English Dub Review: Scarlet Nexus “A Doomed Future”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

Kasane and her cohorts find themselves in a strange reality. They encounter an adult man who looks like Yuito, and discover that they’ve traveled 50 years into the future. Yuito admits that he’s done terrible things after taking over from his assisnated father, and pleads with Kasane to kill him. She travels back into the past just in time to get caught by the younger Yuito holding the knife on his father.

Our Take:

The sixth episode of Scarlet Nexus is here, and boy does it shake things up. After somewhat of a slower start in the first couple episodes, the series has been dropping big moments every few minutes it seems like, and A Doomed Future is no different. But while it reveals some major revelations, it does so in what might just be the lamest way possible.

After following Yuito in the aftermath of Karen’s revolution last week, the show switches things up by shifting the focus to Kasane. If you’ll recall, she has been absent in the show (due to some funny business involving red strings) until late last week, when Yuito caught her in the apparent act of murdering his father. A Doomed Future backtracks a bit and gives us the complete story by showing Kasane’s side of things and what led her to commit such an act.

Basically, the first half of the episode is batshit insane, but simultaneously extremely boring in execution. Kasane, it turns out, has a special kind of power that lets her time travel. Yuito also possesses this power, and the two of them together caused it go haywire, which transported Kasane 50 years into the future and created a giant gate/portal/thingamajig above the city. In the 50 years she’s missed, Yuito has become something of a tyrant, continuing the experiments his father started and transforming people into Others. He begs for Kasane to kill him and end things.

All this info is relayed in a never-ending monologue from adult Yuito. There are so many better ways to have conveyed this, and the scene plays out like an extended video game cut scene. Which, to be fair, is probably what it is since this series is based on a game. Still though, it’s a disappointing way to unleash some of the juiciest details we’ve been told yet.

As if all this wasn’t enough, Kasane then travels back to the past in order to try and stop Yuito from becoming corrupt in the first place. That’s where things pick up with Yuito discovering her with that blood-stained knife in front of his father. Whew! A Doomed Future certainly isn’t very nicely executed in terms of enjoyability, but there is a certain entertaining chaos to it all. It’s like the show is throwing everything at the wall in hopes something sticks: mind powers, crazy monsters, and now time travel. How are they gonna increase the insanity next week?