English Dub Review: Black Clover “Saint Elmo’s Fire”

It’s the obligatory hot springs episode!

Overview (Spoilers Below)

The volcano training continues, as Asta faces a wall in his attempt to scale the mountain to reach the summit amid its ferocious heat. Because of his inability to use traditional magic, Asta faces a peculiar problem, he can’t use the mage armor necessary to buffer himself against the heat of the volcano. However, Asta thinks of a solution. If he can just find a way to use the devil powers that were unlocked in him by the Queen of Witches, then he can fly up the mountain and win the day.

Asta focuses on himself and what he’s learned, especially in regards to “ki”, the essence of life itself that Captain Yami uses to fight with. He looks inside and, using his own ki and the sense of the demonic power inside himself, is able to form a connection in his body that brings out his inner power. He dashes ahead into the air, flying with his one demonic wing, and makes it to the top despite Mereoleona punching him in the face.

With the training done, Mereoleona scolds her squad for taking as long as they did, but lets them know that they’re free to use the hot spring. Naturally, they can’t have the boys and girls bathe with each other, so Sol uses her magic to create a rock wall in the hot spring.

The boys and girls go to their separate hot springs and begin the kind of hot springs shenanigans you’d expect from this kind of scenario. The boys try to scale the rock wall to get a peek at the girls, all while reaffirming their manliness. Meanwhile, Mereoleona speaks with Noelle of her mother, who bears a striking resemblance to her. She brings down Noelle by recounting how digniified and precise her mother’s steel magic was, comparing it to the raw and uncontrolled magic Noelle uses.

Our Take:

Black Clover has a tendency to stretch out it’s episode content by taking a couple small little nuggets of plot and then stretching them out over the course of 22 minutes with filler to make the necessary running time. All anime is guilty of this in some way or another, but it’s especially egregious here, in an episode that feels like it could hit the major points in as little as five minutes. The rest is just dialogue and little interactions with the cast that don’t mean anything are only entertaining to watch if they’re well written. Spoiler alert: they’re not.

The biggest development that happens here is Asta learning to tap into his demonic powers, but even that isn’t terribly satisfying. The problem, as has been the problem with Asta since forever, is that he’s way too talented at just “figuring things out.” There’s no obstacle Asta can’t just power through or force or come up with some method of overcoming the instant it shows itself. Other, better shows have things like entire arcs devoted to learning a skill, or at least take a little more time to develop challenge more to make it feel like more of an accomplishment once it’s overcome. Big conflicts make for big moments, conflicts that disappear in five minutes feel like speed bumps. Not to mention, there’s not any kind of “devil’s deal” talked about with Asta tapping into his powers. If he’s going to do this, he should at least have a little trepidation towards repeating the crisis that happened during the battle against the Queen of Witches.

The rest of the episode is the anime equivalent of Styrofoam packaging. Hot spring episodes are nothing new and this episode hits the hot springs tropes in mediocre fashion. It’s a little disquieting when an episode makes a self-deprecating joke about how cliche hot spring episodes are at the end of a boring hot spring episode. It’s almost an admission of failure from the showrunners, or just a misplaced joke. I would have liked to see more about Noelle’s mother, who has gone previously unmentioned until now, but I guess we have to do the “Boys try to invade the girls hot spring” cliche we’ve seen a thousand times before.

I can’t bring myself to make a passionate statement about this episode because there’s just so little talk about. This episode isn’t fun, tense, emotional, clever, or any of the things I look for in a good anime story. It’s not horrible, it’s just…nothing. If it amuses you to see Asta and pals goofing around in a hot spring then by all means enjoy, but as for me, I’d recommend watching something else.