English Dub Review: Dr. STONE “Masked Warrior”

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Senku and the gang gather the final ingredients needed to finish creating Ruri’s medicine. Meanwhile, the village is getting ready for the Grand Bout tournament. The gang devises a plan to enter Ginro and Senku into the tournament, in addition to Kinro and Kohaku. This is so that they can hopefully tire Magma out before he faces off with Kinro. It’s unclear if Chrome plans to join as well, but he does practice “hitting his junk.” When Senku arrives at the tournament, Ruri catches wind of his name and is instantly reminded of something. She goes down to ask him what his last name is but collapses from her illness before he can answer. Senku finds this intriguing, considering that villagers don’t know what surnames are, and has “a million questions to ask her.”

The gang gets the worst first-round tourney match-up possible: Kinro and Magma. Mantel also tries to sabotage Team Kinro by kidnapping Suika and tying her to a tree, claiming that she’s drowning in a river and since Kohaku’s the fastest, she needs to leave the tournament to save her. Kohaku leaves, knowing it might be a lie, but plans to make it back in time. Suika manages to escape and runs back to the tournament, where she notices Kinro squinting while fighting Magma. She recognizes this as the “fuzzy” eye sickness and throws her glasses-melon onto Kinro, who is then able to fight like a champ.

Our Take

Now, this is an interesting tournament arc. The stakes are high — Ruri might die, secrets are being revealed, and there’s a whole lot of mischief going on behind the scenes.

Before getting into any of the juicy plot stuff, we have to get it out there: the various, hilarious art styles in this episode were unmatched. Everything from Kohaku’s leering gaze at Senku’s experiments that could endanger Ruri, to the entire team getting sandbagged by the tournament’s round match-ups were laugh-out-loud funny. It’s rare when an anime will incorporate so many different types of art styles — especially when it makes the characters “ugly.” It’s really refreshing to see an anime show be unafraid to be silly in that sense.

From silly, though, we have the serious: what on earth is going on with Ruri? She clearly knows Senku from somewhere, but she was seemingly raised in the stone world with no connection to the old “modern” world. If Ruri is from the old world, it would raise a lot of questions about her memory and how Kohaku exists in connection to her.

Finally, it’s great to see odds be stacked against the characters in a way that corresponds to how the “real world” actually is. Sometimes in the show, experiments will go wrong, or won’t work the first time. The gang came up with a plan, and circumstances made it backfire with the tourney match-up placement. There are a lot of ways that this show is realistic, and its charming roots to reality — narratively and scientifically — are very strong and affecting.