English Dub Review: Black Clover “The Final Invaders ; Mastermind”

(Possible Spoilers Below)

“The Final Invaders”

As Noelle begins to fight Fana, destroying her upper body, but Fana recovers using forbidden magic. Asta struggles to get past the paint monsters to reach Lira but gets himself injured but requires Mimosa to heal him. Outside, the rest of the Black Bulls struggle against the Golden Dawn elves, until Yuno suddenly arrives having gathered quite a calvary of unpossessed knights from all over the kingdom. The elves are all rendered unconscious while Yuno’s necklace reopens the entrance, though only Yuno, Sylph, and Charmy make it inside while Nero is left behind. Charmy ends up with Asta and Mimosa but when she sees Lira upset she tries to offer him food, only for Lira to destroy it and knock her unconscious. Asta rushes to help her, only for Charmy to begin emitting strange magic after being struck.

Her giant sheep pet/chef transforms into a giant talking wolf while Charmy goes through a more significant change herself when she transforms into a taller adult version of herself. Lira realizes Charmy is actually a human-dwarf hybrid, which Charmy was completely unaware of, and her dual heritage has given her two magic attributes, Cotton magic, and Food magic. The wolf begins devouring the painting monsters, absorbing Lira’s magic while Charmy becomes a violent force of nature to keep Lira busy, allowing Asta and Mimosa to run ahead, while Noelle receives help from Captain Jack in a comedic scene where she’s subtly in her mind desiring Asta to rescue her. But the episode ends when something strange happens during Yuno’s battle. As Yuno goes up against Three of the elves who manage to steal his necklace, some in-fighting between the elves begins to ensue when one of them isn’t who they seem…

“Mastermind”

This week, we are introduced to a series of twists even I didn’t expect, but his betrayal had indirectly allowed the Race-war between elves & humans to happen by never being fully honest with the elves and letting them believe they were betrayed by Lemiel, the brother of Licht’s human wife, Tetia, when in fact Rhya knew Lemiel was innocent but hid the truth so the elves would continue their blind hatred for humanity. As one of the other Elves places the stone in the altar, revealing he was actually possessed by a demon that now rises from the land of the dead. The demon reveals to Patoli that while Rhya played his role as an Elf-Judas, the Demon himself was the one who convinced the ancient humans to massacre the elves. As Yuno attempts to save these two Elves, his magic is useless against the demon that can use an omnipotent power called “Word Soul Magic”, meaning anything he says becomes reality. When Asta and Mimosa arrive, he and Yuno try to fight together but it doesn’t go well…

As the episode’s title implies, the demon also reveals itself as the one who cast the forbidden spell to resurrect the elves via-reincarnation, not Licht, and the war between humans and the Midnight Sun was all part an elaborate plan to regain his original body. Of course, Asta and Yuno aren’t just gonna let him do what he pleases and attempt to wound the demon, but he heals instantly. The Demon finally reveals one more twist that when the owner of a four-leaf Grimoire is filled with despair, as Patoli now is, it transforms into a five-leaf Grimoire spell-book. His first attempt created Asta’s Grimoire 5 centuries ago, but he was prevented from claiming it for himself, but now with Patoli’s five-leaf Grimoire in his possession he has the power to rule the world. Now filled with ultimate despair Patoli transforms into a dark elf on that goes on a violent rampage and the episode ends when he leaves Patoli to finish Asta and the others to prevent anyone else from stopping him.

Our Take

For the first episode, Between the plot twists regarding Charmy and the traitorous elf reveal, this episode was insane. Older Charmy is shockingly well-drawn, not gonna lie. Captain Jack’s entrance in Noelle’s battle was also comical, but I think the heart of this episode was Yuno’s Necklace/plot-McGuffin finally coming into play in tandem with the elf betrayal twist I wasn’t expecting. As for the 2nd episode to further explain the betrayal, it was much more detailed and manages to fill in the gaps on the shit that really happened during the Elf/Human war. Whatever this Demon’s name is, he’s the worst kind of enemy in any shounen anime or Manga, the “expositionist” archetypical supervillain who likes to explain their evil plan even though no one asked only to sometimes reveal too much about themselves like a classic Bond Villain which can sometimes be their downfall.

But in this case, it’s not like this Demon revealed what his weaknesses were otherwise this would be a much shorter episode. I also commend Asta for consistently going all out in this fight to prove himself and Yuno. They kept the momentum of the fight to a pretty tense mood although their enemy is pretty god-tier at this point at least until a weakness is found. Now I wonder what will happen since there are other elves fighting at the same time this is going on. Will this Shadow Demon thing corrupt them too? Or is everyone going to put aside their past grudges and go up against him?

I guess that remains to be seen in future episodes.