English Dub Review: Scarlet Nexus “Wakana’s Resolve”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

Yuito and Kasane are both excited to have their mother Wakana around again, and share a home cooked meal and household chores together. But soon they have to set out to undo the dimensional entanglements in the Kunad Gate by entering the Kronos Terminal and untangling the red strings. The two of them are able to untangle almost all of them, but then they see Karin and are knocked back into the present day, where the squad reveals that Wakana has left them to return to her own time and give her brain to BABE.

Our Take:

This week’s episode of Scarlet Nexus is a real jargon-filled mind trip, literally, as our two heroes use their red strings to enter the Kronos Terminal and undo all the dimensional entanglements in order to make the Kunad Gate disappear once and for all. There’s nothing inherently terrible about the episode, but it’s very boring and feels pretty dumb for the most part, especially in the latter half when Yuito and Kasane are moving furniture around with their minds.

But it all starts off in the present day and dimension with Wakana in the kitchen and her two children helping her complete household chores. It’s a really weird scene for a show like Scarlet Nexus, where everything is sci-fi and filled with weird powers and crazy technology. Hearing Kasane talk about doing the laundry while Yuito’s showing off his cooking skills made me think I’d tuned into the wrong episode for a second—until Yuito’s cooking involved using his psionic powers to levitate the ingredients, of course.

That scene is meant to sort of show us the relationship between Wakana and her kids, but it all comes across as too weirdly out of place and didn’t really have its intended effect for me. Unfortunately, the episode doesn’t really get any more exciting, despite Yuito and Kasane traveling and trying to fix inter-dimensional rifts.

Wakana gives them their healthy dose of expositional vocabulary for the week, telling them about how the Kunad Gate is a dimensional portal that’s been corrupted by entanglements, and that red string users like themselves are the only ones who can undo the entanglements and destroy the gate—but they have to do it in a place called the Kronos Terminal, which randomly opens for red string users but is NOT time travel itself. I hate when dumb shows come up with even dumber explanations to try and justify the crazy antics going on, and this is a perfect example.

The actual action of the episode comes when Kasane and Yuito are in the terminal, but it’s so lame it’s almost funny. Basically, every entanglement shows up looking like a glowing red onion, and to make the onions disappear they have to do things like, wait for it, moving furniture back into its proper place with their minds. It’s incredibly dull and the only saving grace is that the two of them have plenty of time to talk. Yuito reveals that he regrets not knowing what to say to Nagi at his death, but that he still wouldn’t want to go back and change the past, which Kasane agrees with.

The episode ends with the two of them seemingly failing at their mission thanks to an interruption by good ol’ Karen, but when they wake up back in their own reality, Wakana has left them to reset the timeline by returning to Togetsu and allowing them to put her brain into BABE. Sigh. Scarlet Nexus is usually pretty dumb, but this episode took that to a whole ‘nother level.