English Dub Review: Clockwork Planet “Theory of Y”

When a genius and a savant join forces, miracles can happen.

Spoilers Below

The team is hard at work, building a bypass for the Pillar of Heaven, so they can prevent the destruction of the entire Tokyo grid, and perhaps all of Japan. They are stopped in their tracks when Naoto hears a terrible noise. The Yastukahagi is firing its main weapon long before it should be charged! The blast rips through Pillar of Heaven, destroying many of the gears outright. But this doesn’t make sense! The crew of the Yatsukahagi was supposed to be staging a coup, but the destruction of the Pillar could result in a planet-wide catastrophe! That’s when Gennai Yurihama, who commands the superweapon, come on the loudspeaker. This wasn’t a coup at all. It was a challenge to the man who completely changed the world… Y. But, nobody’s seen or heard from Y in hundreds of years! Worse yet, the military has taken Gennai’s actions into consideration and has launched the orbital missile Tall Wand. The Yatsukahagi fires again, destroying the Tall Wand before it can make an impact. It will be 75 minutes before the weapon can charge for another shot. Problem is, the bypass is completely gone, along with a chunk of the Pillar. And, since a part of this great clockwork mechanism is gone, it’s only a matter of time before the entire machine -the planet itself- stops functioning. Naoto’s gift is useless since he can’t hear where to place gears that aren’t there. Marie’s skills are useless because she has no idea how things were. She gives up.

AnchoR begs to be ordered into battle. Neither Marie nor Naoto have the heart to do it and demands she stay. For once in her life, she disobeys orders and runs out to fight the Yatsukahagi. Naoto sends RyuZU after her. Marie continues to sulk, but Naoto works hard to snap her out of it. That’s when they both realize something. They are opposite sides of the same coin. He hears in his head how the gears should sound, and analyzes the differences to discover the problem. She imagines what the result is, and constructs around it. If the two of them combine their abilities completely in tandem, they might just have a chance. This brings up a new realization: The entire clockwork planet is a giant paradox. The planet should have already fallen apart as soon as those pieces were destroyed. Everything the maesters studied for a millennium was wrong. Suddenly, as the two jump into the robot arm interface, they see a whole new realm of possibilities and begin creating cogs and gears from scratch to build their mechanism. What is happening is completely supernatural!

So, this episode grabbed me at the very start, but slowly lost me as it continued. The initial action and intrigue on the Yastukahagi, as well as the superweapon firing, was entertaining. I wanted to know what this Gennai they’ve been teasing for the last few episodes was up to, and they still haven’t entirely gotten there. He has some grudge against Y, but there are no details yet. He seems to think that Naoto is the second coming of Y or something of that sort. But, why kill his own men? To keep them from stopping him in his mad quest? Maybe. We will have to see. From there, it became a lot of talking and talking without a lot of character development. Just a tennis match between despair and determination. Then they got over it and the train of thought went by so fast… I can’t even. All of a sudden, Naoto is grabbing Marie’s head in a vulcan mind meld with no explanation, conclusions are reached and actions planned… and I have no clue how it happened. Since when was Naoto psychic? Oh, and AnchoR just flying off the handle and going into self-destruct at the end of the episode? Why? She hadn’t even tried to stop the thing yet, and she skipped to the last resort? It may be a special form instead of an actual self-destruct, but it seems kinda final to me.

From a technical standpoint, this episode has little to brag about. It has few errors in the animation, but they didn’t work that hard, either. The characters pretty much just talked as CG special effects happened around them. The combat outside the gate… You know, the one so insignificant to the plot I didn’t mention it in the summary? Was mostly just the characters and enemies standing around with bullets flying back and forth. Not even bullets from their guns, just bullets. The savant world where the two kids were constructing everything was entirely CG, and didn’t really show any of the parts assembling. They are just thrown together, flash, and become a complex, unknowable mechanism. It’s incredibly lazy animation. The voice acting was…. There. It really didn’t impress or offend me. They were just doing their jobs, with an occasional faux shout. All in all, the episode is just a couple steps away from boring and lazy. The intrigue at the beginning saves it. I give it seven mystical gear nirvanas out of ten.