English Dub Review: Island “We’ve Met Again, But Who Are You…”

Can we please go back to the future?

Overview:

Setsuna makes it back to the past, and makes one huge mistake.

Our Take:

Well, I think I can safely say that this is the most ridiculous anime that I’ve watched. I don’t mean ridiculous in a hilarious way, the way Pop Team Epic is, I mean ridiculous in a terrible, insulting your intelligence way.

So Setsuna manages to successfully go back in time this way around, this time with his memory intact. This, unfortunately, raises more questions than answers them. This confirms that time travel is real, but then why did he lose his memory the first time? Why was it so shaky the first time around, if he really came back to do the exact same thing: save Rinne? In fact, the Setsuna this time around, seamlessly changing the past, is what the Setsuna we see at first should have been. He makes to save Rinne, and things go well- until the end.

Here’s the thing: good plot twists only function in a particular boundary, not destroying your audience’s suspension of disbelief. Every fantasy story doesn’t operate exactly the way they would from reality, sometimes in massively different ways. For example, a fantasy world with lizard-people and magic would be set up as something very different than our world, so we don’t expect the rules of the world to be the same. With Island, the only thing that seems to be different is the existence of time travel- everything else stays exactly the same. So the idea that Setsuna has gone back too far in time to a time where everything else is exactly the same but Rinne isn’t there, so he accidentally ends up starting a relationship with her mom, Kuon- breaks this suspension of disbelief to smithereens. I mean, this would be somewhat interesting as a time paradox, but only really works in anime-land, where both mother and daughter look and talk exactly the same, and they both look fourteen. That’s something chalked up to the art style, not something that would actually affect the reality that’s being presented. Moe art doesn’t actually translate to people mistaking people of such different ages for the same person- they’re not clones of each other. It’s unbelievable and completely beyond stupid, and I’m at a total loss of words.

At least the next episode is the last one, so I can finally be free from this mediocre nightmare of a show.