English Dub Review: RErideD: Derrida, Who Leaps Through Time “The Place He Awakened”

I can’t wait to awaken tomorrow and pretend this show doesn’t exist.

Overview (Spoilers!) 

A woman weeps and heads to an appointment. A man declares that he will go back to the place— and time—this began.

In a futuristic city, Derrida meets with his boss Andrei; he explains that they found a malfunction in the company’s newly manufactured robots. If too many DZs receive the same order at once—which they will when used in combat—they’ll go haywire. Even so, Andrei doesn’t allow a recall.

Derrida attends a birthday party for Mage, his coworker Nathan’s daughter. The news describes the ongoing war, but the partygoers enjoy themselves. Nathan asks Derrida to help him with his time machine research, but Derrida (perhaps fittingly) derides him. Nathan is furious. Mage overhears the fight and quotes Derrida’s thesis to him, in which he proposed that humans are capable of time travel. For an instant, Mage appears as an adult woman, but the image soon vanishes. Derrida now believes that time travel is impossible, but he hands Mage an access key anyway.

The next day, Derrida talks to his father Jacques about the DZs, but he too refuses to help. Declaring that Jacques has always just used him as a puppet, Derrida runs off. Nathan informs Derrida that Mage was working on the time jump and ended up in the hospital. Some dudes shoot Jacques. That night, Derrida receives a second call from Nathan, who says that Andrei wants them dead and they have to run. Nathan picks him up and explains that DZs are already in combat and the bug was intended. Realizing that Mage has the access key (does it give access to the time machine or the DZs? who knows), Nathan turns the car around and promptly crashes and flips it. Andrei shows up, explaining that he framed Derrida for his father’s death and intends to kill them both.

Suddenly, Mage appears in front of Derrida. She vanishes, and Andrei’s men shoot a crapton of bullets, blowing up the car but somehow missing Derrida. He falls off a cliff, and Mage appears again. After falling down a crazy long tunnel, Derrida appears in an underground facility. He lies down to rest and ends up in a cryo chamber.

Mage finds the chamber and leaves her pocket watch on it. Derrida awakens to see that the city is now a ruined wasteland.

Our Take 

A lesson in writing generic characters and unemotional dialogue, this episode is boring.

Seriously, try to describe any of these characters to me. I dare you. Do it. Tell me what makes Nathan unique, what personality he shows over the course of these precious twenty-three minutes I’ll never get back (hint: he doesn’t). Tell me who Mage is, other than a curious, sweet young girl, perfect in every way. Tell me what makes Yuri tick. Describe Derrida’s passions and quirks. Oh, you can’t? That, my dear reader, is because they’re deeply boring.

After the disorienting opening scene, I found that the futuristic city Derrida works in actually looks pretty cool. I was excited to learn more about this future world—what kind of technology they have that makes life different from our own, how their culture and clothes have changed—but instead of creative new devices, the team behind the show has populated this world with tech from our world that’s just… shaped differently. Cell phones look more like rotary receivers than iPhones. Yuri’s camera is shaped, somewhat disconcertingly, like a gun. Cars are squarer, but with rounded edges. There are robots (as a big Sherlock Holmes fan, I smiled that Mage’s robot is called Mrs. Hudson) but we don’t learn anything about what they usually do. And overall, the design is a weird mix of past and present. Although the city is futuristic and its inhabitants wear modern clothes, Mage’s house, outfit, and pocket watch are relics from the nineteenth century. Perhaps more bafflingly, Nathan plays a song on a record player. I’m super some hipsters will still use those in 2050, but probably not eight-year-old girls. Plus, I’m confused on how safe this world is. There’s a war going on that’s sapping their resources, but an eight-year-old and a seven-year-old are trusted to walk home through the snow together unchaperoned?

And as this episode drags on and on, and we’re fed exposition after exposition, the plot becomes increasingly unoriginal, forced, and unrealistic. Andrei is a stereotypical evil, corrupt boss. The party does nothing to advance the plot. Derrida’s daddy issues explode out of him without any context to let us get invested first. In one scene, Mage is in the hospital with an IV in her arm; the next, we’re told she’s at Yuri’s house, apparently all better, her illness/injuries totally forgotten.

My favorite sequence of this episode is the one after Derrida denounces his father and runs away. Instead of giving us a scene of him dealing with these conflicting emotions, or of him telling Nathan that he’s just learned that Jacques accepted a bribe from Andrei—we next see Derrida at work, just chillin’, working on some work. Nathan calls him and tells him about Mage, promising to give Nathan more details later (which he never does). Then we see Jacques getting shot. Then, after those two seconds of whiplash, Nathan is in bed, asleep, where he receives yet another call from Nathan telling him that Andrei is after them. First of all, how did Nathan know that, but secondly, why did these need to be two separate phone calls? Why did we need two scenes of Nathan just chillin’ and then receiving crucial info over the phone? They couldn’t have thought of a better transition between these bite-sized snippets of exposition? Really?

And increasingly, as the episode goes on, plot details become overdramatic and unbelievable. Nathan is so anxious to get back to Mage that he just doesn’t see the giant barrier that he crashes into, flipping his car? Andrei just happens to show up immediately? Six million bullets manage to kill Nathan in a massive explosion, but they can’t hit Derrida even once? How did Derrida survive those two huge falls? Why did the plot require him to fall twice? And why did the cryo chamber activate as soon as he touched it? Wouldn’t it require, oh I don’t know, someone to turn it on?!

The dialogue is uninteresting, often relying on cliché platitudes. When Derrida asks Nathan why time travel is so important to him, Nathan just says, “It’s my mission as a scientist.” What a boring motivation. My personal favorite line of dialogue is when Derrida’s father compliments him on being, “Impressive. Swift work,” and Derrida responds, “Whatever.”

The war is underdeveloped. The voice acting is uninspired and unemotional—Natalie Hoover and Bryn Apprill are breathy and annoying, and, especially during Derrida and Nathan’s fight, Adam Gibbs and Seth Magill just sound kind of bored. And despite all the exposition, this show really does need to do more work to explain what’s going on. I initially thought that Andrei was Derrida’s father, and I had no idea who Andrei was until I looked him up online because they don’t say his name in connection with his face until he’s literally shooting at them. Also, Andrei looks a lot like Donald Trump, which is appropriate but unsettling.

Even the animation is underwhelming. Character’s faces aren’t very expressive, and in wide shots, they look even wonkier. Andrei’s motions are jerky and off-putting. During Derrida and Nathan’s argument, the shot zooms out to show the room around them so that the animators won’t have to make anything move at all. Nathan’s anger is animated as a weird vibration of his whole body, while his face just looks constipated. And from a character design standpoint, Derrida’s hair is an asymmetrical mess that lacks any charm.

When it comes to this episode’s strengths… the mix of past and future inherent in the production design, while confusing, lends the show a cool aesthetic. The soundtrack (by Maiko Iuchi) is far more emotional and enjoyable than anything else going on, and the ending song is actually pretty haunting. But if you’re desperate to hear it, I’d skip this episode and buy the soundtrack instead, because nothing else here is worth your time.