English Dub Review: ēlDLIVE “Super Cool Space Girl”

Space ships, aliens, monsters, and now magical girls.

Spoilers Below

Fresh from his success in hunting down the monster from the day before, our boy Chuuta manages to go a while without the voice in his head. Unfortunately, the voice can now take physical form, popping out of his chest to talk to him. The distraction causes a scene from America’s Funniest Home Videos, and he’s sent to the nurse’s office. The host and symbiont discuss the critter’s origins a bit, and Chuuta names him Dolugh. Great, because I was tired of calling it the voice.

Introductions complete, it’s time to get to work. Misuzu guides Chuuta around the ship that he’ll be working from. They look at each of the stations, meet the people who run them. The works. Their tour takes them through the detention center, and a brief of ēlDLIVE’s penal policies. Rehabilitation is the focus for those criminals they capture. For those criminals they capture. Yeah.

A little while later, klaxons sound. One of those criminals in the detention center has escaped, and is beaming to earth! Better go round him up! Misuzu and Chuuta engage him in combat, but between Chuuta’s floundering and the creature’s bubble smoke-screen, it gets away. While Misuzu hunts for it, Dolugh notices that an old lady and her dogs have wandered onto the scene. Chuuta instinctively throws himself at her, just in time to prevent the crab creature from killing her. This grabs Misuzu’s attention, and she… goes  all Sailor Moon on us. The newly transformed magical girl unleashes a barrage of cutting disks on the crab critter, mincing him into bits. Rehabilitation, my foot. Chuuta seems to have regained his nerve, and declares that he will go on being an ēlDLIVE officer.

Personally, I felt this episode dragged a little bit. Lots of exposition, lots of showing around, but very little happening. This is compounded by Chuuta’s continual whining and indecision. I get it, people don’t change overnight, but ultimately, it was this behavior that made me give up reading Garth Nix’s Kingdom series. Man up, kiddo. You’re a space policeperson now. You don’t have the right to flipflop on whether you want to do this or not. On the topic of his foil Misuzu, if it weren’t for the opening credits, her whole transformation would have been out of left field. That isn’t a complaint. Having a sudden, random magical girl in the mix would have been just the right form of weird for this show. Wait, is Chuuta going to do a henshin at some point, too?

As far as visuals, this episode didn’t pull out much that wowed me, and pretty much kept to the standard set by the pilot. The show’s main chance to wow us in animation, the magical Misuzu and the battle after, did not deliver the goods. There was nothing wrong or bad in the animation, but nothing to wow us. You may think I’m being overly critical, but this is Studio Pierrot, the same people that brought us Naruto, Bleach, and the legendary Yu Yu Hakusho. I’d love to see a little more of their prowess show off here. The monster of the week was interesting enough. It made me think of the Spiderdemon from DOOM, and it was intimidating enough to be a slight threat as far as weekly mooks go.

The dub, similar to the animation, shows us nothing new or spectacular. The voice acting was just fine, and the characters were believable. The dub script, however lacked any timing. Several points we got super close to the face of the speaker, but they didn’t really bother to time the script to match the mouth movement. It isn’t a terrible thing. It’s simply a missed opportunity to take your craft to the next level. Thankfully, Dolugh’s voice no longer has that distortion effect he had from the pilot, so that annoyance is gone.

From a slow plot to a bunch of missed opportunities to shine, this episode of ēlDLIVE could have been better. It isn’t enough to make me want to stop watching, but it needs to pick up soon. I really hope to see some interesting combat, and I would like for them to explain what this SPH really is. They’ve dropped the name enough. I give this episode six magical girls out of ten.