English Dub Review: Black Clover “Three-Leaf Salute”

Didn’t Yuno used to be in this show?

Overview (Spoilers Below)

The magic knight captains have been gathered with the Julius Novachrono, the Wizard King, to discover the identity of the traitor in the magic knight captains. Through the use of memory interrogation magic, the two members of the Eye of the Midnight Sun they’ve taken prisoner reveal its none other than Gueldre Poizot, the captain of the Purple Orcas squad.

Of course, he denies it, but its no surprise to the other captains, who already thought he was pretty shady. Poizot tries to escape, but with Asta’s help the magic knights take him down and bring him in for questioning.

Afterwards, Novachrono invites Asta and Yami into his office to inform them of a mission he needs them to undertake. A water temple with strong magical energy should have a magical stone located within, and Novachrono wants the Black Bulls to get the stone before The Eye of the Midnight Sun does. After a brief flashback of Yami’s past where he first met Julius Novachrono, the two are sent back to the Black Bulls hideout. There, the gang rejoices at their new mission, and gets ready to embark to the ocean.

Our Take:

This episode was a potentially solid entry gone wrong. After last week, we were left on a cliffhanger of who the traitor in the magic knight captains was. Unfortunately, this gets bungled at a fundamental level. The twist is weak and is basically the only thing of consequence that happens in the exhausting 22 minutes of this episode. The rest of this story is muddled in tiresome exposition, with plenty of wacky comedic moments to make sure that the tone can’t achieve any semblance of power.

It was a questionable creative decision to make Gueldre Poizot, the captain of the Purple Orcas, the traitor among the magic knights. As a character, we’ve only just introduced him in the most recent episode, and so the audience has no real investment in who he is. If it were a different, more unlikely character that we had a relationship with, then this twist of fate might’ve been more powerful. And having Gueldre go into a lengthy exposition about who he is and why he’s so gosh darn powerful of a mage is less than graceful. This episode leaks character tension like water through Swiss cheese. Asta’s indignation at Gueldre’s betrayal is no different than his indignation at any other moment in the series, so its not like Gueldre means anything special to Asta or the audience as a character.

And really, even as critical as I am, I was actually looking forward to seeing who the traitor in the black knight captains was. This is disappointing, to say the least, and I can only imagine that to fans of the series that were in the same boat share this feeling as well.

It wasn’t all bad, of course. Nothing is. The little flashback we get about Yami’s past at the end of the episode is a nice little tidbit that develops Yami out a bit more, but it does feel somewhat out of place. I really couldn’t have imagined Yami and Novachrono being friends in the past, but I’ll take what I can get from Black Clover at this point. If this series wants to get better, then its going to have to spend more quality time with our mainstay characters instead of just assuming that we’re going to like them. And with Captain Yami’s character popularity seeming to overtake the rest of the cast’s presence in the show, making our cast more interesting will be more important than ever.