English Dub Review: Clockwork Planet “Trishula”

An entire episode of sex jokes, fanservice, and terrible characterization. Oh, and a new enemy shows up somewhere in there.

Spoilers Below

After Marie is officially declared dead from the Kyoto Grid incident, she has taken up a new name as Maribelle Halter, her bodyguard’s little sister. She has a new mission to go with it. There are signs that government corruption is resulting in the gradual purging of all the grids. To save the planet, she, Halter, Naoto, and RyuZU must travel the world, fixing core towers and taking names. However, life goes on for Naoto, and he has to study for a test. While he does, Halter gets a transmission. It refers to a “Ghost Girl”, who is obviously Marie. The rest of the message is not PG. We have seen in some scenes that the origin of these transmissions are a group of cyborgs investigating some anomalies, and getting nothing but murder and pain in return. Naoto traces it to its source in the Mie Grid. This grid has a beach, so of course, the hormone-addled writers have to use this as an excuse to spend extra time staring at the main two girls in bikinis instead of advancing the plot. Nope, Naoto nearly drowning doesn’t count as a plot.

The city is a ghost town. It’s completely silent, sans the glitching televisions. It seems that the Clock Tower (one of two towers required for every grid’s continuing operation) is not operating. When they go in to investigate, they find that all of the parts have been stripped, and used to build a mecha of mass destruction. They also find bits and pieces of a cyborg that may have been the origins of the signal that drew them here. It looks as if something grated his limbs clean off. That is when they meet the one who caused it. A Y-series automaton with a shapeshifting cube of death and grating. Have fun!

So, we’ve spent four episodes building the series up, developing plot and whatnot. After the arc was done, however, we have returned to the sophomoric humor and storytelling of the first episode. Marie randomly screaming for no reason. Both girls ending up in compromising positions with Naoto. Sex jokes, followed by ragging on a little girl by saying she isn’t getting any sex, followed by a loud scream of “I’m a Virgin!”. Of course, she’s a virgin, she’s A CHILD. In fact, let me look up how old she is… Wait, she’s sixteen? The light novel lists her age as sixteen. That is not a late teenager I see there. I… I just don’t even. Let’s move on. The characters are as flat as they could be made to be. None of them behave as if they had a brain or complicated thoughts beyond gears and gonads. No wonder the government has been getting away with slowly purging the populace. The heroes are morons.

Let me also bring up a major plot point here is that the signal was done using radio waves, which is illegal because it messes up the gears. Instead, all communications are handled by resonating gears… HOW? They went from a very detailed metaphysical explanation of RyuZU’s time stop ability two episodes ago to forgetting basic Newtonian-level physics and logic in this episode. That would mean that all communication has to be physically locked to the structure so that the gears can transmit the resonance. But, as gears of different shapes, sizes, and materials transmit that resonance differently, the signal would get horrendously distorted and possibly even lost. Further, we have seen wireless communication being used before, which means that the gear resonance is transmitting the signal through the air… which would make the signal electromagnetic, because simple resonance would immediately dissipate into heat. The amplitude required to make simple resonance transmit the signal to another gear would be so high that you would feel it in your body. Not a pleasant means of communication. What’s so wrong with using radio waves? They say that it messes up the gears? Unless these gears contain some sort of hyper tech, which they very well might from the impossibilities they’ve done so far, radio frequency electromagnetism ain’t gonna do jack to those gears. If it did, no watch company would be able to produce classical spring-driven watches anymore. So, they’ve gone from having a high-level understanding of physics to “Hur-Dur, It’s Gears. Stop thinking and look at the girls.” Way to go.

The animation wasn’t horrendous. There were precious few errors that I could notice, and the only place where CG was used was on Trishula’s weapon cube. Other than that, just traditional animation. The voice acting was… Not the fault of the localization team. They were working the best they could with what garbage was given to them. So many scenes of Marie freaking out, forcing the voice actress, poor Skyler McIntosh, to do high-pitched screams through the whole thing. In fact, I think the writers were so busy trying to make Marie act cute/angry that they forgot to make her act like a person. This meant her voice actress had to bounce through the episode between a happy perky modality, then switch into irate, barn-owl screeching. I’m hoping the writers grow out of this phase quickly, but I sincerely doubt they will. I’m glad I’m halfway through the series already. I don’t know how much more I can take. I give it three cubes of death and grating out of ten.