English Dub Review: Black Clover “To Help Somebody Someday”

This week: flashbacks, new magical abilities, and more!

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Sally has used one of her chemical syringes to turn Baro into an enormous mud monster with enormous amounts of magical power. Since Gauche has run off with his sister in hand, it’s up to Asta and Theresa to take care of the beast and save the kids.

Theresa demonstrates the power of her wizened, experienced magical ability while Asta slashes away at the mud monster, but the two are stretched thin and unable to do much. Gauche, meanwhile, spurned by his sister, reflects on his life, remembering why he became a magic knight in the first place.  Eventually, he decides to drop his sister off outside of the cave and return to battle.

With all three of them together, they actually stand a chance against Sally and the transformed Baro. Gauche, because of his selfless actions and willingness to trust others, unlocks a powerful new magical cloning ability he uses to copy Asta. The small army of Asta clones brings Baro down as the children are rescued from the cave by Theresa.

Their victory is short-lived, however, as spears of light quickly bring down Asta and Gauche, and kill Theresa in cold blood. These spears come from none other than a man named “Licht”, who reveals himself to be the leader of The Eye of the Midnight Sun.

Our Take:

This is an episode with a lot of ups and downs. The kind of episode that starts to give me what I want out of a shonen series and then pulls it away from me at the last moment. It’s a bit frustrating, but its improvement over what I’ve seen so far, so I’ll take what I can get.

I was happy to learn more about Gauche and where he comes from. The boy has needed some kind of character development from the beginning since his one-note “I love my sister” shtick was never very funny or interesting. And I actually enjoy what I saw of his past, but the trouble is that the scenes of his past life are so sparse we don’t get to spend any time developing out his character. We get just the barest of info about where he came from and how he met Yami. What’s provided is nice, but it needed more time to make it really whole. In fact, Gauche’s flashback should’ve had an entire episode to itself. That would slow things down a bit to remind us of the stakes and endear us to Gauche before the big battle. Doing that might bring a little more tension into the fight.

The fight itself is decently entertaining. It’s nothing particularly creative, (Especially if you’ve seen Naruto; cloning magic isn’t exactly new territory) but its animated fairly well and shows us off some of the cooler things magic can do in this universe. I have to point out, though, that the way magic works in Black Clover don’t seem to have any consistent rules, at least not as far as I can tell. Gauche gets a new spell not with training, practice or knowledge, but just because he trusts people? I think? Its a shonen, so I expect a little bit of “The power of friendship”, but power is given to gauche in this way it really just feels like cheating, especially when that power doesn’t feel earned through challenges overcome in the story.

Licht’s arrival put a nice dark spin on things for our heroes, which always makes me smile. Theresa’s death felt untimely but did stir up some emotional impact, so that’s something. However, ultimately, if Black Clover can’t learn to take its time, then no amount of dark twists is going to bring this anime up to a proficient level of quality.