English Dub Review: Steins;Gate 0 “Solitude of the Mournful Flow -A Stray Sheep-“

These episode titles keep getting weirder and weirder.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

New mysteries start to take shape this week on Steins;Gate 0 as Okabe and Amadeus’s relationship continues to deepen and Okabe starts experiencing strange dreams and what feels like world line changes. Meanwhile, Utaru and Suzuha try to track down an old friend of Suzuha’s who came back in time with her so many years ago. And a familiar face reappears in Okabe’s life, but whether or not this is a welcome return remains to be seen.

Our Take:

This week on Steins;Gate 0 new developments are starting to take form, and its about time too. Last week I lamented how slow this show was going compared to its quirky predecessor, but as new developments start to leak into the plot, it would appear that things are now on the mend, though I still think we’ve got a long way to go.

The melancholy tone of this series appears to be here to stay, but that doesn’t exactly surprise me, considering the subject matter. Yet, even though I can tell that melancholy is what the creators are going for, that doesn’t make the show particularly fun to watch. Things are dragging, to say the least. Scenes flow into each other haphazardly without tension or intrigue, and the direction of the scenes, mostly just being two people talking in a room in a plain fashion, isn’t helping. In the original “Steins;Gate”, Okabe was the hurricane that kept things interesting and moving along. But now, with him taking the backseat in a mostly reactionary role, things have slowed down to a crawl.

But for what this episode does, it doesn’t do poorly. The vocal work is on-point, as always, with John Michael Tatum doing a superb job of re-interpreting Okabe as a suffering shadow of his former self, and the rest of the cast reprising fairly well too. The writing and dialogue between the characters feel natural and keeps things going as if the first series never ended, even though quite a bit of time has passed since the release of the original. One can feel the relationship developing between Okabe and Amadeus as if it was with another person; it’s cute and its sweet. But I’m not getting the sense of dread that perhaps I should be getting with Okabe’s infatuation with Amadeus. It’s pretty clear that this is not going to end well for Okabe in the long run, given Maho’s warnings, but the show plays it completely straight. Furthermore, Okabe’s trauma seems a little…well, inconsequential. Apart from the occasional hallucination, this “fallen” Okabe doesn’t feel like the tortured man that we were sold on when the show was first being teased. Without sounding like a sadist, I want to see some real pain. Intensity, suffering, challenge: these are the things that make good drama, and this show could use a hot injection of some of that, stat. I wonder how long things can go on for this show as they are before the plot starts to spoil, but we’ll have to say. As for this week’s episode, it gets a passing grade, but it’s not scraping by with flying colors if you catch my drift.

Score
6/10