English Dub Review: Code:Realize “Prayer”

Sit down, grab a beer, and get ready for everyone to talk about their feelings for a half an hour.

Overview (Spoilers)

In the wake of Finis and Twilight laying waste to London, the entire team has joined forces with the Queen’s Army. Their plan is to have a diversionary force draw the enemy out, and another force enters from the rear. They will enact their plan in the morning but until then…

Saint confronts Cardia about his true mission. He and the other members of his secret group (called IDEA) go around looking for what they think are mistakes in the course of human history and correcting them. They, in their magnanimous and obviously benign opinion, believe Cardia and the rest of her “siblings” to be among those mistakes, and are resolved to kill her. Well, all of them but Saint, he still leaves things in her hands because he’s a softie. He hands her a vial of poison that will kill quickly and painlessly. She takes hold of it but doesn’t drink. That way, at least, it looks as if he did his mission. He leaves, and is confronted by Guinevere, his superior. She tells him to forget the girl, but he can’t and resigns.

Back at the camp, the soldiers have escorted Vlad the Annoyer and a load of gear from the mansion. This gives the team what they need to prepare for the battle while Lupin recovers from his gunshot wounds. This also gives the team time to sit around and talk. I’d go into each conversation, but they’re all pretty similar. They’re scared, but they love Cardia, and will do whatever it takes to end Twilight. Slight addition, Hellsing is totally ready to let Drac kill him afterward.

While this is going down, Cardia helps the troops by handing out bread. She happens upon a soldier who was terribly wounded during the siege. The medication is working, though, so his body just feels heavy. He shows her a picture of his family, and the two have a pleasant conversation. Later, she returns to talk some more, but finds his gun laying unattended. After searching the camp, she finds that he has died. Feeling that this is just an extension of her role as a world-ending monster, she goes off on her own and ponders the poison. Lupin arrives and gives her some encouragement. The boys aren’t planning on dying anytime soon, and he’s gonna spend the rest of his life protecting her. He pulls down her cap and kisses her on her (now shielded) forehead. The gang is now resolved, and even Saint and Drac are joining in the fight. Time to take on Twilight.

Our Take

There are episodes that focus on how the characters feel about the situation before a big fight. They delve deep into each motive and backstory, taking hold of every tie that binds the heroes to each other and twisting them into a rope the pulls us inexorably along the path to the end of the story. These episodes cement our feelings about the characters and solidify their roles as protagonists in our eyes.

This isn’t one of those.

Instead, it’s the kind of episode that is really just filler, wasting an episode of production because they knew the amount of plot they had left wouldn’t fill this spot. If this episode was removed from the series, we could have simply tacked the opening scene with Saint onto the next episode and moved on. Nothing would have been changed. We wouldn’t be missing out on character development, bonding, action, tension, or drama. Just a bunch of fluff as they all talk about their feelings. Those feelings, however, remain ephemeral, whisps of sentiment. The male characters haven’t developed at all from the first episode, not really. They are flat, cardboard cutouts without anything to them past their archetypes and tropes. As such, their feelings as paper men have no gravitas. To a degree, this is a conceit of the source material. It is a romantic visual novel for girls. As such, all of the main characters must be flawless and attractive to girls so that they will fawn over the boys and buy more merchandise. That means they have no failures or blemishes to drive them on. To another degree, this is an issue with the writing. They wasted so much time early on with meaningless episodes that neither drove the plot or character development. Now, as we are about to reach the home stretch, they are paying for this waste by having a shaky foundation upon which nothing can be built.

I saw one person comment that they thought this episode was “beautiful, beautiful, beautiful”. I don’t see it. It wasn’t that it was ugly. It just had nothing worth looking at. We had a military camp and a cliffside, neither of which were rendered with much more art than it took to show what was going on. The animation had several errors in it, primarily having to do with the mouths as they talked. Since there is a lot of talking, we spent a lot of time seeing messed up mouths, especially Impey’s. When it came down to voice acting, I was not impressed by much here. Other than a brief moment where Lupin (J. Michael Tatum) got flustered by his feelings getting outed by Helsing, the boys of this show were single notes. Again, paper men with nothing to build on. Jill Harris gave us a bit more to listen to with Cardia. In a single scene, we got to see many different shades of her upset modality. There were happy tones and warm tones in other scenes as well. She actually showed some depth, which was probably the only high point of the episode. Too bad, it wasn’t all that high.