English Dub Review: Black Clover “Zenon’s Power”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Yuno, Klaus, and Letoile charge into Golden Dawn’s headquarters to stop Zenon from taking Captain Vangeance, but have to deal with Devil powered goons first. They make short work of them, but are unable to stand up to Zenon, who leaves with Vangeance and leaves them for dead. Thankfully, Vangeance was able to leave a spell behind to heal those who had survived the attack, including Yuno, but half of their squad was killed.

OUR TAKE
Black Clover barrels ahead into the final countdown as we are down to the last ten episodes of the series. With Funimation racing to complete dubbing the remaining episodes before they need to air on Toonami, it’s a bit of a relief that the better action cartoon show is putting the series on hold for at least the next couple weeks, which will hopefully give Funi enough breathing room to finish the rest of the batch so they don’t have to worry about that until the series is done. And if you were keeping up with Black Clover through Toonami like I have been, it’s actually kind of convenient that they actually caught up just last night so fans can jump over to Funimation and keep watching before it airs on TV.

Anyway, as for the episode itself, it actually took me a bit to realize that we haven’t had Asta show up this entire episode, since the plot has shifted to focusing on Yuno alone for the time being. On top of diving into his past for the first time ever, revealing last episode that he is actually royalty of the Spade Kingdom that the Dark Triad usurped power from, it also makes things personal between him and Zenon. Though apparently not because he killed his parents, since Yuno barely considers himself part of the Spade kingdom, but actually because Zenon just took Vangeance. Which I guess makes sense. Let’s just hope that royalty stuff gets utilized later so it doesn’t feel pointless.

It just seems kind of odd that we’re introducing all these new threats and characters and forces when we’re getting so close to the end of the show, at least for the foreseeable future. Obviously this is not the intended end for the story, it’s just ending because they’re catching up with the manga (at least from what I’ve been told). But that’s also why they did those six months of filler to reflect the six month timeskip…only for the show to eat through that padding right away and force them to end the show anyway. I think they had a good opportunity to pause the series right before the timeskip instead of just teasing us with this new era for the story, but I guess we’ll just have to see how they handle that if they ever get to resume it. In the meantime, we still have nine more episodes to go in this iteration.