English Dub Review: Listeners “Day of Rage / problems”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

After running off from Freak Scene Academy earlier this season, Nir arrives in the city of Londinium and stops at a repair shop. There she finds two disillusioned youths named Lyde and Ritchie who have lived in Londinium their whole lives with the wish to someday make it out.

The entire town is governed by an impersonal group of leaders who are willing to sacrifice the poor masses rather than fight the Earless themselves. Nir befriends the boys and tries to help them, but in the end she only causes their demise. When a monster Earless attacks the city, Lyde grows a jack and he and Ritchie go down fighting the monster. Except it isn’t the Earless who takes them down, but Mu.

Our Take:

It’s been a few weeks since Funimation premiered a new dubbed episode of Listeners, and the break seems to have affected the show. Not really, of course, but the episode that debuted this week feels like a perfect one to come back to in a way. It’s unexpected, possibly out of order, and raises a ton of questions. Is it a perfect episode? No. But it’s one of the more interesting puzzles that Listeners has presented so far.

The show opens with Lyde and Ritchie as children. Their street is in chaos as the Earless attack. Both of their parents perish, and the only thing that saves them is the arrival of — who else — Jimi Stonefree. He’s visited pretty much every character by now it seems. Maybe he just likes to show up once and then vanish, so that he becomes a legendary idol? Regardless, the two boys live on, though their life isn’t all that great. They’re troubled teens, and without their families around and a community support system, they aren’t going anywhere.

Until Nir shows up. It’s been weeks since we’ve seen her, and I wasn’t expecting her to show up at all until later on in the finale. She’s on the run from the trouble she got into with Echo at the school, but seems to have settled down a bit from her trouble-making days. She finds a family with Lyde, Ritchie, and their adopted mom, who loves feeding them all bland, tasteless soups. The bond between them is really sweet, especially since we know Nir’s history of being alone. The dubs choice to translate her nickname as Big Bro is a little awkward, but apart from that, this is definitely one of the most wholesome sequences in the series.

And then the trouble begins. Nir had encouraged Lyde and Ritchie to never give up, so when the monster Earless starts to attack, the two of them channel their inner anger rather than fleeing again. This causes a jack to mysteriously appear on Lyde, which is fascinating in and of itself. Can anyone become a Player if they have enough drive? (Or plenty of tortured inner trauma?) The two of them are actually able to take on the Earless pretty well — or so it seems at first. Then Jimi Stonefree’s Equipment shows up with an evil-eyed Mu on board and takes the boys out with a single shot. Nir attends their funerals at the graveside. It makes for a strange, rapid-fire ending to an otherwise pretty low key episode.

What’s even stranger is that Mu and Echo are almost totally left out of this episode, which is a first for the show. The choice to follow Nir, and to a lesser extent Lyde and Ritchie, makes for a welcome break from the traditional format, but I can’t help but feel like it also killed any momentum the show had going for it. It seems like we’ve skipped ahead weeks, possible even months, into the future. A future where Mu commits atrocities while being separated from Echo, and yet another traumatic time for poor Nir. Hopefully next week’s episode will provide some further illumination on what exactly is going on — and maybe point Nir toward a happy ending, if that’s still possible.