English Dub Review: A Certain Scientific Railgun “Dream Ranker”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

There’s a hot new craze going around Academy City: Indian Poker cards, which can apparently transfer dreams someone’s had during the night to the person who has the card. And like any card game, it soon becomes a desperate search for those who can make the best dream cards, known as Dream Rankers. Junko Hokaze, Misaki’s number two in their clique, is already big on the fad and even gives one of her dreams to Misaka, who Junko knows is a big Gekota (a frog mascot within the show) fan like she is. The dream goes pretty well at first, until it moves past the Gekota part and moves into Misaka becoming a maid for Misaki, which was probably a dream come true for Junko, but a nightmare to her. Oddly enough, Misaki is also adamantly against the cards, which Junko rather quickly acquiesces to. The three girls also overhear Pierce Aogami apparently selling erotic dreams of both Misaki and Misaka, leading to a rare team up between the two Level 5s to get rid of the cards.

Meanwhile, Kuroko and Uiharu investigate a separate app that has seemingly been predicting future muggings and accidents. It seemed to be a joke at first but over time the predictions turned out to be true. The two manage to finally stop a car accident predicted on the app and encounter its creator, a precognitive Esper boy named Shaei Miyama, who says he created the app in order to find someone who can stop these incidents from happening.

OUR TAKE

With just a third of the season left to go, we begin the other arc that will be covered: The Dream Ranker Arc. This one is a bit unique among the Railgun story arcs (at least the ones that are based on the manga) in that it’s a solely original story that isn’t another side of a pre-existing arc from the Index series but also intersects with several of arcs from that story on the timeline. The hints as to where these overlaps happen is a bit more subtle than the Sisters or Daihasei arcs, since the involvement of Misaka and other Railgun characters is pretty sparce, but I’ll point out when certain other arcs are said to have happened between these episodes. For example, around now is when Toma is supposedly on a trip to Italy and fighting Catholics on giant boats made of ice while saving nuns alongside Mugen from Samurai Champloo! Man this show is wild.

Anyway, this episode on its own seems to be pretty much set up for the rest of the arc, which looks like it will involve these dream cards in some way shape or form. The involvement of Misaki and Junko was a bit of a surprise after Misaki had gotten so much focus in the last arc, but it did end up being pretty funny to see another team up from her, though even though she’s in the OP, I don’t expect much more significant involvement from her. That OP does tell us that the ITEM team will be showing back up, obviously before they had their break up, as well as a bunch of characters new and old getting in on the card craze, including possibly the precog boy.

Also interesting that this is how we got some spotlight on Junko in this series. She apparently also has her own spin-off manga, Astral Buddy, which just recently ended, but I don’t see it getting an anime adaptation any time soon. Oh yeah, most of the Level 5s (or someone adjacent to them) have some sort of spin-off manga. This author is an absolute madman. Not that you could tell from stories like these, right? Either way, with this episode, we have a new story to hold us over before this franchise goes back on indefinite hold (at least in animation), so we might as well savor it while we can.