English Dub Review: Dr. STONE “The Culmination of Two Million Years”

 

Overview

With Magma out of the way, Ginro, Senku, and Chrome are all eligible to become the new village chief and marry Ruri. Ginro starts thinking with his dick and attempts to beat down Senku. Luckily, a swift kick to the nuts stops him in his tracks. When Senku is about to go up against Chrome, however, he realizes Chrome took too much damage from the Magma battle. He faints, automatically making Senku the winner.

Senku immediately divorces Ruri and demands barrels of particular ingredients instead, which he runs back to his lab with to finish the medicine. The gang gets to work with him, knowing there’s only two days of toiling left. Senku even manages to finish Gen’s soda. At long last, the medicine is completed. Senku presents the sulfa drug to Ruri and the village elders, feeding it to her and using a glass as a stethoscope. He hears fluid in her lungs, which makes him afraid that the disease might be tuberculosis.

However, when the sulfa drug makes Ruri’s illness worse, Senku lights up — knowing that the bad reaction to the drug means that her disease is just pneumonia. They continue giving her the drug every day, and Ruri is finally cured — able to run free at last.

Senku is officially crowned as chief of Ishigami Village. Senku is stunned, recognizing his last name, and Ruri finally reveals that she’s known who he was “since she was a child.”

Our Take

This is, by far, the most elating and heartwarming episode of the series. This seemed like an all around happy plot for everyone involved — even Chrome, who wound up not marrying Ruri, kept true to his word about only wanting to see her happy and cured. Even that one skeezy “typical anime” shot of Senku pouring the sulfa drug into Ruri’s mouth wasn’t enough to sour the vibe of the episode. Everything had such a hopeful and happy vibe, with great plot turnarounds that weren’t predictable or contrived. Even if they happened to be that, Dr. STONE was just so good at depicting emotion that it almost seems like anything they could have done would have come out amazing.

When Ruri is finally cured, it’s genuinely hard not to get choked up about it — especially considering all the hard work The Kingdom of Science had gone through to make it happen. Even Gen crying as he drank his first soda in thousands of years was emotional.

Which brings us to the new, captivating mystery: how does Ruri know Senku? She must have either come from stone after living in the modern world, or there was some archaic evidence of Senku’s that Ruri had grown up with. In the latter case, it seems like the entire village must have grown up with this background information on Senku’s existence without even knowing it. The entire village is named after his last name? What is going on here?

Captivating things like this can make a viewer forget that Taiju and Yuzuriha exist. There are so many places where this story can go, and we’re glad there’s more to come.