English Dub Review: My Hero Academia “An Unpleasant Talk”

And it really is unpleasant.

Overview:

The heroes come together for a strategy meetup.

Our Take:

Nighteye calls for a large meeting of several heroes from across the country to discuss the latest happenings. From this, we see how the vague threads that have been happening in different places all lead back to one key group: the Hassaikai. Their two drugs, the enhancement drug and the quirk destroying drug, have been distributed already and are causing trouble.

The most horrifying reveal is naturally, what Eri is and what’s been happening to her. While we suspected that Chisaki was doing something to her, the show had it set up to be something along the lines of traditional child abuse. While that alone is horrible, it’s revealed that the truth is far worse: the quirk-destroying bullets are filled with human cells. Chisaki hasn’t just been manufacturing a new drug but has been using his daughter’s quirk as the main component. Chisaki’s quirk allows him to disassemble and reassemble whatever he touches, including organic matter. And now it’s heavily implied that he has been using this quirk on Eri, using her innate abilities to manufacture his newest weapons.

Everyone is rightfully horrified at this, but nobody more so than Midoriya and Mirio. They both had the chance to potentially help Eri, and that missed opportunity has weighed heavily on them, now even more upon the awareness of what is really happening to her. Of course, Mirio’s initial assessment to stay back was a correct one. Chisaki would have happily killed them both if Eri didn’t return to them, and they probably don’t have the strength to fend him off at this point in time. Chisaki realizing that he’s under suspicion would have been made it much harder for Nighteye to continue his investigation, and even harder to stop the eventual flow of these new drugs. Acting too quickly without thought will cause problems down the road, but still, that doesn’t make the reality any easier to accept.

It’s really impressive how there’s so much gravity in an episode where comparatively, not much happens action-wise. The majority of the episode is the meeting with the heroes and discussing the revelations about the Hassaikai. There are no fight scenes, or anything close to one, just conversation. And yet, that conversation has so much weight from different angles that we the audience feel that tension. The stakes are very high and the pressure is palpable.