At long last, Muzan finally reveals his endgame and the climax of Demon Slayer begins to take shape in the Hashira Training Arc finale. It’s been a long and frustrating road, but here’s everything that happened in the season finale, “The Hashira Unite.”
What Happened In Demon Slayer Season 4’s Finale?
Before getting started with a recap of “The Hashira Unite,” looking back on the season, if there was one thing that was abundently clear, it’s that even though this season was an arguably shorter one given its eight-episode length. One of the biggest criticisms of the season was its bland padding. Most, if not all of the episodes were padded out with either lame moments of character development or with dramatic flourishes meant to show off the animation budget. It made the season a frustrating watch, but “The Hashira Unite” is probably the most frustrating for how it pads out virtually every moment.
The episode runs 40 minutes, but the first three minutes are spent playing the same dramatic montage of Muzan walking through the Ubuyashiki compound from the end of last week’s double-length episode. After that, Muzan and Ubuyashiki begin to have a conversation wherein Muzan repeatedly voices his disdain for Ubuyashiki and the Demon Slayers.
It’s here that Ubuyashiki reveals that Muzan and him are actually distant relatives. Muzan has existed for over 1,000 years and was an ancestor of the Ubuyashiki family. Due to their connection with Muzan, they’ve been cursed with poor health that has resulted in their children being born frail and sickly. If they didn’t die during their infancy, then it’s a certainty that no one would live beyond 30. Given how the manga – and one would assume the anime – explains Muzan’s origins, the nature of this “curse” is somewhat puzzling, but that’s neither here nor there. In any case, a priest an ancestor of Ubuyashiki visited said that if the family tried to fight against the demons, the curse would be lifted, which led to the foundation of the Demon Slayer Corps.
Muzan doesn’t care about any of this. He feels no emotional connection to Ubuyashiki other than disgust and all that Ubuyashiki’s speech is doing is boring him. Ubuyashiki then asks Muzan what his ultimate goal is, which he guesses is eternal life. Muzan doesn’t refute this and says that once he finds Nezuko, he’ll be able to walk in the sun again and gain true immortality and he’ll wait as long as he needs until he finds her. Muzan’s enhanced smell indicates that Ubuyashiki already smells like a corpse, so Muzan also tells him that he’s already dead.
To his credit, Ubuyashiki admits that he knows he’s not long for this world and has only survived as long as he did because of his hatred for Muzan and his death ultimately doesn’t matter. The Demon Slayers Corps will still fight and hunt down demons regardless of if Ubuyashiki is alive or not. He does remark that it’ll only increase the drive and passion of the Hashira to kill Muzan, with Ubuyashiki content with the knowledge that when the Hashira kill Muzan, then all demons will die. And with that, as Muzan prepares to end Ubuyashiki’s life, Ubuyashiki detonates a ton of explosives in the mansion, annihilating him and his family in an effort to injure Muzan.
Muzan reforms, but the explosion did a lot of damage to him and delays his regeneration enough for Tamayo to appear and use a Blood Demon Art to immobilize him. As Muzan attempts to absorb this Blood Demon Art, he also absorbs an antidote developed by Tamayo (and most likely Shinobu) that turns demons back into humans. It doesn’t appear to have any immediate effect on him, but his immobility allows Gyomei, who was hiding alongside Shinobu, to use his weapon to decapitate Muzan.
Gyomei reflects back on his time with Ubuyashiki and we learn that Gyomei was the only person who knew the extent of Ubuyashiki’s plan. Ubuyashiki wanted to use himself as bait to lure Muzan out, giving the Demon Slayers the best opportunity to defeat him. Ubuyashiki speculated that if Muzan was as strong as he believed, then decapitating him wouldn’t kill him. The only method to kill Muzan would be to expose him to sunlight, hence Tamayo’s immobilization in an open space like Ubuyashiki Manor. As Muzan’s head begins to grow back, he lashes out at Gyomei, who deflects all of the attacks and confirms Ubuyashiki’s hypothesis that sunlight is the only way to kill Muzan. This isn’t going to be an easy battle anymore. It’s a war of attrition to keep Muzan in place until the sun rises.
By this point, the other Hashira and Tanjiro have made it to Ubuyashiki Manor and see it in flames. Gyomei quickly informs everyone present that Muzan can only be killed by sunlight and everyone launches an all-out assault against Muzan. It’s at this point though that Muzan reveals his hand. Using Nakime’s ability to draw people into another dimension, now known as the Infinity Castle, he summons every Demon Slayer to it. Tonight is the night that either Muzan is killed or the Demon Slayer Corps is eradicated. As every character we’ve known in the Demon Slayer Corps begins to fall into the Castle, Tanjiro calls out to Muzan that he’ll be defeated before the night is out. Muzan fires back that all of the Demon Slayers will die here as a five-minute credit scroll begins to play, ending the season.
And that’s it. Over the course of nearly half an hour of episode runtime, we spent half of it watching Muzan and Ubuyashiki talk, followed by the detonation, Gyomei decapitating Muzan to no avail, and then the Demon Slayers being thrown into the Infinity Castle for the final arc of the season. It’s a remarkably brief synopsis and really makes a lot of this season feel even more pointless. We don’t get any follow-up on Zenitsu’s development (for those who care at least), the amount of actual fight scenes can be counted on one hand, and the season ends on a cliffhanger to tease the trilogy of movies that will conclude the series.
I know I’ve said before that the Swordsmith Village Arc of Demon Slayer was the series at its worst due to it indulging its worst tendencies. The Hashira Training Arc, and “The Hashira Unite” to a lesser extent, is the show at its most pointless. This is a season that could have been summarized in three or four episodes and didn’t need multiple double and triple-length runtimes. Nearly all of this was set up for the series finale, which I suppose is okay, but that just makes the Hashira Training Arc feel like the bland vegetables you had to eat before getting to the delicious steak. Even then, given the amount of padding that Demon Slayer is all too eager to indulge in, who can say if those three movies won’t drag things out further with an additional film to formally wrap up the series?
This season was subpar at best, but as has become commonplace in these recaps, I can only hope and pray that the next time we see Demon Slayer, we’ll get back to the stunning action and fast-paced narrative that made me fall in love with the show all those years ago and not the bloated melodramatic series it has become.
And that’s what happened in “The Hashira Unite,” the finale of Demon Slayer’s Hashira Training Arc! Thank you all who read these recaps week after week and I’ll see you next time for the Infinity Castle movies!
