English Dub Review: RErideD: Derrida, Who Leaps Through Time “That Which Is Not Wholly Abandoned”

Derrida attempts to resolve his raging daddy issues.

Overview (Spoilers!)

Derrida realizes that, yep, his memories don’t match up with Yuri’s video of the past. He wonders if the “time ride” that Nathan was building actually worked. Yuri finds a clue to Mage’s whereabouts—she once visited a museum in nearby Vanfort. Videaux has an errand he needs to run there. Donna spies their car. When they arrive in Vanfort, the city is deserted.

Derrida, Videaux, and Yuri enter an abandoned police station. A robot dog identifies them as intruders but shuts down after scanning “Inspector” Videaux’s face. While retrieving the box he was looking for, Videaux reveals that he is indeed a former policeman. Derrida gets déjà vu and remembers coming to Vanfort as a child with his father. In the museum, Derrida discovers a celestial globe that can be activated to project a glimmering display of lights. He remembers talking about the science of lightspeed with his father at this same display: “Starlight is like a natural time machine,” said Jacques. Suddenly, white fog fills Derrida’s vision, and he sees a spectral version of his child self-running through the museum. And then Donna crashes through the ceiling.

A fight ensues, and no one gets hurt, but Yuri’s camera is smashed. Derrida sees another memory—one of his child self-stumbling into the security room. They copy all security footage of Mage, but Derrida is overcome with yet another recollection. He ends up in a room showcasing the first robot prototype, which he and Jacques were attending the unveiling of. Derrida weeps, devastated by the fact that he couldn’t reconcile with his father or save him from Andrei. Suddenly, Ange appears. In a swirl of white light, Derrida appears in a car. It is 2050, the day after Mage’s birthday.

Derrida bursts into his father’s office, but Jacques isn’t there. He goes to their meeting and warns Jacques about Andrei, begging him to run away with him. Jacques tells Derrida that he should leave—he doesn’t want to lose his son—but Jacques feels that he must stay and deal with the DZ bug.

Derrida is back in the future. Jacques is still dead, but Yuri’s camera is in one piece. Videaux and Donna burst through the ceiling, and Videaux and the robot dog defend Derrida and Yuri. A statue crushes Donna. Videaux reveals that he was collecting a photo of an old coworker who passed away, at the request of that man’s father.

Our Take

When it comes to this episode, I’m on the fence. On the one hand, it’s one of the more thematically interesting episodes of RErideD we’ve seen so far. The starlight symbolism works as a great metaphor for the power that memories hold over our lives: although they’re mere imprints of the past, they’re intricately connected with our present selves. Derrida witnesses a vision of his past made out of light, which brings the comparison home in a satisfying way. Videaux’s errand, too, although it doesn’t add much to the actual plot, works as a parallel to Derrida’s relationship with his father.

But honestly? For most of this episode, I had no idea what was going on. Say Nathan’s “time ride” worked after all. Okay. The device is nowhere near Derrida. He’s not activating it. Is someone in a remote location forcing him to leap through time against his will? Why do his actions change seemingly unrelated things about the past (i.e. why does reconciling with his father fix Yuri’s camera)? It isn’t clear whether Derrida is literally changing the past or his memories are somehow being altered so that they no longer match real events (he says something to this effect early in the episode, which really threw me for a loop). Plus, the splitting headaches he gets when he’s remembering things are eye-rolling overdramatic. I also don’t understand why all these memories were hidden from Derrida in the first place. I’ve heard of repressed childhood trauma, but why would he repress such joyous memories? And why would they come back to him like this, where he’s forced to view them as a movie against his will? Honestly, Derrida’s fits seem symptomatic of PTSD, but he’s having flashbacks of happiness rather than trauma, and I just don’t get it.

Also, what is this hint Yuri receives about Mage? Apparently, she knows Mage was at this museum, but why did Rebuild know that? Did Rebuild have a file in their system that just said: “Mage visited this museum on this date”? The most ridiculous part of the episode is when Yuri copies “all the security footage of Mage” by narrowing the footage down to just locations Mage was in. First of all, how does Yuri even know which rooms Mage visited, but she also didn’t use any constraints related to timing. Is this, like, all the footage of the rooms Mage visited, from when the museum first opened to the present day? And if Yuri was able to narrow it down, how does she know what exact date and time Mage visited? Was it recently? Viewers might need to know that! (On a similar note, the idea that Donna found Graham just by standing on some random desert rocks where the car happened to drive by is so funny. It’s such an… old cartoon villain cliché. How did she find them?)

But yeah, what I hate most of all are Derrida’s emotional reactions. His sobs are animated in the most half-assed way so that the tortured sounds coming out of his mouth don’t match up with his minimalist motions at all. He’s stupid enough to run after his own memory screaming “COME BACK HERE,” never thinks to ask if Yuri and Videaux can also see the white smoke (or, you know, tell them about it at all), and consistently seems surprised by extremely mundane things (like just… having memories). And I’m really confused about the relationship between Jacques and Derrida. In episode one, Derrida made it pretty clear that Jacques was a bad father who never had time for him and just wanted a successor in the robotics business. Derrida was sure Jacques had sold out to Andrei, and their fight felt like the culmination of a lifetime of frustration. So it’s pretty weird to see all these memories of Jacques as a kind, supportive father figure. When Derrida wails, “If only I had remembered this before… I was always fighting with him…” I just didn’t get it. We’re supposed to believe Jacques was a good guy now? Who didn’t accept a bribe from Andrei? Who cares for his son’s wellbeing and wants to do the right thing? And Derrida just didn’t know that because he repressed… his own happy memories with his father? It feels extremely unearned. Either some outside force messed with Derrida’s memories of his father Total Recall-style, or this show has no idea how to write believable father-son relationships.

But yeah, I do like the science metaphors, and the contraption’s projected starlight is actually charming (it calls to mind the romantic tunnel of stars from Cardcaptor Sakura). The fight scene has great intensity, the city is animated nicely, and we get more intriguing snippets of Videaux’s past. The music, once again, is phenomenal. Plus, I love the twist of Derrida randomly leaping back in time to 2050 again. It was so disorienting and shocking in the best possible way. I initially thought the whole rest of the show would take place in the past, giving Derrida the chance to prevent the dystopia he knows is just around the corner in 2060, but alas. I still give the writers props for keeping me on my toes.

Some other twists don’t land nearly as well. It’s really obvious that Donna wouldn’t be killed off so soon (even though she got crushed by a truly inhuman amount of rubble). And the name “Cassiel” gets pulled out of nowhere at the episode’s end as if he’s an important character we should care about, despite him never having been mentioned before. But hey, if you want some pretty lights and interesting commentary on nostalgia, then this episode is your best bet.