English Dub Review: Clockwork Planet “Deep Underground”

Well, Naoto’s dead. Series over. Let’s go home.

Spoilers Below

Marie and the gang are having a tough time taking down this evil Y-Series unit. Her cube-o-doom keeps popping up out of nowhere and annihilating anything it touches. It’s all they can do just to dodge the silly thing. She even pulls a giant sword out of hammerspace and proceeds to attack them directly! That’s when Naoto comes up with an idea. They can’t really get in close enough to do any damage, but if they can drop her into the deep underground below, she can’t fight them anymore. They hammer at the floor, blasting a huge hole under he feet… but she bounds up the rubble to rejoin the fight, now with a giant resonance cannon! After a shot gets off, tearing a hole through the city above them, RyuZU stops the gears of the cannon with her scythes. The attacker returns to her original attack strategy. And Naoto comes up with another realization! Their assailant IS AnchoR, RyuZU’s sister Y-Unit. Something is going wrong, and she is unable to act freely. This information does him no good, however, as he and RyuZU fall in the hole themselves, and are unable to fly back up. From Holster, we learn that the Deep Underground is an airless void. An unprotected human would surely die. He and Marie retreat back to the surface.

After a bit of crying over the loss of her friend/punching bag, Marie gets up to get some answers from someone who would know: The head meister of the Mie Grid. After threatening him in a skin-tight leather suit that should not be made for girls her age, Marie gets him to reveal what has been going on. Thirty years ago, one of the grids was dropped to cover up illegal government experiments into electromagnetism. The remaining meisters that worked on that project took materials and ran to Mie, building the giant mecha of mass destruction that AnchoR is guarding. It was never intended to be activated, merely meant as a countermeasure to ensure the military wouldn’t try to drop the grid. However, it seems that it has become active, and likely as a response to the military’s actions in the Kyoto grid becoming public a couple of episodes ago. This could spark a disastrous war if allowed to continue. Unfortunately, being faced with indirectly causing this, Marie is unable to think of what to do next. That’s when Naoto pops up out of the sewers with RyuZU. Apparently, the two of them fell intentionally, knowing full well there was another floor beneath them, along with air and a mysterious old man. After a swift kick in the face from Marie, and a pep talk from Naoto, the gang is back together, and ready to save the day.

The action scene here was rather interesting, and its animation finally kicked into gear. No, pun not intended. Not only that, but the characters actually behaved with a modicum of intelligence as they went into this. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to save the episode. That brings up the real problem of this show. It has two phases: Action-y awesome mode, and perverted talk-y mode. Action-y awesome mode shows characters behaving as they seem like they were supposed to be written. It has moderate to good animation in a traditional style on average. Perverted Talk-y Mode has the characters behaving irrationally and out of character. It devolves everyone but Holster into glandular teens obsessed with sex, sex jokes, puberty, and finding new ways to show skin. The characters end up speaking by screaming at each other, stopping only momentarily to advance the plot a bit by becoming who they are in the action-y bits for a few seconds. Animation and art ends up suffering during these portions, as we saw in several early episodes. If we had more of the action-y story, or had the characters act like that all the time, this would be an anime well worth watching.

The voice acting in this episode is rather abysmal. Skyler McIntosh’s performance during the shower scene with Marie was flat and completely without authenticity. They could at least add some sort of effect to her “counter-inner-dialogue” to differentiate. This could have been a moment with actual emotion, but instead, we have a character that sounds like even she knows Naoto is coming back in a few minutes. Then, when she realizes he’s alive, she screams in such a way that all of her words blur together into a meaningless heap that hurt my ears. Because of all this, I’m giving this episode five improbable resonance cannons out of ten.