English Dub Review: Chronos Ruler “Will and Representation”

Oh, hey! More twists, turns, and plot points that mean absolutely nothing!

Overview (Spoilers)

Having completed their unnecessarily convoluted test, Victo and Kiri are recognized not only as Chronos Ruler but among the top twelve. Victo also manages to crack the code on his old mission logs, piecing together that each character represented three letters, pulled from the names of the girls he met at that time. He and Kiri discover that his final mission before losing his time was to his home town. Before the Putin family leaves, Victo talks to Aisrehdar about Mina. Is she really his wife? There is no easy way to tell, but the time goddess begs Victo to release her sister from the “curse” of loving him. He effectively refuses, stating that if she is his wife and she still loves him, he will go to the ends of the earth for her. Mina overheard the conversation and is irked by the nuances of what was said, making the trip to the airport reeeeeeeally awkward for Kiri. Fortunately, his new big bro Blaze is joining them for the trip, and his awkward helps to override theirs. This is gonna be a strange journey.

The more episodes I get into this show, the more I feel like Jea Pon needs to stop playing video games and start reading some good books. Now that our boys have been accepted in the top twelve, they are given titles: Ace Ruler and Splash Ruler. We also learn that Mina is Storm Ruler, and Blaze is Flame Ruler. Now, in all those titles, replace the “Ruler” with “Man”. What do you get? The cast of a Mega Man game. Not any particular one, but original this ain’t.

On the other hand, my comment on the need to read more books is to understand a fundamental concept in writing: Chekhov’s gun. Put simply, don’t put a gun on stage if it isn’t going to go off. Time and again in this show, we have instances where a plot point is brought up, only to have a later episode cancel it out. Here, we are given Victo’s Mission Logs. Now, I didn’t want to give it away in the summary above, but this episode makes a big point to talk about them, and how they need to be translated. A couple scenes show how Victo manages to do so. Once translated, however, these logs prove useless, as they are all about the girls he is wooing. Instead, a page IN PLAIN ENGLISH gives them all the clues they need. Yeah, that’s right folks! Two episodes ago they brought these out and talked about how they are in code and could hold all the secrets. Really, they’re garbage, and the easy answer is at hand the whole time.

Or, hey, how about the big scene of the second half, where Aisrehdar pulls out a genetic test between Mina and Kiri to determine if he was her mother? What is this? The test says there’s no possible way they’re related? That’s doesn’t matter. A few seconds later, Aisrehdar admits that time god DNA changes on their 18th birthday, so the test means nothing. If that were true, then why did you do the test, secretly no less, in the first place? Why waste your time and resources when you knew what the answer was going to be? Oh, and what do you know, this also negates the whole point of Mina revealing her own Horolog scar. They admit outright that her blood makes her immune to them. She didn’t lose any time to the bite and her tearful revelation of the scar was meaningless. Let’s continue! This scene also goes on to say that the organization doesn’t even need the Unique because their modern Oaths of Time are at the same level, so he can just keep it. So you mean that all of the fighting, the twisting, the turning, wasn’t really over the fact that you guys needed the Unique like you said you did, but because you wanted to test them to see if they were in the top twelve? (Just a moment. Let me compose myself.)

Okay, Mr. Jea Pon. You and I need to have a sit-down chat. Do you, in fact, even know what the heck is going on in your own story? This is now the fourth twist in the plot, all of which were illogical, counter-intuitive, counter-productive, and just plain dumb. Why? Because someone told you that turnabouts made good writing? No, they don’t. Not when they are done like this. A good detective novel will have all of the clues sitting there for the readers to piece together. The writer will present these clues in a manner that deceives the reader into making false assumptions, but if they are smart and know how to spot the misdirections, they can solve the murder before the big reveal. A bad detective novel gives no clues, and has the heroes stumbling upon the truth by chance, giving the readers nothing to analyze. The murderer is then revealed from left field, and his conviction is assured by clues that the readers never saw until we are told it is him. You, good sir, have not even given us a bad detective novel. Literally, every character and plot point that is telling us anything is lying, and we have no indication of the real truth. This does not make your story compelling. It makes it meaningless. Why should anyone watch an episode if everything that happens in it is a lie? I will have a better grasp on the plot just by skipping the entire series and watching the end. Go. Go read some Agatha Christie, Dresden Files, or even Sam Spade if you don’t have the attention span for a full-length novel. Anything. Just stop this.

Our Take

The episode’s art and animation really aren’t bad at all. It isn’t utilizing the CG that made the first two episodes amazing to watch, but today wasn’t about action. It was about revelation. And backpedaling. Sorry, I still don’t have all the salt out of my system. I don’t see that much in the way of errors, per se, but there are compositions that are awkward and difficult to explain. The scene with the tech division fawning over Victo? There’s one of the girls sitting way far away, her lab coat half off, and smiling in a way that… doesn’t seem quite right. Another is looking right ant the camera and stroking her tie as if she were not going for Victo at all, but Kiri. The whole composition is off. Fortunately, as I said, there aren’t any errors in the animation, and it moves pretty smoothly. There aren’t any points where the movement looks stiff or anything, and I didn’t notice any frame cycling.

The voices were fine. Yeah. That pretty much catches it. None of them were unbelievable, and on occasion, Jad Saxton actually made me feel for Mina. Victo, on the other hand, is a bit off. I understand that Jerry Jewell is attempting to present the man as charismatic, but cool, detached, and determined. Unfortunately, this comes off more as detached. As if the character doesn’t even register what is going on around him, much less feel anything about it. Christopher Wehkamp does this a bit better with Kiri. The boy tries to portray himself as the cool, Vulcan-esque, strategist. At his core, however, he is a raging inferno of emotions. Christopher does a great job of bringing this out in the voice, and it plays off well against Austin Tindle’s Blaze.

What do I give this episode points for? Well, there are little things here and there that made me smile. Most were in the tech division. Yes, I know, it’s still pretty sexist to have the all-female division turn into little more than a giggling sorority harem for Victo. But ladies aren’t given much recognition for their work in the STEM sector, so an elite research team for a clandestine organization being entirely female is cool to me. Yeah, I know. You’re calling me an SJW. Whatever. The other thing that made me smile was a small detail. Snake cleans his glasses with a pair of pink panties. Nobody bats an eye at this or even mentions it, so you could just as easily miss it. But this is totally in his pervy, school-girl-centered character. That’s actually kinda bad, now that I realize it. The only things in this episode that I actively liked were small details with no real meaning for the show as a whole. They could have been omitted, and the episode would go on chugging. I have to say, I like the universe that the story is set in. Horologs are perhaps the most creative part of this series, even if they are little more than the Hollows from Bleach, but with a time theme.

So, while the animation is good, the composition is weird. The voices were solid, but one character isn’t bringing out their full emotive potential. The writing is derivative, convoluted garbage, but the universe is interesting. The first two episodes promised much, but we are here in the sixth episode, and only half of that promise was delivered upon. Unless this series ditches its M. Night Shyamalan Syndrome and starts doing meaningful plot soon, I feel like it’s all downhill from here. I give this episode four unnecessary plot twists out of ten.

Still, those tech girls were cute.