English Dub Review: Dr Stone – Science Future “Sickening Yet Beautiful”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

After four months of travelling, Senku’s team finally arrives in the Amazon Rainforest and are closer than ever to the site of the Petrification Ground Zero.

OUR TAKE

In this episode, things…PROGRESS! Yay! I can one hundred percent verify that this episode concludes with distance having been crossed and our intrepid science driven heroes reaching a significant milestone in their journey: A massive shiny pile made up of what may in fact be several thousand Medusa devices that are very likely to have caused the great Petrification that occurred thousands of years ago. This episode is most definitely a key point of the plot and things do happen which are important. I say all that as a qualifier for when I say my feelings ON this episode, which are that this honestly felt very thin on actual story and padded out with a lot of fluff that was probably fun to watch, but not so much fun to try and critically analyze. As with the last few episodes, Stanley is still very much in pursuit of the group to get back Dr. Xeno, who himself is a bit of a wild card among Senku’s team and could be looking for any opportunity to hinder their progress, but is at least complying for the moment. These are both things that we are aware of and it is very repetitive to bring them up every week because nothing has really changed on either of those fronts.

The things that happen, like actually happen, in this episode are basically just watching Senku’s group finally approach the Amazon and have some shenanigans as they make it through. A little bit of teasing that Xeno being around Hyoga might lead to Hyoga being turned back to evil like he was before, but that’s put to rest pretty soon after. So…yeah, why did we do that? We do at least get people remarking how they’re closer than they have ever been to finally uncovering this long standing mystery of how everyone on the planet was petrified, and even some speculation on the mindset of the enigmatic Why-man, but all of it is ultimately just build up to finding what they find at the end of the episode. So, finally, here we are, at Ground Zero of this whole thing. Now that we cannot build this up any more than we already have, surely now is the time to see this plot move into a new stage, have some characters move to the next step of their development. Because as much as these characters have definitely been physically moving, it really feels like they’ve been standing still. God, what’s next, them all ACTUALLY being frozen in place again?!