English Dub Review: The Reflection “New Orleans”

Well, that’s it. What little interest I have in I-Guy is gone.

Overview (Spoilers, I guess)

Eleanor, X-On, and Lisa take to the road again. From all available clues, the Association of Insidious Folk With Strange Powers (trademark pending) have been hunting after women that are all related to each other, and nabbing mutants along the way. Following this trail, they head to New Orleans to get the jump on Raise and his evil brotherhood. During her hunt for clues, Eleanor gets kidnapped by a man and a metallic beast called Merchant and Trader. In the meantime, Ian Izzet powers up his waaambulance because he wants the glory for what I-Guy does. As in personally, under his own name. Yes, that means he’s jealous of his own fame.

This episode wasn’t as interesting as the last, but I am elated at the inclusion of Lisa to the cast. While X-On sits around moping, Eleanor puts her nose to the grindstone, and I-Guy… whines, Lisa looks at her world with joy and wonder. Her powers have made her mostly self-sufficient, which grants her a whole new level of freedom. She tires herself out by being excited over seeing the ocean. Where are we going? New Orleans? She starts nerding out about jazz music. Yeah, it’s childlike, but that’s what this show needs. Just like Arrow needs Felicity Smoak, or else it turns into the most depressed action show in history. The choice to have her in the back seat of the truck with X-On is a great exercise in polar opposites. While he mopes and complains, she injects hope and light into her situation.

So, let’s take a look at the other “hero” of this show. What does Ian Izzet contribute to the show? Nothing of value. As the series goes on, he gets a bigger and bigger head, and whines about wanting more of the spotlight. He doesn’t drive the story along at all. The only way I can see value in having this guy as part of the show is if he turns into a villain later on. A hero for all the wrong reasons keeps on trying to get more glory, ends up causing horrible tragedies that the real heroes have to clean up. Until then, he’s just monotonous gloom and whining. Worse yet, whenever he’s on screen, we hear the same forty second song clip of “Sky Show”. It ends, then he goes and does something, then it starts up again. It’s not even a good song. It’s a modern pop song trying to masquerade as an 80’s pop song and failing miserably. It’s hard to imagine that it’s made by such a giant in the 80’s music scene. Trevor Horn, who makes a cameo in the episode, wrote the song.

A major theme during the New Orleans portions of the episode was the prevalent Anti-Reflected bigotry. Merchant and Trader apparently kidnap and dispose of any Reflected they find, just by virtue of being Reflecteds. Eleanor has to rescue a non-Reflected who was getting beat up for hanging out with the Reflected. This feels almost out of left field for the show, as previous locales presented this racism merely as social exclusion. This is also interesting because it is happening in a post-Katrina New Orleans. The devastation caused by the hurricane in the real world brought to light a subtle, insidious form of racism. While bigotry is easy to spot and can be rooted out by dealing with individuals, racism by exclusion is a societal issue that has no clear solution. Those excluded find themselves in substandard living conditions, but their plight is ignored by those that can help because they “aren’t a part of the society I see”. Think of the all-white country club. They aren’t all white necessarily because of a rule that excludes other ethnicities. Their membership simply doesn’t know anyone that isn’t white. They, therefore, are also unaware of issues that don’t touch their social group. Therefore, when issues such as Katrina occur, their disconnect from the victims also makes them less likely to help.

That is what we are witnessing in The Reflection, if Flaming Fury can be believed from her speech in episode two. On the other hand, we arrive in New Orleans, which experienced this “racism by exclusion” first-hand, and they have gone into full-blown racial violence. Police officers even engage in it actively and are encouraged by the muggle bystanders. Yes, I said muggle outside of Harry Potter. It’s in the Oxford English Dictionary now. Look it up. This brings us all the way around into the territory tread by X-Men. Mutant hatred sparking into violence, which creates a cycle of violence. What’s disturbing to me is that in this setting, the bigotry against the Reflecteds has already become systematized. The police officer is about to lock Eleanor up, citing loitering as her crime, just for being a Reflected. This is normal to them and encouraged by the lay person. Somehow, it has gotten this bad in only three years! What events went down during that time that would rationalize this? I know it is all based on fear, but for the sentiment to get that entrenched in such a short time, it must have some reason. Will we get to see it, or was this just a rogue plot point without a firm foundation? I guess we’ll see in the next episode.

Our Take

The more I watch this show, the more I get mired down in trying to find a reason why its production quality is so abysmal. I can’t find it. Studio DEEN has the power to make some amazing animation. Trevor Horn is a music production legend. So why is this show’s art, animation, music, and sound design on the level of an amateur Newgrounds flash video? Search as I might, I have no answers except… POW! Entertainment. This is Stan Lee’s studio, which according to one of our readers, was also responsible for the dubbing, and not Funimation. If this is true, then I am horribly disappointed. I would expect Stan Lee to have a more discerning eye when it came to products so closely associated with his brand. Signing off for something with this low a production value damages his reputation. If any of this was actually the fault of his own studio, then it’s even more damning that he lets it go. Oh, and since I mentioned the dub, I want to bring up that only one character’s voice was remotely entertaining to me in this episode: the bouncer outside the club in LA. That’s right. No name for the guy. He’s a throwaway background character. His voice actor put more into emoting than anyone else in the show. Sad.

The episode’s story was more transitional. It got us acclimated to Lisa as a part of the team, and led us into what appears to be a bigger plot arc. There is much more going on with Merchant and Trader than we are led to believe, given the mass of Reflecteds Eleanor finds at the end. I doubt that the bestial one of the pair actually eats these people. Since this episode is more of an in-between, it lacks the compelling action and development I’d like. It’s bland. Further, the writing leaves so much blank space, you could drive a truck through it. There is a thirty-second sequence where we are staring at the tip of I-Guy’s cape flapping. Not him, just the tip of the cape. Then, we have ten or so seconds of watching his feet wiggle from his jet boots. Wiggling between the same five frames. There is no talking during this sequence. No action. Just repeated animation cycles and “Sky Show”. There’s a bunch of points where we stare at a character who isn’t talking, as they stare at the off-screen character that IS talking. Why? Probably so they wouldn’t have to animate the speech. I’d be okay with this if there was a reason we’re staring at them, such as watching their reaction to what’s being said or to show something in the background. But, when nothing is going on around X-On, and he’s wearing a full-face mask, why are we watching him just sit there? It’s bad script writing. It wouldn’t even fly for a comic book.

In the end, this show just continues to go downhill. Not because of the bad story. Heavens no. That’s the only thing that keeps me watching. It’s just that everything else is of such low quality, it harms the reputations of everyone involved. Which also seems to be half the point of the show. If someone remotely famous is involved, they appear in the show. Stan Lee and Trevor Horn are the obvious ones. 9Nine, the pop idol group that sings the ending credits theme, are also represented in the four Japanese Reflected girls who have now become magical girls. I wonder what name they ended up choosing? What I choose is to give this episode three repetitions of “Sky Show” out of ten.