English Dub Review: Dusk Beyond the End of the World “Paper Songs of a Budding Primate”

Overview:

Amoru’s desperate search for her parents’ banned storybooks leads her and Akira to a secure library.

Our Take:

This was probably the weakest episode of the series thus far. It wasn’t bad necessarily, and I do think we’re about to get into solving some of the mysteries. It probably won’t surprise anyone that Yokurata, the glasses wearing playboy, seems to have more going on than he seems. His scene with the librarian android, Seshat, was one of the weirder scenes. Feeding her fruit in a way that the juice collects in her cleavage, then giving her that juice. But Seshat is a freak in her own way, as when she goes to the library as a result of Amoru and Akira’s break-in, she starts to give off some serious BDSM vibes.

What made this episode kind of boring for me is that a lot of what’s going on doesn’t feel properly explained. The group runs into a couple of the androids from earlier, and Yuugure decides to go off on her own to get them off their trail. This wasn’t super confusing to me, but her absence from the rest of the episode was, and I suppose this led me to discover that a lot of my enjoyment in this is because of Yuugure. Another confusing aspect is the librarian Seshat herself. To the best of my knowledge, we have never been introduced to her before, but she seems to have a massive importance for the episode. Other than being the embodiment of the sexy librarian trope, I couldn’t tell what that importance is. Maybe the next episode will shed some light, but the occasional mistake is bound to happen, I suppose. A short original anime series can’t handle those mistakes as well as longer series, but that remains to be seen in this case.