English Dub Review: SK8: The Infinity “We Don’t Balance Out”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)
Much to Reki’s shock, Langa quickly surpasses everyone else at the skate park with his increasing obsession take on Adam again. His pride in Langa’s abilities quickly turns to jealousy and inadequacy as he learns how much farther ahead his friend has gotten despite only skating for a few weeks, making it look like Reki is just a hanger on to Langa’s greatness. This starts to grow a rift between the two, heavily straining their friendship. This is made worse when Adam announces his tournament, which everyone is eager to compete in…except Reki, who all but disowns Langa when he breaks his promise to never fight Adam again.

Meanwhile, Ainosuke, Adam’s true identity, must attempt to cover his tracks as Investigator Kiriko looks to uncover his secret collusion to keep the skate park open. Soon the police chief he’s been colluding with is found out and resigns, meaning the trail is likely to lead straight to Ainosuke.

OUR TAKE
To be honest, this is not a turn I really expected this story to take. Usually the red-colored protagonists are the ones more than eager to engage in their respective show’s battle and the blue guys are the ones who have reservations. Not that that’s much of an issue, it just goes to show how SK8 may be taking a different route than excepted. It’s a real downturn considering just last episode the two were thick as thieves, but suddenly all the chatter about Langa’s skateboarding genius and dedication are reminding Reki that he’s never quite gone anywhere with his own skating. In fact, I’m surprised the show didn’t just hit the nail on the head and point that the only reason Reki’s made friends with Miya, Joe, Cherry, and Shadow is that Langa has beat them all or gotten them on his side through facing Adam. Not that Reki needs any OTHER mortal wounds on his self-esteem, but there does seem to be a clear reason things have only gotten interesting in this setting once Langa showed up. Though I guess the main takeaway fro that is really just that skaters need to pick up a few snowboarding lessons.

We’re also finally kicking off the skating tournament that Adam promised last week, and with that some hints as to his real motivations for why skating is so important to him. We already knew that he used to skate with Joe and Cherry back in the day, but it seems he was already quite fond of it as a kid as well, even though his father seemed to heavily dislike it. I’m still not quite clear on how that led to him being so obsessed with it that he’d go as far as to collude with a police chief to open a secret skate park where he can mercilessly hunt potentially great skaters like prey in his crazy matador fetish gear, but everybody has their hobbies so who are we to judge? The right people, that’s who. We now have a clear pathway through to what the show’s finale will be as we roll towards to final five episodes, plus possibly a recap since Funimation does have a tendency to dub those as well. And this is not the final word on Reki and Langa’s friendship, that’s for certain, so we’ll be touching back on that soon enough, don’t you worry.