English Dub Review: A Certain Magical Index “Curtana Original”

It’s the rebrand they had to go with when everyone hated New Curtana.

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Toma and Floris, one of the New Light girls, get away from the train and run into Villian, who is then found by the Amakusa. Acqua and the Knight Leader continue their Giant Dick-Metaphor Swinging competition with Knight Leader revealing he has a special power to negate all damage from things he sees as weapons because of course he does, but gets distracted by a hint at Acqua’s true plans for the royal family and gets sliced and beaten, finally defeated. Toma then finds Acqua, followed soon by Carissa, who shows them both the true power of the Curtana Original. Apparently, it has the ability to cut through dimensions higher than the third and turn them into three-dimensional matter…which is visualized as what appears to be a glowing block of cheese that sinks into the ground.

Acqua, Toma, and an unconscious Index escape from Carissa, but Acqua explains him helping them as merely keeping the Imagine Breaker power in Toma’s right hand and Index’s knowledge of prohibited books alive so that his boss, Fiamma of the Right, doesn’t go crazy. With that, he flees as the camera pans away from him so the animators don’t have to draw him moving. Toma is picked up by the Amakusa so they can all plan their next move, namely getting rid of Curtana and, effectively, ending the coup. To do this, they’ll make use of an underground subway that will stabilize the sword’s power, but they’ll try using it to make it go UNstable. But first, Toma calls Misaka to ask how to open a lock. Poor girl.

So, Toma, Index, and Villian enter the subway when they encounter some sort of golem made of pieces of paper, but punching it with Imagine Breaker only gets Toma wrapped up in it. Index and, surprisingly, the non-violent Villian manage to help bring it down. The plan to destabilize Curtana seems to work, with Carissa only barely managing to contain it, but she’s onto their game now. Though for now, everyone on the good side has a big ol’ dinner while they wait for reinforcements. Acqua also gets a chance to breathe, as well as a call from a recovered Knight Leader, who may be having second thoughts about this whole coup. And Queen Elizard, Remia, and Laura also make plans for the upcoming final battle.

OUR TAKE

The problems I mentioned last week that have plagued this season are still blindingly present this week, though definitely minimized at least somewhat. There’s still some clear budgetary abuse and consequences of condensing what is apparently 500+ pages of material into five episodes, but I’m oddly starting to understand things a little better. Acqua’s not just randomly here because this royal stuff plays into his backstory, he’s on another mission from Fiamma and doesn’t want his crazy boss to go even crazier if his two most precious targets, Toma and Index, got killed. I’m still not sure how Fiamma connects to this whole British coup, but there’s still one more episode in the arc to figure that out.

Curtana Original gets a chance to show its true might, which I still have a hard time understanding. Cutting dimensions certainly sounds like an impressive ability, but the way it’s demonstrated just confuses me as to how that could be used either as an offensive move or anything practical. Being the villain of the arc, this seemed like the perfect time for Carissa to test this out on some poor soul around her to show just how deadly something like that could be if turned against another country. As we’re shown, it can create gold cubes that disappear into the ground. Again, still a whole other episode left to show us how bad it can be, but then why not do it now?

Though that may be due to the very obvious cutting of corners that is unfortunately very apparent here. One instance, in particular, is a scene between Toma and Acqua, which cuts to Acqua and pans down to Toma THREE TIMES IN A ROW. The only reason for this I can come up with for this is that showing characters turning their heads is just too expensive for this studio, and even that sounds pretty sad considering the next few arcs are really going to need to make use of the budget to live up to the books.

Again, I would say this is a bit of an improvement over last week since things seem to be more comprehensible and even show characters like Villian getting into the fray, but the problems are still too strong to overlook.