English Dub Review: Scarlet Nexus “The Sumeragi Tomb”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

Yuito is unconscious as he and his friends race back to the Suoh, which is under assault by Others and a gravitational anomaly caused by the Kunad Gate. Luckily, the attacks die down and Yuito is able to make it to a hospital bed where he sleeps for days and makes a complete recovery while the other members of the group wait to implement their plan. Finally, Yuito is better and they make their way into the tomb of Yakumo Sumeragi, where they encounter a maze of memories that threatens to tear them apart.

Our Take:

Scarlet Nexus has had an eventful few episodes these past several weeks. Between traveling back in time and meeting up with their long-gone mother, Yuito and Kasane have gone through a lot of late. That doesn’t change in today’s new dubbed episode. The Sumeragi Tomb takes the gang through a maze of unwanted memories and makes it difficult for them to continue to see their mission through—but first, Yuito has a nap.

That’s right, the first half of the episode is basically just everyone taking a breather. The introductory scene starts out where things left off last week, with Suoh in chaos and Yuito on death’s doorstep, but after that hooks viewers in and reminds them where things stand, the show quickly calms everything down. The Other attacks simmer down and Yuito is fine once he’s laying in a hospital bed.

With no obvious attacks on the horizon, the cast members get a rare opportunity to wind down. In a show that’s so chockfull of overloaded plots and characters, it’s one of the first chances we’ve had in a while just to see the cast members hanging out, and… it goes about as badly as you’d expect. We don’t really know anything about who these characters are outside of the events of the show, so the writing has to resort to heavy-handed exposition like Fubuki reminding Arashi that she always hangs out in his room eating snacks and it’s annoying. Meanwhile Kasane is crying in bed and the rest of the gang is daydreaming about going to eat gyoza together. This goes on for half of the episode, and by the time the eyecatch rolled around, I was actually glad to get back to the status quo.

And that status quo turns out to be pretty crazy. Once Yuito, Kasane, and all of the other former OSF-ers enter the tomb that supposedly holds the founder of Suoh, they’re immediately transported back to OSF headquarters… or so it seems, at least. The tomb is a weird mind maze of illusions, emotional obstacles, and actual obstacles in the form of Others. (You’d think the crew would be a little hesitant about killing them now that we know some used to be human, but no.) Luca sees his brother, Kasane sees Naomi, and Yuito sees Nagi. Then all of them see Karin’s most harrowing moments, like when he sees Alice turned into an Other and lets out the funniest Wilhelm-esque scream that had me dying of laughter. The show repeats his shouting into the void like five different times and it just gets funnier.

But things get a little less humorous when they seemingly reach the end of the tomb and Yakumo wakes up from his tomb…or is it Karen? Whoever it is, it looks like we’re in for a battle of wits next week. There’s only a handful of episodes left now, so hopefully the show can bring everything to some kind of conclusion—although I’m not going to even bet on it being a good one.