English Dub Review: Dr. STONE “Spartan Crafts Club”

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Now that the Kingdom of Science has been blessed with a water wheel, Senku outlines the next step — which is to make home-made batteries to store all of the water wheel’s generated electricity in. They create this by pouring sulfuric acid into a bottle with two sheets of lead. Despite being exhausted from inventing the water wheel, Chrome and Kaseki help Senku create some new gears in order to upgrade the furnace. Instead of being operated by manual labor, it is now fully functional via the water wheel. The villagers start to store their supplies for winter while Senku gets to work on inventing light bulbs. The glass breaks due to the heat, so they use mercury to suck the air out of the bulbs from then on. When winter finally hits, Senku creates a Christmas tree for the villagers.

Next, Senku aims to make “computer eggs” for cell phones. Initially, the bulbs break due to the heat expanding the copper in the glass, so they make copper tubes that won’t expand. The light burns out, though, because the only available filament (bamboo) isn’t strong enough to use in a vacuum tube. They seem to be at a dead end with cell phones, but then Suika finds scheelite — also known as tungsten. Senku then plans out a spelunking expedition with Chrome and Magma.

Our Take

If there’s any critique to be said about Senku’s character, it’s that he always seems to know exactly what to do, and exactly how to do it. He seems to always have an answer for everything, so it can be kind of predictable to watch him just get everything right and fix everyone’s problems all the time. However, this episode was different in tone, because it was the first time the audience really sees Senku get stuck. He’s genuinely frustrated and starts to become hopeless, which is rare for him. It’s also very engaging to see because it breaks down his too-perfect genius persona. Weirdly enough, this bout of hopelessness is actually exactly what was needed in order to prove something greater about his character. Senku is a guy with big ideas and a can-do attitude, but this episode nailed in the one thing that highlighted where his “Anything-Is-Possible” philosophy ends: and that is when something is literally no longer possible.

The only reason Senku started calling the cell phone idea a “dead end” was because, in his mind, there were no other available natural resources they could use. Nothing else has ever stopped him before, and it seems the only thing that can is if something is literally, physically impossible, with no hyperbole.

Senku — who made a cotton candy machine in a stone world and created a Christmas tree for a primitive village — will stop at nothing until what he aims to do/make is completed. He is the definition of an unstoppable force that can only be halted when every single possible material is taken from him.

Even then, though, it seems that this only slows him. What a fantastic character episode for Senku!