English Dub Review: Black Clover “The Magic Knight Captain Conference”

Conferences, betrayal and lots and lots of pie.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

The fight against the Eye of the Midnight Sun has ended, and our band of upstart heroes are sent home to recover their wounds and prepare for what comes next. Gauche shares a touching moment with Theresa while Asta gets a kiss from the girl he’s been accidentally wooing for the past few weeks, and the Black Bulls get together to have a pie-eating contest.

Following that, Yami is summoned to the capital for meeting of the magic knight captains. This event has secretly been planned by the Wizard King to be a way to smoke out the traitor among their ranks; the magic knight captain who is secretly working with The Eye of the Midnight Sun.

To do this, the Wizard King also needs Asta’s anti-magic, which he uses to erase the memory protection spells keeping the Wizard King’s mages from discovering the memories of their captured Eye of the Midnight Sun prisoners.

After their preliminary gathering, the Wizard King summons all of them to the dungeons below, where he announces his discovery to them all that one of them is a traitor. Though who that traitor is has yet to be revealed.

Our Take:

With the prior arc finishing up, this episode serves as a denouement for the cast, who need time to recover after the drawn-out fight they’ve just come from. Though this episode is entitled “The Magic Knight Captain Conference,” that time is somewhat incorrect. Most of the episode is little scenes of the Black Bulls chilling out with each other and having an eating contest. The quality of these scenes are…variable. The pie-eating contest is fairly amusing, but when the show tries to bring in touching moments with Gauche and Asta, it just falls a bit flat.

I know I say it a lot, since its a point of criticism that keeps coming up in this show, but the animation quality in this episode is a far cry from even the last couple of episodes we’ve had. Its a “One step forward, two steps back” situation. With the improvement of the animation during Yami and Licht’s fight, its almost as if the animators have to compensate for that improvement by cutting corners on less action-oriented episodes. Asta’s body shape keeps changing from scene to scene, with some particularly egregious scenes reducing Asta’s face to little more than a spiky triangle. They manage to get away with this by having a lot of comedic scenes with over-the-top facial expressions, but when its bad, its really damn bad.

It’s kind of cool to see the magic knights all get together, but their time together is tainted a bit by the awkward verbal ticks of Jack the Ripper and some unfunny comedy. I don’t feel like we get to see these characters as anything more than one-note punchlines, constantly being shoved down our throats over and over again. This would have been a good time to remedy this problem, but this conference of the most powerful magic knights in the land feels rather small.

Its nice to see Christopher Sabat put so much into his performance as Yami. Among the tepid deliveries most of the magic knight captains deliver, his voice stands head and shoulders above the rest. Though I don’t think the writing is on point, Sabat certainly carries the magic knight conference in terms of sheer vocal energy.

It’s a lukewarm episode that received lukewarm criticism. Very little actually happens as most of the episode is filled with comedic bits designed to fill out time with the least expensive animation possible. While the ending of the episode might lead to a better story next week, this one is merely a transitional piece.