English Dub Review: Black Clover “Battle to the Death!? Yami vs. Jack”

Let the filler continue.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

The star festival arc continues with Asta bearing witness to a showdown between Captain Yami and Jack the Ripper of the Green Mantis squad. Of course, this showdown isn’t an actual battle, but a cooking contest where Yami tries to sell more grilled squid that Jack the Ripper sells his own cooked meats. The two are locked in a stalemate, and soon start challenging each other to a series of increasingly absurd games to prove their dominance over each other.

Eventually, Yami has Finral teleport them both to the cave where Asta fought Licht, and the two go at it mono el mono, solving with blades what they couldn’t solve with grilled meats. The two lock themselves in battle until Captain Yami reveals he’s got a brand new spell that he can use to destroy Jack. However, Asta and Noelle are concerned that this spell is too powerful. They try to stop Yami and Jack from fighting, but are unable to. However, before the fight can really go down, Julius Novachrono reveals himself and uses his time magic to stop the fight before it can get too serious. Novachrono departs, but cuts off Yami and Jack’s pants so they can’t continue fighting each other.

Yami and Jack settle their fight with each other and go back to competing with each other over food sales. Yami shoos Asta away, who runs into a beautiful young woman in the center of the festival. He comments that he’s seen her before, though the full extent of that knowledge is left unrevealed.

Our Take:

This week’s iteration of Black Clover is what I would call a “Nothing” episode, an episode of the show that serves to just be a distraction from the main plot and doesn’t really offer anything to the story. I’d call it a “filler” episode, but given the frivolous nature of all of Black Clover’s episodic offerings, it’s hard to tell what’s a part of the main plot or just an episode made to waste time. Regardless, this episode is all about wasting time. It lacks in everything except comic relief, which is this episode’s only redeeming value, even if that value isn’t terribly satisfying in it’s own right. Comedic reception always varies, so I’ll say that your enjoyment of this episode stems from how familiar you are with the kind of cliche anime slapstick that this episode is stuffed with. If you’ve never seen a good anime before, I imagine you’ll find this quite entertaining, but if not, it will be a weak serving of trite anime tropes that fail to entertain or satisfy.

In terms of plot, our story progression is basically nonexistent. So much of the episode is spent dithering about instead of actually doing things that there is little left after to properly critique. After all of the shenanigans are said and done, Jack the Ripper and Captain Yami get into a fight that could have been interesting, if the show didn’t cheap out on its own fight scene by having Novachrono come in at the last second to break them up. His presence in that scene seems entirely there to preserve the budget, so the animators don’t have to make another fighting sequence in a pointless festival arc.

While the idea of Captain Yami and Jack the Ripper going at it over food sales isn’t a bad one, it lacks the creative follow through to be actually interesting. Much like an old episodes of “The Simpsons”, this could have been an episodic comedy episode where Jack and Yami find increasingly funny ways of dueling with each other. However, that gets tossed aside in favor of having the two “Fight,” which we already know doesn’t actually happen.

There’s just very little here to actually watch, let alone critique. It’s an episode made to be pointless, made to be forgotten, made to fill time while we wait for another piece of the main story to come into play. If you find it funny, then good for you, but this episode is about as entertaining as watching paint dry to a rock and roll soundtrack. It’s loud, but it doesn’t offer much.

Score
3/10