English Dub Review: A Certain Scientific Railgun “My Dear Friends”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

After a long and hard fought battle, Misaka learns that the Doppelganger simply wants to end its own meaningless existence since it does not actually have a soul. Unfortunately, the head researcher of the project that made her (who seriously does not have a name, nor has had much of any real role in this so far, so I’m calling him Dr. Bowlcut) shoots Ryoko in a fit of rage, so parts of the Doppelganger are used to save her life, which somehow means they are now to identities stuck in one body. Misaka then goes back to her normal life with her friends. I mean, for about as long as she can, since that whole “World War 3” business is still right around the corner.

OUR TAKE

After a shaky start and numerous delays, the dub of the third season of A Certain Scientific Railgun finally reaches its conclusion. And it’s mainly just wrap up of the current arc followed by some last check ins with the cast to close us out, which only really end up serving to show how lacking this arc ended up being. For the first two seasons, Railgun would usually fill in its second half with a filler arc made for the anime, and the Dream Ranker Arc is probably better than that in a lot of ways, though those at least made use of their arc-specific gimmick by the end of the story. The Indian Poker cards, meanwhile, actually end up not really contributing to the ending much at all, even if we now know what they were made for. And it’s not like there couldn’t have been ways to fit it into the climax somehow, like maybe compiling the best ones for the situation and coming up with a plan to stop Doppelganger through that, or gathering everyone together to formulate something that way…but nope, the cards are still just out there now and I guess will just fade like any other fad now that their purpose has been fulfilled.

And so, this season continues the pattern of its first arc being much better than its second. As said, the little short vignettes were fine on their own, but it just got a bit too complicated near the end there. Still, it did lead to a really cool final battle even if it ultimately didn’t really justify its purpose…kinda like Doppelganger herself. And it’s a shame that the season ends on a bit of a meh note since this was far and away the best of the new Raildex seasons we got over these past two years. Where Index Season 3 tried to cram way too much in and Accelerator tried to stretch too little out, Railgun T made surprisingly good use of its story for being an interquel of sorts around the main story, adding plenty to its own cast and their corner of the universe that might be overlooked by the bigger events going on. It’s actually hard to really accept that it’s truly over after it took so much longer than expected to get here, but sadly we’ve reached the end, at least for now. Now to be even more scientific and look back on the season as a whole by compiling all the data we’ve found and reaching a conclusion to our thesis!