Bill 
There's always a moment, in every major shonen, where you're staring at the screen and your mind drifts to Naruto. Not because it's good. Because you recognize the warning signs. Episode 3 of Season 3 of Jujutsu Kaisen was exactly that moment.
Was waiting a whole week really worth it for this?
24 Minutes of a PowerPoint Nobody Asked For
"About the Culling Game" spends its entire 24 minutes laying out the rules of the tournament. The rules. A full episode. Just the rules. The community did not hold back: "the most painfully boring info dump session," "easily top 3 most boring episodes I've ever sat through."
The IMDb score backs it up: 7.7/10, one of the lowest ratings in the entire franchise. For a show that had set the bar sky-high, that's a number you can't just brush off.
An episode that buries the audience under a mountain of exposition is a production choice. The real question is whether it was the only option, or just the easiest one to pull off.
Six Episodes, Then Nothing
The season went on hiatus after just 6 episodes. And since the first two had already been released as a compilation film, hardcore fans only got 4 genuinely new episodes before the break hit. Momentum in a series is something you build carefully and lose instantly. Here, it shattered.
Season 3 needs to adapt roughly 84 manga chapters, compared to 64 for Season 1 and 73 for Season 2. Same format, significantly more material. Something was always going to give.
Source Manga or Adaptation: Who's Actually to Blame?
The Case for the Manga
- The Culling Game arc is inherently dense in Gege Akutami's manga
- Adapting 84 chapters inevitably forces structural compromises
- The rules breakdown in Episode 3 exists almost verbatim in the source material
The Case Against the Adaptation
- Isolating the exposition into a single episode makes it feel far heavier than it needs to
- The mid-season break after 6 episodes kills the narrative momentum
- Other adaptations have managed to spread out exposition without front-loading it like this
The uncomfortable truth: both sides are probably guilty. The source manga piles on rules and factions at a pace that works fine when you're reading chapter by chapter at your own speed. Crammed into a single animated episode, it turns into a press conference with no Q&A.
But the decision on how to structure that episode belongs to the adaptation. A chapter and an episode are not the same thing.
What JJK Promised Us
The first two seasons set a standard that felt genuinely rare for the genre: real consequences, a narrative brutality that never hits the reset button, characters who don't just miraculously come back from the dead. JJK felt like a show that had actually learned from the mistakes of the giants that came before it.
The Culling Game arc hasn't betrayed that promise in terms of substance. But in terms of execution, it's a reminder that even the best shows aren't immune to the genre's oldest bad habits.
JJK hasn't turned into Naruto. But for the first time, you're sitting there watching an episode and thinking it could. That's the real problem.
© Image credits: Gege Akutami / Shueisha / Toho Animation / Crunchyroll