English Dub Review: Black Clover “Clover Clips: The Nightmarish Charmy Special!”

This episode was going to be fun, but then it got high.

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS?)

As Asta confronts Langris and Zora calls everyone jerks, it seems Charmy has wandered off and started tripping on shrooms while looking for new ingredients. What follows are her vivid hallucinations that look an awful lot like the Clover Clip shorts seen at the end of every episode(including some I am almost certain were already used in previous episodes). But eventually, she sobers up and heads back to her search as the fight continues.

OUR TAKE

Spent a lot of time catching up with this show for today’s review…only for it to be a complete filler episode requiring next to no required knowledge of anything around it. Black Clover, you have made a very powerless enemy.

Oddly enough, however, this is actually where my history with Black Clover’s animation studio, Pierrot, helps me out a bit. Back when Shonen anime based on manga often had to keep running continuously without breaks, it was not that uncommon for a series too close to its source material to take an episode or even a whole half a year off from adopting the manga and make a totally new story arc so it could space things out. Naruto and Bleach, both animated by Pierrot, were probably the most infamous for doing this as Naruto once had a 80+ string of filler episodes before it became Naruto Shippuden, while Bleach would pad out its own story by stopping the canon material dead in its tracks to begin a completely unrelated tale, then plop everyone right back where they were when it was done, even when it was in the middle of a much-anticipated fight (and even having characters lampshade this by acknowledging how weird the situation was).

Eighty episodes into its own series, Black Clover has relied a lot on padding but never quite having to pull out the filler material…until today, it seems. To be fair, these things are pretty common in the industry because of the standard treatment of shows like this, so it happens. Only…it’s not the norm anymore, so there’s really no reason to fall back on the same habits when there’s an obvious solution: Let the show take a break so the manga can make some more room. Or at the very least, wait to put the filler interlude AFTER the current climactic battle is over!

Actually, you know what, the REAL least you could do is have this filler episode be its own story and not just A CLUSTERFUCK OF UNRELATED SHORTS THAT AREN’T EVEN FUNNY. I think maybe the only one that got a chuckle out of me was the one where Asta asks questions about mana and keeps getting told “it’s magic”, but then asks about something else and gets a detailed scientific explanation. Didn’t get a LAUGH, mind you, but a chuckle.

I guess the real story resumes next week, which I’m legitimately curious to see how it concludes since I’m a sucker for tournament arcs.