English Dub Review: SK8: The Infinity “The Fated Tournament!”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)
Adam’s tournament begins with the qualifiers, despite Adam still dealing with ongoing investigations into his scandalous other life. Langa, Joe, and the rest participate and easily make it through to the main bracket, as well as Adam and his attendant Tadashi, but Reki decides to avoid signing up and is still keeping his distance from Langa, but he tries to sneak in to spy on what’s happening. This absence is felt by Langa, who finds himself without the same passion for skating that he usually does when Reki is around. He still manages to do well enough in the competition early on, even when paired against Joe, one of the top skaters.

OUR TAKE
I’ve probably mentioned this a few dozen times on this site, but I have a huge thing for tournament arcs. As formulaic as they can potentially get, they can also offer really fun and interesting story and character opportunities that otherwise would be more difficult to integrate. The tournament itself provides a common goal for numerous characters to seek after by offering a prize that all of them would want. It also gives a good reason to bring in new characters who can be used to develop existing ones in specific ways, or even pair up certain characters who would normally have no reason to have conflict and seeing how those characters adapt as a result. And as unorthodox a series as SK8 has proven to be, it seems to be also making good use of this mold to explore and expand on things. Not only does it finally give the series a sense of momentum and direction that it was lacking before, but ramps up the stakes by…wait, hang on a second.

Did they say what the prize was for winning the competition? Because that’s kind of a big part of these sorts of things. Hmm.

Well, other than that, I am glad to see it be implanted and how it is making use of the existing character drama. When this series started, I would have expected Reki to be right along side Langa in this sort of competition, but now he’s on the sidelines trying to understand his place in all this. Meanwhile, Adam is unraveling as he looks for ways to get out of his life falling apart, even planning to throw Tadashi under the bus (which he is given even more reason to do after Tadashi joins the tournament under the “snake” alias to play off Adam’s persona and his search for an “Eve”). Oh yeah, apparently Adam is looking for a psycho-sexual-skating partner he says would be his Eve, but we’ll have plenty of time to get into that later. As for the matches within this episode, every named character not named Reki gets to go to the bracket, which is a little disappointing considering you’d think they’d use these a chance to kick off Shadow or Miyu to show that the competition is serious. But hey, we’ve still got four episodes to go, so I’m sure things will get just as serious and ridiculous as we’re used to this show getting by now.