English Dub Review: Scarlet Nexus “Operation Destroy the Kunad Gate”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

Now that Karen is finally cooperating, Yuito and the rest of the team come up with a plan to save the world by using the Kunad Gate to destroy the Extinction Belt. The only problem is that it needs all of their combined strength to work, and Yuito is hanging on by mere threads. Through his and Kasane and Karen’s efforts, plus the strength of everyone else via SAS, they manage to destroy the Extinction Belt—but then Yuito collapses and Karen takes off on one last mission to the past. Except this time, something seems to have worked, because the Kunad Gate is gone and flower petals fill the blue skies.

Our Take:

Scarlet Nexus has had an eventful run over the past two cours, but now it’s time for that to wind to an end. The aptly-named Operation Destroy the Kunad Gate finds everyone coming together in order to banish the threats to their world once and for all. It should be a major plot point, the excitement that everything in the show so far has been leading up to—which makes it even more disappointing that this week’s new dubbed episode was an absolute snooze fest.

I was hopeful when the episode started out with Karen joining with the rest of the crew to invent a brilliant plan to save the world. But the show drops that in favor of silly flashbacks where Alice tells Karen to smile more. It’s hilarious to think that all of this could’ve been avoided had Karen just bared his teeth once or twice.

Yuito could use a little laughter, too, because he apparently believes his death is the solution to everything. Even though he’s exhausted his efforts over the last several episodes, he still insists that he’s needed to help destroy the Extinction Belt. And maybe he’s right, but in the end Karen does most of the work anyway. There are two central scenes to this week’s episode, and the first one is where everyone is straining to move the Kunad Gate into the Extinction Belt. It’s supposedly the main conflict of the episode, maybe even of the show, but it’s so stupid to watch. Everyone just stands around reaching up to the sky and grunting for like five minutes, while Yuito’s squad worries about him collapsing, and then he does. I get how this would’ve played out in the video game, with buttons to mash and power meters to read, but just observing while Yuito holds a yoga pose makes for some of the most sleep-worthy cinema I’ve ever seen.

What comes after they destroy the Extinction Belt and save the world isn’t much better. Karen throws their plan out the window and goes back in time one final time (which was so obvious from a mile away since he said ominously at the beginning of the episode that he would ‘give them what they want’). Suddenly all is sunny and beautiful and flower petals are falling everywhere like there’s a P.A. standing offscreen with a bucket of flowers and a leaf blower. Everyone finale-ish things and Yuito says they’ve forged a new future. Maybe so, but it sure was dull to watch.

Operation Destroy the Kunad Gate is one of the lamest episodes of Scarlet Nexus to date, and that’s saying something. It manages to wrap up all of the major threats introduced in the past 24 episodes in the most boring, non-eventful way possible that had me wishing for some more Others to fall out of the sky. There’s only one more episode remaining in the show’s run, and even though it probably won’t be about any important world-ending events, I bet it’ll be more exciting than whatever this was.