English Dub Review: A Certain Scientific Railgun “Mitori Kouzaku”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Misaka and Misaki make their own ways through Gensei Kihara’s security, with Misaka fighting guards and infiltrating in disguise, while Misaki starts building a posse of mind controlled guards so capture Gensei. But the two come up short in the end, only capturing a body double. And to add insult to injury, reading the double’s memories only shows Misaki a recording of Gensei mocking her for being fooled. Keitz and 10032 are also found by Gensei’s goons.

Meanwhile, Kuroko, Uiharu, and Saten do their research on Mitori Kouzaku, who was the one who attacked Uiharu and Misuzu on someone’s orders. Problem is that she’s listed as deceased, though the person they learn that from theorizes that she was just filed that way because she was given a deal for some top secret work. Saten goes looking for an abandoned factory Kouzaku might be at, but runs into Toma, who is currently on a scavenger hunt for a lucky charm, so she decides to give him hers on the condition he comes back with it in an hour. Saten then finds the factory, but then is caught by both Kouzaku AND Xochitil (who Saten recognizes as the girl she helped with her cell phone), who then turn on each other because Kouzaku had been manipulating MEMBER, which Xochitil works for.

OUR TAKE

Oh okay, I guess we’re doing these every week now? Good news for me I guess, but it’s worth noting that Funimation is dong what they can to schedule things and get through the rest of the undubbed stuff. And some interesting timing here, considering the sub of this just finished this arc and has announced it will be going on break until July to cover the OTHER arc of the season. So we’ve now got six episodes left to dub until Funimation catches up, though we have yet to see if we’ll be doing these weekly until then. I know I’m definitely interest in seeing how these all gets handled either way, but I hope we get some confirmation on what that way will be sooner rather than later.

As for the episode itself, it’s basically just the next step in the objectives established last episode. Misaka and Misaki are looking for Gensei Kihara, the others are looking into the other ones involved in this craziness. The story uses the development of those plots well, there’s just not a whole lot to go into at the moment. It’s expected that capturing Gensei wasn’t going to be so easy that they’d be able to get him without him planning at all in advance, especially since he probably knows their abilities super well and can plan against them. Then there’s Saten running into Toma, and I don’t think I’m spoiling anything by saying he’ll be playing a role in the climax of this arc (which seems obvious considering how he’s featured in the OP).

Basically what I’m getting at here is that this episode seems more like a stepping stone to the next major plot point and so ends up just being connective tissue as opposed to much in the way of worth commenting on for its own moments. I did like seeing Misaka trying to disguise herself, which I guess was not immediately found out because teenage girls being super powerful is a pretty common thing in Academy City so no one needs question that, as well as the fake out on the body double, but this is just set up for better stuff to come, which will be far easier to get into in detail. I imagine things will start to really escalate very soon, but this episode acts as a good up ramp to the major showdowns, which we will hopefully get to see more of next week.