English Dub Review: A Certain Scientific Railgun “Possession”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Rita Izumi, the leader of Scavenger, thinks fast to avoid having to fight Misaka and tells her that she works for Judgement. Misaka, despite knowing someone who works for Judgement, completely believes this, allowing Rita to finish her own job of getting the Doppelganger to the people looking for it, even though they end up really injured for their trouble. With all of that out of the way, Misaka faces Doppelganger in battle, though it begins to incorporate debris into itself, turning into a giant monster.

OUR TAKE

Aw man, I could’ve used more Avengers movie titles if I knew Scavenger was going to be in more of the show! They’re even fighting an evil robot! Next I bet they’re going to fight a giant purple guy with a rigid chin and giant glove, I just know it. But anyway, seems that we got to focus on this little band of wannabe villains just a tad more, as most of this episode is told from the perspective of Rita Izumi. Interesting that she’s getting more focus here than she got in the Accelerator show, and I’m fairly certain that story was written first considering they keep going back to mention it as a crucial period for these characters. And I’m not even particularly mad that this team is getting more focus, since do have their own group dynamic that we haven’t seen nearly enough of for me to get all that sick of yet. But it does seem to play into a suspicion I’ve had about this arc that it doesn’t really know what to focus on.

Most of it has been, as I’ve mentioned, little side stories that vaguely tie into the detail about the Indian Poker cards which use the opportunity to flesh out the characters who were around at that time, and usually it uses that to its advantage. But now we’re supposed to be getting into the actual story that ties all of this together and we’re still stopping for little interlude with more characters who don’t really matter to that story. Is it because they didn’t have much interest in Ryoko and the Doppleganger? Was the author just really itching to use Scavenger again and didn’t know how else to incorporate them into the story? And the result isn’t even that it becomes a bad story necessarily, just that it’s a very messy and unfocused one. I’m still having a good time, all things considered, but it’s nowhere near as focused as the Daihasei arc from a few episodes ago that had well paced build up and payoff. With only a couple episodes left in the season, I doubt there’s much about this that could end up souring me to this arc (although I may be jinxing that by saying so here), it’s just that I feel like it could have been far better with a more concrete plan in mind than what we’re getting.