English Dub Review: The Water Magician “The Inferno Magician”

The Burning Beginning
OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

We see Oscar’s past before becoming the Inferno Magician. In the present, the men who attacked the festival manage to seriously injure Fiona, who is saved by Ryo’s friends. Oscar finds them and thinks they are the attackers, driving him into a rage.

OUR TAKE

We’re at the second to last episode of the season, and possibly the series, so what better use of our remaining time than to completely avoid the title character altogether and devote half of the episode to the backstory of…well, Oscar’s not UNimportant, but he has very much not been shown to be a prime focus of the show or even this arc. I could see there being more reason for this if he were being built up to be a major antagonist and we were seeing a reason for why he turned out the way he did, but we don’t even get that! He grew up with fire powers, had his village destroyed and murdered by bandits, was taken in by another village for a few more years, and then THAT village was killed by THE SAME BANDITS, but he somehow survived despite being stabbed straight through the chest. And also his red hair turned gray. There’s no framing device for this, we don’t see any resolution with the bandit that destroyed his entire life TWICE and left him for dead, or how he ended up meeting and training Fiona. Ironically, I feel like I know him even less than I did before!

At most, we see him react to Fiona’s mortal wound by remembering all the people who already died in front of him in the past, but I’m pretty sure it would have made sense for him to be traumatized without the flashbacks. Heck, if anything, I would’ve liked to see him flashback to their meeting or him training her, but no time for that I guess. No time to find out who the hell the people are that are attacking this festival either, apparently. Nah, why have that when we can have a more or less pointless flashback and then contrive the most forced misunderstanding between Oscar and Ryo’s friends? Well, we have one more episode to find out why this attack happened, what the hell Ryo was doing when all of this was going down, and whether or not Oscar will burn his friends to a crisp for the unforgivable crime of being in the wrong place and time while holding Fiona. And having seen that last episode, I would warn you not to get your hopes up about much of any of that getting resolved, but we still gotta watch and review it anyway so let’s get to it.