Iyanu Season 2 Episode 9 Recap

A good villain reveal is usually a punchline. The best ones are betrayals. “The Acolyte,” the first half of Iyanu’s Season 2 finale, gives us the second kind, and it does it by quietly walking Boju, Queen Adura’s wet-blanket advisor, into the middle of the frame and confirming what nobody on the show seems to have thought to ask: who actually had her parents killed? Spoiler, it was him. He has been raising her on a lie since she was a child. The cult he answers to has been waiting centuries for her to do this exact thing. And while all of that is happening, Toye’s father is crying and trying to convince him he is in fact “sweating from his eyes.”

(The following is a recap of episode 9, “The Acolyte,” with full spoilers.)

What happens in Iyanu season 2, episode 9?

Iyanu (Serah Johnson) is a kids’ show. I keep reminding myself of this, because “The Acolyte” opens on a flashback to the priestess Eje-Okun standing in front of Deso, the Fallen One, in the final hours of the Divine Wars. He hands her a scroll. He calls her his Chosen. He tells her she and her offspring will fight for the darkness “in my absence.” Then she wakes up to find he has been defeated, hears the survivors talking like the war is already over, and immediately starts writing.

What she writes is the Dark Scroll: a manifesto, a set of instructions, and a centuries-long promise. The bloodline she founds calls itself the Acolytes. Their job is to finish what Deso started.

Animated children’s television, in the year 2026, just gave us a generational-cult cold open with a “the master is dead, long live the master” structure pulled straight out of an HBO drama. I am not complaining. Cartoon Network has been quietly letting this show get away with things, and the way it slipped a zealot-inheritance plot into an episode about a teenage girl punching a queen is, frankly, an achievement.

Boju is the Acolyte, he killed Adura’s parents, and the episode is built around making her figure it out

The reveal lands in two pieces, and the second piece is the one that hurts.

The first is mechanical. Boju (David Onwubalili), the soft-spoken chancellor who has been at Queen Adura’s (Faith Gesiere Agua) side for the whole season, walks into the temple, drops the polite act, and starts trying to figure out how to destroy the Conduit. He has been positioning her for this her entire life. He is a Spawn of Darkness. The Dark Scroll specifies that only one of those can free the Fallen One, and that has been him all along. Olori (Adesua Etomi-Wellington) and Oba Uwa work this out roughly four minutes before Adura does, which is a nice piece of dramatic irony, because we watch her get blindsided on a delay.

The second piece is the conversation. Adura asks him if any of it was real. The “it” she means is everything: the years he spent raising her after her parents died, the trust, the closest thing she has to a father. His answer is the only honest thing he says in the whole episode.

“All of it, Adura, but my duty to the Master was more important.”

He loved her. He did it anyway. That distinction matters because it is the difference between a sociopath and a true believer, and the show has chosen “true believer.” A sociopath you can talk down. A zealot you can’t. Boju is a zealot, and the episode is built to let Adura figure that out on her own face, in real time. Faith Gesiere Agua’s best work this season is in that thirty-second beat. Watch what she does when the rage drains. She goes small. She goes blank. Then she lets him take it from here, because what is the point.

This is, by some distance, the most interesting character work the show has done with her. The whole season has been building Adura as a tragic-villain type, the kind whose grievance is legitimate but whose tactics are monstrous. The reveal does not redeem her. It relocates the monstrosity. The Wonders did not kill her parents. Boju did. And the line Iyanu plants on her during their earlier fight, “Wonders didn’t kill your parents, Adura, people did,” turns out to be the show’s actual thesis statement, which is a surprisingly sharp one for a Saturday-morning slot.

The “trusted advisor is secretly the bad guy” reveal is one of the oldest beats in genre television. What makes it land here is the parent-figure overlay. Boju is not just her advisor. He is the man who raised her after he had her parents killed. There is no clean version of that. The show does not try to give us one.

The submarine, the reunion, and the only joke that lands

Everything else in this episode is plot maintenance, but two beats are worth flagging.

One: the Riverlands had submarines this whole time. Olori reveals, with no setup, that Adura’s mysteriously-vanishing fleet has been operating beneath the river. Team Chosen takes one and rides it into Elu. “Ingenious feat of nautical engineering from my people” is the line, delivered like Olori is at a museum exhibit, and there is exactly zero attempt to explain how a society that fights with magical Wonders also developed pressurized-hull submarine technology. The show just does it. I respect that.

Two, and more importantly: Kanfo cries. Toye (Samuel Kugbiyi) finds his father (Blossom Chukwujekwu) alive in the temple, hugs him, looks up, and notices Kanfo’s eyes are wet. The exchange that follows is the only thing in the episode I would put in a permanent highlight reel.

“Father, are you crying?”

“No. I’m just sweating from my eyes.”

That is it. That is the whole bit. Chukwujekwu plays it completely straight, and it is the kind of small, useless lie that real fathers tell their sons, and the show lets it sit there for one extra beat before moving on. In an episode this loaded with prophecy and cosmic stakes, a man lying to his son about whether he missed him is the only moment that sounds like real people. Lock it in.

What is the closing scene of “The Acolyte”?

I lied earlier. The actual punchline of the episode is the closing scene.

Iyanu fights Adura to a near-standstill on the Bridge of Light. While she is locked in, Boju does what Boju does, which is sneak around behind everyone and trigger the ritual that destroys the Conduit. Adura, broken from the reveal, lets him. The ritual goes through. Wonders die. Boju knocks Iyanu off the Conduit, cackling. Down on the riverbank, Biyi (Okey Jude) goes still because Ekun has stopped being able to feel her. The audio cuts to Iyanu’s voice, calm and small, saying one word.

“Goodbye.”

Then we drop below the temple, into the chamber that has been sitting under Yorubaland for centuries, and the Fallen One chuckles. Roll credits.

I do not think Iyanu is dead. The show would not kill its title character in the second-to-last episode of a season order it just got renewed off the back of. But the move is still bold: park your protagonist’s apparent death at the cliffhanger, make the audience sit with it for a week, and trust that one quiet “Goodbye” is doing enough emotional work to carry the gap. It is.

What did you read into Iyanu’s “Goodbye,” and do you think Boju is going to be a full-blown sorcerer in Part 2 or just the Fallen One’s middleman? Drop your theories in the comments.