English Dub Review: Clockwork Planet “Conflict”

An entire city is about to be dropped to certain doom, but please, stop a moment to propose to your robot girlfriend.

Spoilers Below

Marie sits down with Naoto, and demands the return of RyuZU, who was originally her company’s property. Naoto refuses, and a Mexican standoff ensues. Once cooler heads prevail, the full story comes out. With a little over nine hours, until Kyoto drops, they need RyuZU to repair the tower. She is sorry to admit it, but the automaton girl does not have the ability to repair any of the Clockwork Planet. On the bright side, Naoto can. His headphones are of a special noise-cancelling variety. Despite that, he can still hear the exact floor of the tower that the problem gears are on, though he can’t pinpoint the troublemakers. To do that, they’ll have to get him to the tower. That, of course, is easier said than done. The building they’re in is loaded with military automatons, including a Goliath, which is part tank. Which part? The gun part. They make lemonade from these lemons, though. After defeating the enemy forces, they use a captured radio to phone the corporate boss that ordered the hit and got a recording of him confessing to being behind the whole thing. Of course, they had to lead him to believe Marie was dead in order for that to happen. Now officially dead, Marie is free to follow her own course, and take on the military.

Which is good, because the forces protecting the tower are numerous, containing several Goliaths, and a couple actual tanks. As a fine howdy-do, one of those tank rounds fires straight at them from range. RyuZU cuts the car in half to keep its occupants from going up in a blaze of glory. Well and truly teed off, RyuZU turns her mechanized scythes against the enemy. But one ancient automaton against a modern platoon? Well, it works if she has the power to stop time. And she does. Okay, that isn’t quite accurate, but the explanation went so fast and had so much theoretical physics thrown around, it’s easier to just say time stop.  This drains her power, so Naoto has to take a moment to wind her back up. After this, Naoto decides that this is as good a time as any to propose to RyuZU. She turns him down, but not because she doesn’t like him. She likes him plenty. She just doesn’t want to become his equal, as she is his servant. Still, he’s happy. And in a few hours, everyone is gonna die. Great work.

Well, it was slightly better plot-wise than the previous episode, at least. A few chunks of knowledge get dropped on us early on. One, Holster is a cyborg, which explains his super-strength. Quick question, why wasn’t this hyper-advanced cyborg bodyguard given onboard weapons? Anybody? Just me? Anyways, the second is that RyuZU is the weakest of her sisters, though potentially the oldest. She has a younger sister and, we assume from the credits, an evil sister. To be honest, I call bull on Naoto’s super-hearing. If he’s a baseline human, there is no possible way for him to hear things miles away through at least two walls while wearing noise-cancelling headphones as everyone around him is yelling. Not happening. Either Naoto isn’t human, or the writer spent so much time researching theoretical superluminal physics that he ignored basic Newtonian physics. And good sense. I do appreciate that the explanation of the time stop was loaded with very real physics concepts, though, as I went back and researched everything (that I remember) was said, and it somewhat checks out. Ish.

Animation. Well, the scene where they explained everything that RyuZU did was pretty cool to watch, lots of CG lines flying around with traditional animations of the Robobabe hacking mice to pieces. Her magical girl-esque transformation to enable her time-stop was loaded with CG gears and other doodads but was little more than a palette swap, and really didn’t do much to build the action or story. Voice acting wasn’t anything spectacular, but nothing was really bad. One thing I’d like to bring up to the director of the dub, nobody grunts when they nod. Especially when they are nodding repeatedly. Having Jeannie Tirado do that for all twenty some-odd nods as she confirms that she likes Naoto? Kinda cheese. Because of that, I have to rate this episode six blocks of clockwork cheese out of ten.