop to call for “Nanamin,” and loudly announces to anyone in the vicinity that Gojo has been sealed. In the meantime, the Prison Realm plummets to the ground as it struggles to process all the information that is the strongest living special-grade sorcerer.

Choso, Mahito, and Jogo scatter in search of Itadori, each with their own motivations. It is later shown that, at 9:30, Dagon consumes all the civilians on floor B4, whose skeletal remains he’d later regurgitate after receiving a first hit from Naobito Zenin. Pseudo-Geto stays behind to oversee the immobile prison realm when he is approached by Mimiko and Nanako. The twins tell the evil sorcerer they’ll make him regret refusing to give Geto’s body back.

Team Nanami and Itadori reconvene, and Ino, Megumi, and Yuji stay as a team while the older sorcerer goes to check in with Ichiji, who he finds bleeding out on the ground.

At around 9h40, Nobara and Akari Nitta run into Haruta. The sadistic man gets the upper hand on both of them, and is only defeated when Nanami arrives on the scene to give him the beatdown of his life, which he only narrowly survives thanks to his miracle-based technique. Nanami leaves to warn team Zenin of Gojo’s sealing, not without first telling Nobara to stay put and safe, which, of course, she doesn’t.

It’s about 10 o’clock now, and after deciding they’d have to take out the sorcerers in charge of keeping the veil up, Team Ino gets the drop on Jiro Awakasa, Granny Ogami, and her grandson. Megumi and Yuji manage to defeat Awakasa back on the ground, while Ino is taken out of commission by the grandson who’s now wearing Toji Zenin’s body due to Ogami’s séance. The old lady would soon come to regret her life decisions, as Toji’s extraordinary cursed energy-free body manages to overpower the grandson’s, and momentarily gaining awareness, he effortlessly kills her, becoming then free to roam Shibuya as a mindless killing machine, instinctively seeking out the strongest opponent.

The team does manage to lift the barrier, which Mei Mei notices at around the time she kills a nameless cursed user and advances towards fake Geto, who’s also become aware of the veil’s disappearance. The villain and the siblings meet in the tunnel, and the former summons a special-grade Smallpox Deity to fight Mei Mei. She, with her little brother’s help, defeats it and faces Pseudo-Geto next. We don’t see this fight play out, but we learn that the siblings nearly get killed and would’ve been had they not used Ui Ui’s technique to flee to Malaysia.

Parting ways with Megumi, who goes to take Ino to get medical aid, Yuji goes off on his own. He briefly encounters Toge Inumaki, who’s about to do some crowd control outside and clean out the disfigured humans in the vicinity. Going inside the station at 10h10, Yuji comes face to face with Choso, who wants him dead for killing his two Death Painting brothers back in the season 1 finale.

The escalation ramps up and Shibuya burns down

Choso defeats Yuji but doesn’t kill him as he comes to the stupefying realization that there’s something deeper that connects the two — something that he could not have foreseen. After Choso leaves, the twins Mimiko and Nanako find a passed-out Yuji and force-feed him the Sukuna finger they have, hoping the King of Curses will fulfill their wish (Spoiler: he couldn’t care less).

In the meantime, Nanami has joined up with the Zenin team and the three of them fight the sea disaster curse, Dagon. Inside Dagon’s Domain Expansion, two additional Zenins show up to join the fight: Megumi, who comes to help his comrades, and not long after, a mindless Toji, who randomly pops up through the escape hole his child made in the domain. The older Fushiguro appears to have the time of his life – death, rather – as he makes takoyaki out of a minced octopus-looking curse. It’s all fun and games when Toji is fighting the baddies, it’s slightly less fun when the sorcerer killer goes after his son as the next strongest person in the room.

Toji pushes Megumi outside to have some wholesome one-on-one fatherly bonding session, which coincidentally, and somewhat thankfully, allows him to avoid crossing paths with Jogo, as the one-eyed volcano head toasts everyone in the room: Naobito, Maki, and Nanami. Just then, the cursed spirit feels the presence of a Sukuna finger, and dashes to Mimiko and Nanako’s location. He tries to kill them, but they survive thanks to Nanako’s technique. Jogo feeds Yuji the ten fingers he has in his possession, effectively awakening Sukuna at 10h50.

Sukuna kills Mimiko and Nanako for their audacity to try and bargain with him. He then turns to Jogo and challenges him to a duel (more like a one-sided beatdown), in which, if the spirit manages to strike one single hit, the King of Curses will work under their group.

