English Dub Review: Clockwork Planet “Yatsuhakagi”

This episode. Why isn’t the rest of the series more like THIS episode?

Spoilers Below

AnchoR has been saved. Akihabara has been evacuated. But there’s still only three seconds to midnight on the Clockwork Planet’s doomsday clock. AnchoR’s cube-o-death pulls ahead out of its hammerspace. It belongs to the guy who called for Marie in the first place. He confirms what everyone has been fearing: AnchoR was guarding an electromagnetic weapon, and it’s ready to go. Now that she sic’ed the military on the thing, the gloves have come off, and the doomsday clock has ticked away another second. The WMD claws its way out of the planet and releases a huge blast of magnetic energy. All of the gears in Akihabara magnetize and stop moving. All of them. Even the ones in RyuZU, AnchoR, and Holster. They all fall silent and still. Even the gears that make up Naoto’s noise-cancelling headphones are affected, for what little sense a gear-based headphone would be. It knocks him out, while the building crumbles around them. Marie is alone.

Nothing the military tries will work. Throw an aerial bomber unit at it? All shredded in no time flat. Use a national defense cannon on it, the size of a mountaintop? Please! It makes an EM force field to turn your shots aside. Then, a little force-feeding of purple lightning for you. Their only other plan is to purge the Akihabara grid. The problem is that it is so integrated with the Japanese multigrid, dropping it would have disastrous consequences for all of Japan and most of Asia. They could spin it any way they want, but it would still be a catastrophe. The military turns to an outside consultant meister, who happens to be an ally of Marie’s, for advice on how to beat this monster. He doesn’t have any solutions yet, but he astutely points out that it is likely that this was developed by the government, not independent radicals. They don’t like that. Because it’s true.

Meanwhile, Naoto wakes up. After breaking through a wall to make a faster way out, he carries the now overheating body of RyuZU where the fresh air can help cool her down. Marie questions his choices, especially since the act has burned both of his hands. She is promptly shut up, however, when AnchoR wakes up out of the blue. Both she and RyuZU had automated systems to heat themselves up in the event they were magnetized. Heating the gears t0 this point demagnetized them. The only problem is, RyuZU’s system to cool herself back down. Naoto’s going with AnchoR to find out how to fix his “wife”. Marie is humbled by his headlong rush to tackle tasks, that he follows his guts and is willing to sacrifice everything for what he values. She takes Holster’s head, scuttling his body to keep its tech out of enemy hands. The three head down the tower, and in search of a way to de-magnetize the city, and maybe even destroy the EM weapon while they’re at it.

I’m gonna be honest, this episode was the best-written one I’ve seen out of this series yet. There isn’t a whole lot of actual action, but the tension was real enough that you didn’t need it. The writers dispensed with all the fan-service and hormonal humor, heading straight for the meat of this story. Though Marie was still a bit expository about her thoughts on Naoto, everything is written several degrees better than how the rest of the series has been up to this point. It isn’t the best writing ever, but it is still a vast improvement.

To follow this up, Dallas Reid followed suit and upped his game as Naoto’s voice. As he toiled to rescue the automata, the voice work was completely believable and honest. By comparison, Skyler McIntosh’s performance as Marie was a bit flat. There was pain, anger, determination, and vulnerability behind those lines, and they came across as much as a plea for help as a determined battle cry. This is good because this was primarily a talking episode. The action was limited to a sequence of the fighter planes. It wasn’t horribly animated, it just didn’t feel like there were stakes or real movement in it. The pilots claimed they were flying at Mach 5, but it felt like they were moving so slow, Chuck Yeager would snore. Again, let me point out the absurdity of a clockwork-powered fighter plane moving at Mach 5 with propeller-based propulsion. It doesn’t work. Anyways, this scene could have done with the animation team watching a few episodes of SWAT Kats to see how they actually made it feel like the jet was moving. While the art and animation during the scenes with Naoto and the gang were fine, I felt like the art on the military brass conversations was off, as if the eyes were never quite right. I couldn’t spot any glaring problems, but they just didn’t look like they were lined up. So, with the improved writing, and much better voice acting, this episode was actually enjoyable to watch. Despite its flaws, I bestow upon it seven overheating robots out of ten.