English Dub Review: Dies Irae “The End of the Nightmare is a Beginning”

Well, there we go. I’m lost again.

Overview (Spoilers)

It’s been a week since Ren’s first encounter with the strange German girls with freakish powers. Since then, he’s tried very hard to keep the fact that he sleep-murders people under wraps. The school has canceled all club activities, sending kids home as soon as possible to keep them off the street. That doesn’t stop Kasumi from getting into some kendo practice. As she whacks the dummy, she slips into a trance and pummels the dummy so hard that it, her shinai, and the wall behind the dummy are all pulverized. Figuring that’s enough practice for one day, Ren tells her to hit the showers while he cleans up. On the way home, they run into some grade school kids that remind them of younger versions of themselves and their missing friend Shirou. Ren admits to Kasumi that Shirou once told him from a fortune-telling game that Ren’s future wife would be a girl with a mole on her breast, so the pair of them spied on the girl’s showers to see who it was. He tells Kasumi she should probably get that mole looked at. To repay her for his perversion, she demands that he take her to the amusement park. As they play, she tells him she can sense that he’s trying to hide something from her. She can’t help feeling left out, especially since it is something weighing on his heart. She wants to help him in any way that she can. This triggers another vision of Marie, and when he awakes, he is far away from where they were… and Kasumi is nowhere to be seen. Panicked that he may have killed her, Ren searches the town. Even the bridge, where a mysterious attack has left burning cars flipped in every direction, has no sign of her. He’s hesitant to call her, though. The instant he does, he knows he’ll get the truth, and he isn’t sure he wants it. Kei arrives and calls him out on it, telling him that a war is coming. He’d better get more power soon. As he rounds a corner and slips in a puddle of blood. Ahead of him is Kasumi… and a pair of fresh corpses hacked to bits. Kasumi has been killing him, trying to help him with this thing he’s going through. Her frustration at being left out and feeling useless manifests as blades of dark energy that blast out of her body. Ren absorbs the blasts after some trying, gaining their power. Finally, he pacifies her, saying he’s kept her out not because she would be useless, but because she was the only thing keeping him going. The dark power passes out of her and into him, as he takes her home to sleep it off. In the meantime, Valeria observes the guillotine from a few episodes ago. It is now glowing with dark power, and the blade is missing. What could this portend?

Our Take

Okay, this episode had some great visuals. Everything from the kendo dojo scene to the battle against Kasumi, we got brilliant art, dynamic shots, and smooth animation with loads of detail. I loved how the shot focused on the handle of the shinai warping and splintering in her hands. There was a ton of detail in that. They also could have gone with a cycle of animation for the impacts to the dummy but chose to not only make each hit unique but to show the bits of the dummy flying and moving around from the blow. The way they show Ren getting hurt is dramatic, placing him in silhouette against a red background. It was dramatic and visceral.

Also, Madeline Morris did an excellent job with Kasumi in this episode. The girl was suffused with feelings throughout the story, and I could really hear them in the delivery. She’s gotten a lot more depth in her acting after finishing her stint as Mahiro from Hina Logic. In fact, her voice acting probably made up for one major issue with this episode: the translation’s writing. Let’s face it, this show is confusing. There is a lot going on, and not much is getting explained. The translation seems to choose a nearly direct route to English. While that kinda works, it feels like there wasn’t enough interpretation going on, which would have made the characters’ intents more clear. Like how recent episodes of Dragon Ball Super have radically altered dialogue, not for censorship or to anglicize the show, but to actually bring out more of the character’s personality. There is plenty of room in this episode to do so. Much of the talking happens when the character’s mouth isn’t even visible on screen, or as a voice over of an unrelated scene, so you can have them say whatever you want. One spot that made this obvious to me was at the end of the amusement park scene. She was talking about one thing and jumps back to another. The monologue she was doing sounded shallow, as if it had been written, and not spoken organically. This wasn’t on Morris’ performance. It was the choices of words that made her sound fake.

I am still completely lost on what actually was going on in this episode. Did Kasumi absorb a chunk of Ren’s power? Did he give it to her? Is she aware that he was murdering people, or is she doing all of this in a trance? Has it actually been that she’s done all of the murders and not Ren? What is his connection to Mercurius, and is Kasumi the modern rebirth of Marie? What was the purpose of the guillotine, and of the enemy attacking the bridge? So many questions, no answers. It doesn’t help that most of the characters are talking with a fake accent, and with the exception of Marie’s Jad Saxton and Valeria’s Ian Sinclair, their words get muddied and difficult to understand. I found myself rewinding a few times to try and catch what they said.