At 10h51, after relentlessly pursuing the first-year student like a shark on an injured baby seal’s blood trail, Toji realizes, after the teenage sorcerer cleverly makes use of his inherited Ten Shadows technique, that Megumi is his son. Before he loses control of his briefly gained awareness, the sorcerer killer commits suicide, and effectively saves his unknowing offspring from himself. At 11h01, Atsuya Kusakabe is tricking Panda, and stalling for time.

After a battle of catastrophic proportions, one in which Kusakabe and Panda are caught up but manage to survive, Jogo is killed by Sukuna, who compliments his strength before ending him. Uraume comes to greet him in the aftermath.

While trying to make his way to Ieri Shoko, Megumi is slashed in the back by the cowardly Haruta, who’s unfortunately still breathing. Understanding he’ll be killed either way, at 11h05, Megumi summons the one Shikigami no one has ever managed to exorcise, Mahoraga, in an effort to take Haruta, an unknowing participant in the summoning ritual, down with him.

Feeling Mahoraga’s presence, Sukuna excuses himself to Urauma, not before reminding them to not forget their preparations. Sukuna heals Megumi once he gets there in an effort to keep him alive for his own mysterious reasons. The incarnated ancient sorcerer has a harder time fighting the Eight-Handled Sword Divergent Sila Divine General than he did Jogo. In order to defeat the insanely strong Shikigami, who can adapt to any cursed technique, Sukuna summons his Malevolent Shrine, careful to keep Megumi out of its range, and destroys everything within the Domain Expansion’s diameter. Sukuna comes back to Megumi to take him to where Shoko is. Happy that he’s spared by Sukuna, Haruta obliviously runs into the Malevolent Shrine’s range and dies – good riddance.

The eleventh hour

Just before the body’s control changes back to Yuji, Sukuna tells him to take one good look at what happened in his absence. Awakened at around a quarter past 11, Yuji is in despair at the desolate sight in front of him, but decides he cannot die just yet without doing anything else to help, as he would die the ignoble death of a mass murderer.

A heavily injured Nanami traverses the station in search of Megumi, whom he fears is still fighting that cursed energy-less killing machine. Our favorite salary man kills a bunch of disfigured humans before he comes face to face with Mahito. As he wonders what the point of all of it was, Nanami sees Yu Haibara pointing towards Yuji, who has just arrived on the scene. With a “You’ve got it from here,” Nanami dies at Mahito’s hands right in front of his pupil, who then enragedly charges at the gleefully evil curse.

Concurrently, at 11h16, Nobara also engages a Mahito double on the street. Getting her to chase after him, Mahito number 2, joins his original self, who unlike the double can use Idle Transfiguration. Mahito manages to touch Nobara on the face and it is unfortunately over for our fiercehearted girl.

Todo arrives on the scene with Arata Nitta, the latter applies first-aid to a pulseless Nobara. After an intense battle, Todo and Yuji defeat an evolved Mahito, all according to Pseudo-Geto’s plan, who takes his opportunity to absorb the special-grade curse. After monologuing for a bit and hitting Yuji with some of the many cursed techniques he has thanks to Curse Manipulation, the imposter Geto notices the arrival of newcomers, including the Kyoto High students, who begin attacking him.

Kusakabe and Panda come to the battlefield at the same time as Choso. The Death Pating, for his part, has not only realized that he’s Yuji’s big brother (it’s complicated), but he also became aware that the Brain-possessing Geto is the same that had taken over Noritoshi Kamo over 150 years prior, when he conducted his wicked experiments on his mother. Hence, he’s the new focus of Choso’s hatred.

Uraume also joins the fight on Psedo-Geto’s side, and their Ice Formation innate technique comes in handy for keeping the jujutsu sorcerers in place, preventing them from one last attempt at retrieving the Prison Realm. Special-grade sorcerer Yuki Tsukumo arrives to break everyone free. Yuki and fake Geto trade philosophical beliefs. Yuki’s plans for the world are opposite to fake Geto’s, the latter intends to amplify cursed energy and bring back the golden age of cursed techniques, while Yuki intends on achieving a world where humans are free from cursed energy and, as a result, curses themselves.

Utilizing a far-reaching Idle Transfiguration he got from Mahito, Geto awakens all 1000 comatose humans, who had been marked beforehand to participate in the Culling Game, a showdown wherein sorcerers fight one another. Of these, one group is turned into vessels for ancient sorcerers, and the other, non-sorcerers, are given cursed techniques, much like it happened to Junpei in season 1.

In the end, Pseudo-Geto and Uraume manage to get away with Gojo and the Prison Realm. Their actions are to be blamed for the events of the next arc, the Culling Game.