English Dub Review: Steins;Gate “Altair of Translational Symmetry -Translational Symmetry-“

Is it even possible to decapitate dudes with your hands?

Overview (Spoilers Below)

In the stairwell leading to the apartment complex roof, Okabe is confronted by Alexis, who reveals that he was the one behind this whole plot with Amadeus to steal time travel technology for himself. With the Future Gadget Lab at gunpoint, he explains how he was contacted by Kagari many years ago. Kagari, brainwashed by Alexis’s future self, delivers the news that the world will go to war with itself over time machines. This put Alexis in a position to be the one with all the power in the future, provided he can gain control of the time machine before anyone else.

After explaining his evil genius plan, Kagari and Suzuha fight back to try and turn the tables on Alexis and manage to incapacitate the mad scientist. After the ensuing chaos, Suzuha and Mayuri board the time machine to go and complete their mission to save the future, but at the last moment, a military helicopter launches a missile at the time machine, destroying it and the people inside.

Okabe despairs at seeing Mayuri die once again, knowing that all of his efforts were for nothing. He heads back into the lab to use Maho’s time machine to go and change the past but is stopped by Maho when she says it’s not ready yet. Then, the episode concludes as Okabe gets a text message from the late Mayuri, who tells him about how she loves him and feels responsible for how terrible his life has become.

Our Take:

Oh, damn.

This is the big one folks, the tipping point of Steins;Gate 0, that lays out all the cards on the table, then proceeds to rip your heart out and throw it on the ground.

This episode really does bring Okabe’s struggle in this series full circle. It’s not just a big twist that reveals the true mastermind behind all of this time machine drama, its the thematic conclusion of everything that Okabe has been going through. His big conflict this whole time has been about trying to preserve the sad timeline he’s in, without taking the risk of going and saving Makise Kurisu. He lives in a life of (somewhat) quiet desperation, trying to salvage what he has even though he knows the world is doomed. But in this episode, Okabe discovers that the refuge he took in this timeline is no refuge at all, just another misery, plagued with even more death and despair than the loss of his childhood friend.

Not to mention, Alexis is actually way more of a foil than Okabe than he first appeared, something I didn’t really notice until the show wanted me to, which is a sign of good craftsmanship. Though I definitely had my suspicions about Alexis and his shenanigans, I wasn’t confident enough in my inferences to say for sure that he was the big bad.

It’s an excellent turn of events that makes a deeply compelling episode. Though there have definitely been some structural and pacing problems with this series in the past, this is the kind of episode that really stands above that. Admittedly, it gets a little bogged down in the middle with Alexis’s evil genius speech. There’s nothing like a big exposition dump to deflate the tension of a scene, but it’s not too much of a loss.

This is the sort of episode that a fan of Steins;Gate is really waiting for. The big twists, the dark plots, the existential terror of the callousness of time; these are the themes that drive this series home, even if they’ve had some difficulty throughout the series. Things aren’t quite over yet, but we’re certainly entering the home stretch of this series. I’ll have to wait and see how the dust settles to make the final judgment on how I feel about Steins;Gate 0, but I’m more eager than ever to see how it all plays out.