English Dub Review: In/Spectre “What the Guardian Serpent Heard”
Overview (Spoilers Below):
Kotoko meets Kuro at the hospital and asks him to accompany her to speak with a serpent god in a forest swamp. He says no, so she tracks him to his apartment and gives him another chance. He declines again, but gives her a warm jacket and plenty of bug repellant for her journey. She travels to meet the guardian spirit of Tsukuna Swamp. The spirit’s problem is that a woman named Tanio Aoi disposed of a body in the snake’s swamp, but it wants to know why. The police suspect her of murder, but is it really that simple?
Our Take:
Yikes. After a pretty solid start to the series, episode two is a pretty big let down. I’ve watched ahead thanks to the subtitled version being much farther along, so I know that things get better later on. But I really think a lot of people might be turned away by this second arc before the show gets a chance to kick into high gear in the fourth episode.
Things open up normally, with Kotoko having another ‘random’ run-in with Kuro at the hospital. We get some nice banter and learn more about where Kuro gets his mysterious powers from. When he was just a boy of eleven years old, Kuro ate the flesh of a mermaid. That’s why he can never die. But he also ate the flesh of another creature which is counteracting the effects of the mermaid flesh. What was that other creature, you may ask? Sorry, if puts off telling Kotoko and the viewers for another week or two.
The main issue with this episode is that it consists almost entirely of talking. While the premiere had a good bit of this as well, it also treated us to an action scene near the end that sealed the dialogue up with a bow. This episode is not quite so nicely tied up. There’s just soooo much dialogue. And that wouldn’t be a problem if the dialogue was interesting, but it’s really not. Kotoko and Kuro might be able to sustain an episode with just the two of them bickering back and forth, but Kotoko and a serpent? Not so much. Basically, Kotoko thinks up possible solutions and then the serpent shoots them down by finding little details that don’t make sense. Why did the lady throw the corpse into the serpent god’s swamp? By the end of it, we still don’t know! That’s right, this arc is dragging on for another episode.
The best parts of In/Spectre is still Kotoko and Kuro’s dynamic. “Who lets a poor defenseless girl go into the mountains by herself in the middle of the night?” She huffs ot herself on the way up. Then later, when he eventually shows up and denies being romantically involved with her, she quips: “We can have our lover’s quarrel later.” If only the snake was that clever maybe all it’s talk would’ve been more entertaining. At least the dub is still well-done and the animation, though limited, is nice to look at and well-designed. Now if we can make it past the end of this storyline, hopefully things will get a lot more interesting.
