English Dub Review: A Certain Scientific Accelerator “DA (Security Officer Darkness)”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

As Accelerator recovers and Esther and Huotou (apparently still running around in her underwear) chase after Misaka 10046, Anti-Skill launches their attack on DA’s headquarters, quickly gaining the upper hand. DA brings out their Tarantula assault vehicle as a last-ditch effort, but while it causes some casualties, that only delays the inevitable. Hishigata works to get the Misaka from them so he can cut ties, likely for use on a girl named Hirumi. Scavenger arrives soon after, with their members Naru and Seike to manipulate exploding paper airplanes and frictional coefficients in order to defeat the Tarantula. Yomikawa catches the DA goon with the Misaka, but she drops her off a ledge. Esther and Huotou grab her, but that puts them in Scavenger’s sights. Naru uses her paper abilities to create a giant bunny mech (though with her body completely naked except for paper pasties for some reason).

Meanwhile, Accelerator recovers and tells Last Order that he’s just getting coffee and her favorite lumpy pomegranate juice when he’s really on the way to join the fight.

OUR TAKE

For an episode with so much fighting, I’m not sure you could say a whole lot really happened. With our title character and other main mostly out of the story until the end, you could say that this was Yomikawa’s time in the spotlight. But then with everything else going on like DA being dealt with and Scavenger showing most of their own abilities, I’m not sure that would be accurate either. So maybe this was meant to be the villain versus villain episode? If that’s the case, we sure weren’t given a great matchup, seeing how DA was never that interesting and Scavenger are already proving to be pretty one-note as baddies but in a different way. DA is top to bottom a zealous militia with no room for dimension other than that and no notable faces amongst their many members, but Scavenger at least only has four to focus on, so hopefully, there will be time to give them all a bit more to develop.

Their powers seem to be pretty neat so far, though. We’ve seen “Leader” do her thing with the giant spying eyeball patterns and Naru looks to be using her origami skills to their utmost next time, but something I saw making the rounds on the memes lately was the reveal regarding Seike’s ability to control frictional coefficients. At first, that sounds like just getting really strange and obscure with a superpower just because you’ve already used up all the obvious ones and/or you want to seem smart, but I think it was used pretty effectively here. It basically just means that you can make something stick in place or slide off a surface no matter what that surface is made of, which I wouldn’t want to run into in a dark alley. Slips are already pretty bad, I don’t need that to be my whole life if I cross Seike. Plus we still have one member that’s unaccounted for on move sets.

Next week puts us at the halfway point for the season, though things still seem to be moving kinda slowly. Even when DA is DOA, we still seem to have quite a bit to clean up in about half a dozen episodes, so I’m becoming kind of concerned that we might have to rush a few things. Then again, this show isn’t really that consequential in anything that’s going on in either of the other shows, so expectations can afford to be lowered a bit. I just hope I don’t have to lower them that much more.