English Dub Review: Radiant “The Beast of the Underground Water System -Monster-”

I’ve seen enough hentai to know where this is going.

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Doc tries spending some free time at Melba’s coffee shop, though Seth and Melie keep pestering him. Even worse, just when he finally gets a good cup of coffee from Melba, he gets kidnapped by a giant squid in the sewers that are attracted to coffee. You know, typical Monday. Seth’s training isn’t going great, so Yaga sees saving Doc from this creature, the Devil Fish Kraken, will serve as a good test for future fights with a Nemesis.

Seth and Melie first try luring it out with a giant bucket of coffee, but fighting it is too hard. They then try to trap it, but the traps all get stuck on Doc. Then they try both and…it doesn’t work. Surprise. Neither does a syringe full of sleeping potion or Melie going crazy, but Seth will not give up, even when Doc decides to live out the rest of his days underground with his new squid friend. They make their last plan, which turns out to be covering Seth in really spicy coffee that the squid will then eat and spit out. With that, Melie traps it with magic and Seth lays down a finishing Titan Punch. But it turns out he’s actually nice so they leave him be.

Doc goes back to drinking coffee, but the good cup he had was really made by Melba’s dad! What a twist! Oh, and Seth learned humility.

OUR TAKE

Why are we dragging this out? This is yet another episode that’s mostly, if not entirely, filler material and it doesn’t do anything except kill time. Even worse, unlike last week’s episode that had at least some vague theme of Melie solidifying her friendship with Seth, this barely even bothers to be about much of anything. Okay, the PLOT is about Doc being squid-napped but the STORY (which is really a different thing, I swear) has maybe a few trace elements of being about Seth being made to learn he’s not that strong (something I think he would know by now after his last encounter with a Nemesis) and POSSIBLY about Doc starting to like the kid a little. It’s VERY faint and is pretty overshadowed by the squid antics, so I can’t even say for sure if this episode was really about anything other than just the rescue.

The encounter with the squid does remind me of something, though: it’s been four episodes since we’ve even seen a Nemesis. You know, the big monsters that Seth is trying to stop by going to where they come from, which is also the title of the show? I’m not exactly excepting masterful examples of fight scenes since they seem to just be black and white giant monsters that shoot laser beams with not much more to them, but at least give us one more fight to gauge our understanding of what fighting them is like. Pull some examples from the first few episodes of Bleach if you need to, but give us SOMETHING so these monsters don’t get completely forgotten after seeming so important.

I don’t know, it just seems like everyone is running in place here. This is definitely the sense I get about filler arcs in mainstream shonen, but by the time we get there in those shows, there’s already tons of story we’ve passed to make this breather seem warranted. Radiant isn’t even into the double digits yet, and we’re already pulling plot ideas out of a hat instead of searching more of Artemis or meeting more of the important citizens or building up the inevitable anime original ending we’re headed towards. We’re just stalling to save time when we’re already short on it and I’m baffled as to what the purpose of this move is. I have no idea where we’re headed with this and with each superfluous episode, I find myself caring less and less, which is really disappointing considering how promising this series started.