English Dub Review: A Certain Scientific Railgun “Doppelganger”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Judgement closes in on who they believe to be the creator of the Indian Poker cards, Ryoko Kuriba, the one who put out the way of making the cards online. Misaki is also investigating her and approaches Misaka with her findings, namely that Ryoko was once part of an experiment regarding the human soul where her body was split into two bodies with cybernetic replacements, then put back together to see if two souls existed. What they aren’t aware of is that the cyborg Ryuko, now completely robotic, has become self-aware and has escaped. The two Level 5s confront the real Ryuko for answers. Meanwhile, the Scavenger group is assigned to stop the cyborg themselves.

OUR TAKE

Do you all remember Scavenger? If you’re not a huge Raildex fan, then probably not, but if you’ve been watching the recent anime releases in this universe, they’re the group of weird girls who fought Accelerator for a little bit in his spin-off, which was…holy shit, A YEAR AGO? God, where did the time go. Anyway, this actually takes place not long after that fight, so we’re seeing them try to get their reputation back after being soundly defeated in that series. Not sure why THEY of all people were picked to show up here, since they don’t really have any connection to Misaka or Misaki, but I guess this has to do with almost all of the Dark Side organizations being taken out by this point in the timeline? Plus these two Level 5s weren’t involved in all that so at least they get something to do.

But yeah, this looks to be the endgame story for the Dream Ranker arc. After all those short mini stories about other characters, I suppose it makes sense to bring focus back to Misaka for this last stretch. I have some mixed feelings about how this arc has been laid out in this way, though I’d say it has its advantages too. But I’m really not sure how this was picked as the best way to culminate everything here. Ryoko was set up like a lot of other characters in the episode where Misaka and Saiai looked through Indian Poker cards, though I really would not have guessed that she had a robotic doppleganger of all things. I mean, this is anime after all, so things like that are practically common place at this point and I should be pretty desensitized, but I’m not quite seeing the connection to starting the arc with cards that share other people’s dreams and leading to having a girl who has a robot with a copy of her soul or however this going to be explained. It’s pretty weird, even for this show, and that bar is quite high. But I can’t say that I necessarily dislike it, at least for now. Only a handful of episodes remain in this elongated season, which I’m surprised is finally drawing to a close, but where it could be headed I cannot possibly say right now. And in a sense, that’s certainly an advantage it has over other shows. Let’s see if it can hold onto that right up until the end.