English Dub Review: Clockwork Planet “Purge”

Emergency repairs, corporate espionage, and a playful hairstyle.

Spoilers Below

Marie and her bodyguard Halter ambush a soldier guarding the elevator for the core tower. With the imminent threat from her springloaded-bayonet gun, the soldier spills the beans. There is something seriously wrong with Kyoto’s mechanisms, and the military can’t fix it themselves. Rather than bow down to the meisters guild for repairs, they decided to purge the entire city block, killing millions of people. Armed with this information, she places a call to her technicians, which is routed through an office in between. They managed to ascertain the exact floor that the problem is at, but can’t do anything. Somehow, the main barrel connecting their floor with the errant floor has been disconnected. Elevators to it won’t work, so she jumps astride Halters back and he jumps down the shaft. This guy must be an automaton.

At the main barrel, Marie dons a VR force feedback suit in order to control a variety of mechanical arms to flip switches that re-engage gears. While she goes Doc Ock on us, Halter goes hand to hand versus a bunch of robot assailants. When it seems his fisticuffs are good enough to take down a legion of gun-toting metal men (because of the rule of cool), an even bigger robot called the Minotaur arrives to… be… slightly more menacing but ultimately useless. The barrel is re-engaged, and her techs have access to the faulty gears. Problem is, the diagnostics show no problems with that floor at all. They will have to check the five million some-odd parts manually. To make matters worse, the meisters guild HQ calls up. They are to stop work immediately and return to home base. It seems that a rival company is in bed with the military, and is using this as an opportunity to discredit the Breguet Company. If she attempts to repair the Kyoto grid, the Meisters Guild will pull her credentials, and she will be unable to enter the core tower anyways. On her way out, beaten and depressed, she runs into her only hope to save an entire city worth of people: Naota and RyuZU.

Going into this episode, I expected to hate it. HATE IT. The previous episode was such a cliche-ridden fanservice-fest, I didn’t much like the prospects of this one. I have good news. It got better. Slightly. A bit more action, a bit more plot, and more emotion out of the characters. Still fanservice-y, but not nearly as overt and vulgar about it. I have, to be honest, I’m glad this episode focuses more on Marie and Halter because Naoto’s story (which I spared you from in the summary because it was irrelevant) is just a long stream of rom-com fanservice tropes and unoriginal plot. If you dropped it entirely, this would be a better show, and you’d have more time to do other things. Like deepen the lore or develop the characters more completely. Ah! Se la vie.

I also didn’t notice nearly as many errors in the animation of this episode. In fact, I didn’t notice much of any CG either, making this episode almost entirely traditional animation. I can appreciate that. The action was your typical anime fare, with shortcuts to hide more complicated movements. That being said, it was well executed and didn’t bother me at all. The voice acting hasn’t really improved at all, per se, but the actors were given more of an opportunity to show their work, especially Skyler McIntosh. Marie’s emotional breakdown after being taken off the case was a job well done for her and was believable. It is my sincere hope that the improvement of the show in this episode is a trend and not a fluke. If so, this could be a show worth watching. Otherwise… well, it won’t. Until then, I give this episode six self-soiling soldiers out of ten.