English Dub Review: Scarlet Nexus “Arahabaki’s Trap”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

Every citizen of New Himuka has just learned the truth about the corruption and true mission of their government—much to Major General Karen’s chagrin. After stealing Kasane’s red string power, he’s on his way to Yuito to complete the process and steal his strength too. Yuito and his platoon put up a good fight, but in the end they’re vanquished and Yuito gets his mind wiped.

In order to save him, his platoon comes up with a plan to digitize their memories and embed them back into his head. It’s a little crazy (and also supposedly scientifically impossible) but they get the job done and together with Kasane and her gang, decide to set out and make things right by starting with New Himuka.

Our Take:

Scarlet Nexus returns this week with one of the most boring episodes in a while. Arahabaki’s Trap might feature Karen’s battling skills, but for most of the runtime it’s just a bunch of people in Yuito’s squad standing around and talking nonsense about how to fix his wiped memories. That makes for some entertainment that’s not very entertaining.

Things start out fine enough, with a quick recap showing how Major General Karen attacked Kasane that leads into the current timeline where he’s now going after Yuito. The fight between Karen and Yuito’s platoon is definitely the highlight of the episode—all of them getting frozen by Arahabaki’s strings is a pretty cool image—but it doesn’t last long and then the show pivots to the storyline that takes up the majority of the episode: fixing Yuito’s wiped mind.

It’d be one thing if the gang did it Miss Frizzle style by shrinking down and entering his body. That would be kind of fun and trippy in a way I can picture the show doing. Instead, we just watch everyone standing around and saying a bunch of the show’s buzzwords like SAS, brain talk, and red strings. The funniest part of the episode comes when one of the guys in the platoon is like, ‘wait, isn’t this scientifically impossible?’ And everyone’s like ‘yeah, but we’re doing it anyway.’

Then the brainiac writes some kind of computer program that digitizes memories and they talk some more about how they need to find the right memory areas in Yuito’s brain to embed the memories. It all goes on way too long and was very frustrating to watch—but there is a little light at the end of the tunnel. Finally, after getting all the scientifically impossible exposition out of the way, the show treats us to a bit more wackiness when Yuito starts to regain his memories in the form of a mental montage as everything comes flooding back to him. It makes for some nice visuals that made me remember this show can look pretty nice when it tries.

Overall, I felt like this was one of the least necessary episodes in a while due to the time spent on discussing how Yuito’s brain could be fixed. We know this is a crazy sci-fi show where impossible things happen, so stop pointing out that they’re impossible and just to them if you’re gonna do them! Still, there were a few parts I ended up realizing I liked more than I initially thought as I wrote out this review. Scarlet Nexus needs to focus more on the experience and less on the minutia in order to really get things going next week.