English Dub Review: Plunderer “7 Minutes 12 Seconds”

 

Overview (Spoilers Below):

All is well in the ladies bath, until one of them catches a guy peeping on them through a window. Then a search ensues for the culprit, complete with a trap setup switching the signs for the male and female baths. Rihito/Licht turns out to be the evildoer (big surprise) but not much comes of it besides Jail going into the wrong bath on accident.

Later on, the students talk about how they want to become soldiers, but don’t want to be forced into killing people. Shumerman tells them that there is a way to become an army that doesn’t kill people, and they all rejoice at the news. Jail manages to overhear a group of teachers doing a weird experiment on a rat, and then he gets saved just in time by a young test subject – who turns out to be none other than Nana! She gives him an SD card that has a message from her older self about why she sent them back in time.

Our Take:

Plunderer is not doing itself any favors this week. The opening segment of the episode was one of the dullest, most pointless exercise in fan service I’ve ever seen, and it wasn’t even good fanservice. And then it dragged on to the point where the first half of the episode is just more of the same. Things got a lot better in the second half once Jail and Nana became the main characters, but overall, 7 Minutes 12 Seconds kind of shot itself in the foot.

Rihito is a creep, and we all know that by now. Whatever your feelings may be about him, did we really need to see another storyline where he gets caught spying on his female classmates? I’ve come to expect this kind of thing in small doses from this series, but when an entire half of the episode is devoted to it, it really falls on its face. The only good thing about these scenes were the bit when Jail enters the wrong bath and doesn’t notice until he’s in the water due to having his nose stuck in a book. But even that silly moment gets spoiled by his weird, rude comment about his underlings weight.

What’s a lot more entertaining is what happens afterward, as Jail gets rescued by a younger version of Nana who fills him in on a lot of details of their current predicament. She tells him that she was the first Ace created, and how Shumerman was one of the people who can tap into the power of Allthing naturally without needing extra assistance. Nana has powers of time travel, so she can tell him what happens with the other Aces and how Rihito is eventually led into becoming a killing machine despite wanting to be an army that doesn’t kill. It’s sort of sweet to see Jail trying to interact with a child, like how he promises to come back in 300 years to play.

In the end, this felt like two episodes to me. The first is a dumb, dull distraction from the real meat of the storyline, like a filler beach arc. The second half of the episode fares a lot better, showing us some tension and answering questions while raising a few more. Seeing Nana in such a different state was wild, and Jail getting caught in the end leaves us on a thrilling cliffhanger that I’m excited to see resolved.