English Dub Review: A Certain Scientific Railgun “Scavenger”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Ryoko Kuriba explains her situation to Misaka and Misaki, mainly that killing her doppelganger could lead to horrible consequences for Academy City…somehow. Doppelganger was made to provide hope for Ryoko’s mother, who had a weak and frail body, but the experiment ended up making a whole new soul that is unstable and unpredictable. This is the true reason why she invented the Indian Poker cards, as a way for citizens to come up with ideas that would freely flow through a trendy idea, thereby crowdsourcing possible solutions for her problem. So far, no good results, I suppose. She tells the two girls to not get involved, but is soon found by Doppelganger, only for HER to be found by Scavenger, though one of them mistakes Ryoko for her and starts attacking her instead, though Misaka saves her. Doppelganger eventually gains the upper hand on Scavenger, even absorbing some of the paper one of them uses for attacks and running off. After beating the one that attacked Ryoko, Misaka finds the rest of them and confronts them.

OUR TAKE

We are pretty waist deep in this Doppelganger stuff by this point, which feels almost a bit sudden even considering how long they took to get to it. It’s not exactly bad, don’t get me wrong, it just feels like a bit of a jump to be going from those self-contained stories to this sudden big scale event when we probably could have worked Ryoko and her backstory into the other stories in someway beyond slight hints here and there. But we’re here now, and that’s what matters…and apparently we needed to bring in Scavenger for this too??? They’re not exactly Uninteresting bad guys, at least in terms of power sets, but their involvement in this just feels so tacked on, as if they needed simply someone for Doppelganger to beat up to prove how dangerous she is. You could argue that her taking down a group that also fought Accelerator is a good barometer of her abilities, but all that last fight of theirs shows is that they can be beaten by the guy who is the well established best fighter in the city, which in turn doesn’t tell us a whole lot about Doppelganger. And now Misaka’s gonna beat them up too probably unless they end up teaming up with her. And if it seems like I’m spending a bit too much time talking about them here, the episode is named after them so it seems pretty appropriate.

As for what to expect in the final three episodes of the season, I imagine this gives us just enough time to bring in Kuroko, Uiharu, and Saten for the final battle at the very least. Probably some more insight into Ryoko’s backstory and what it means to have a soul in an artificial body. This is a topic that I don’t think has really been explored all that much in this franchise…and still feels like it doesn’t really fit in with what we’ve seen in this arc so far. Still, if nothing else, I can expect a lot of really interesting fights and quirky character interactions to come as we close in on the final stretch of Railgun T. It’s been a pretty good journey thus far, so I doubt even whatever the worst of these episodes could possibly be, they’ll have a hard time ruining my overall impressions of this season. But I’m sure they’ll be fine! Promise!