English Dub Review: SSSS.Gridman “Restoration”

This episode restores my faith in anime.

Overview (Spoilers!)

The morning after the kaiju attack, it’s like the entire city has been reset. The school building is in tip-top shape, and none of Yuta’s classmates remember what went down. But a few desks in their classroom are missing, including Tonkawa’s. When Rikka asks her friends about it, they have no idea who those students are: “No one in our class plays volleyball.” In order to ask Gridman what’s going on, Rikka agrees to cancel her plans and open the shop.

Akane invites Yuta to eat lunch with her, asking about the kaiju attack. Their teacher, distracted, runs into Akane and doesn’t apologize. The others can see Gridman’s picture on Junk now, but they still can’t hear him. Akane heads home and skypes with—Alexis?! She gives him the DL on Yuta and Gridman; her bedroom is filled with statues of kaiju.

The creepy man Yuta saw the day before arrives at the shop. He introduces himself as Samurai Caliber and re-caliber-ates Junk, allowing Rikka and Utsumi to hear Gridman and see the kaiju in the distance. Caliber leads the others to a Chinese restaurant owned by Tonkawa’s father, who tells them that Tonkawa died in an accident in middle school. The parents of all five students who vanished share a similar story. Akane cheers with Alexis about their deaths. Rikka mourns.

Akane crafts a new kaiju statue and says she’ll use it to kill her homeroom teacher. Alexis brings the kaiju to life, and it begins destroying the city as it chases the teacher down. When a piece of debris nearly crushes the kids on their way to Junk, Caliber saves them. Yuta merges with the newly optimized Gridman and fights the kaiju—but the kaiju has the ability to reflect his blasts back at him. Caliber disappears into Junk and becomes a sword for Gridman to use. Using Caliber, Gridman slices the kaiju in half. The next day, the city has reset again. Still alive, Yuta’s homeroom teacher bumps into him and instantly apologizes.

Our Take

SSSS.Gridman hasn’t lost the momentum created by its promising first episode. On the contrary, “Restoration” introduces several fascinating mysteries, a frightening and lovable villain, and a premise I really didn’t see coming. After the series premiere, I was expecting this series to follow a “monster of the week” format, where each successive episode would be primarily dedicated to the team hunting down that week’s kaiju. But the kaiju/mecha fight this week was almost an afterthought, with most of the episode dedicated to introducing and unraveling the strange circumstances the group has found themselves in. Refreshingly, this format allows for much more original storytelling. Keeping the kaiju/mecha battles short and sweet ensures that they’re fun and don’t have time to go stale.

If you’ve been reading my reviews up until now, you’ll know that I adore a good villain. I genuinely didn’t see Akane’s role in this series coming, and the reveal shocked me in the best possible way. I love that she’s deceptively cute, but is willing to kill someone just for failing to apologize after bumping into her. Her existence is a Death Note-style exploration of what happens when ordinary humans have gifted the power to kill without consequence, and her pettiness is enjoyably astounding. The only thing I’m not sure about is Akane’s voice. Lindsay Seidel was wonderful as Top Speed in last season’s Magical Girl Raising Project, but her voice here is a lot higher and cutesier. Sometimes it feels like a deliberate contrast to Akane’s aggressive, cruel personality, but others it just comes off as tacky.

I also love that we see her encounter with the teacher from his side of the story as well. I mean, that guy is clearly preoccupied and exhausted. He decides not take attendance because he’s given up caring about it. He responds to a student’s assertion that “something’s wrong with Rikka” with a distracted, “Uh, good to know.” When he fails to apologize to Akane, it’s obviously not out of malice; he just had other things on his mind. This show is so good at presenting little details that seem unimportant but are actually crucial to the storyline. I assumed at first that the teacher was apathetic and tired because it’s funny, a la Yokumira Mera from My Hero Academia, but his throwaway remarks actually became crucial to the plot of the episode. Similarly, Rikka later says that she can’t drink carbonation, and I thought it was just a little relatable nugget of character development (I can’t do carbonation either, Rikka). But then Caliber hands her a bottle of tea, asking if she can drink that instead. A silly, seemingly meaningless moment turns into a way for the writers to show Caliber’s kindness and usefulness to the team.

And I love that the teacher didn’t die. I didn’t see that coming at all. Was Akane just trying to teach him a lesson? Did she intend to kill him and failed? She did say she didn’t care if he died or not. I’m so excited to learn more about her motives, and why her room is filled with trash bags. I’m equally excited to learn how she’s resetting time, how she’s going back and erasing the lives of her classmates as if they really did die years ago. The “no one in our class plays volleyball” reveal is so haunting.

The music in this episode continues to be epic, but it’s utilized very infrequently. Last episode, the long stretches of characters speaking over white noise added to the foggy, amnesiac ambiance, but at times in this episode, I longed for a break from characters just talking. The music after Akane decides to kill her teacher is so great, but when the kids meet Caliber, his bizarre entrance is just begging for some tunes. It’s an important scene, and in silence, it feels like something is missing (of course, it’s also a funny scene, as Caliber’s many samurai swords cause him to keep crashing into the doorway).

I’m also pretty confused by this series’s ending song. Unlike the intro, which features pretty much all the characters including some we haven’t met yet, the outro only contains Rikka and Akane, hanging out as if they’re best friends. Do they have some past together we don’t know about? Or is this sequence just for fun because they’re both cute girls? I guess only time will tell.

But really, I don’t have many complaints about this episode. The character animation is better, the kaiju design is cool, and the show starts to develop its main theme: that even if you can’t save everyone, it’s your duty to do what you can to help. It’s not exactly the most original moral for an action-oriented show, but I don’t mind at all, because SSSS.Gridman is just so much fun.