English Dub Review: The Reflection “San Antonio”

Big Wheel is like a bull in a china shop.

Overview (Spoilers)

Eleanor has come up with a new heading. It turns out, most of the reflecteds with the last name of Allen were in the same place during the Reflection. Look at the episode title. You should be able to figure out where. Wraith’s men abduct multiple women at once, forcing each member of the crew to work separately, and fail at protecting the Allens. They manage to track down another of the line, Nina Fischer, who married after the Reflection. With her Reflected Mother in tow, the gang heads out to Los Angeles, using Michael, Vi, and a private eye as decoys. On the road, Wraith appears to Eleanor in a vision, claiming to need her power. She shakes him off. As they catch up with Nina, Steel Ruler arrives and demands they hand these last two Allens over. Things start looking grim when… is that “Sky Show”? Guh… That loser is back.

Courtesy: Funimation

The abduction scene reveals a couple new members of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. One is an evil Shadowcat and the other has the power of illusion. That last one is nothing to sneeze at. Properly built illusions can do some nasty stuff. Question: What happened to Mister Mystic? Did even Stan Lee realize this show was crap and write himself off? I do enjoy the game of cat and mouse the gang is playing with Wraith’s men, and I’ll be sad if Michael and Vi don’t link up with the crew. The truck is getting awfully full, but now they have the PI’s station wagon. Michael uses his powers in a new way here. While he can only see Reflected, his Reflect-o-Vision (patent pending) is also X-Ray vision. He can see through any physical object to pinpoint a Reflected in visual range. This makes him slightly handier than before, especially if you hand the guy a high-powered rifle… They aren’t going to give him a rifle, I’m guessing. I like Vi’s character concept. We now see that she is permanently stuck in her human-shaped iron armor, but can transform into her beast mode at will. Man, that must be frustrating for Michael.

“Congrats, your wife is eternally naked.”

“Yay!”

“But she’s stuck in a suit of armor by her powers and the two of you will never touch again. You can’t even look her in the eyes soulfully because you can’t see her eyes.”

“Aw.”

Our Take

I need to start my take with the voice acting. It was terrible. This episode was recorded in an office with no sound proofing and a USB microphone. No way The Reflection is being dubbed by Funimation. They have the equipment and software to remove small room reverb and microphone pops. This had to have been done by someone else. The same people that decided that that young actress from California could make herself sound like an old woman from Texas. All of this is plain as day in the audio, and it’s bad. What sounded good was Wraith’s conversation with Eleanor, but that was just a few effects added to mostly clean audio. Further, this show has a bad habit of thinking that everyone from a particular place has the same accent. None of those people with Cajun or Texan accents sound real. They sound like people faking those accents. It’s okay to have people in Texas who speak like New Yorkers. They exist there, too. It’s also okay if you want to slightly change what the characters are saying in English so that the audio syncs up with the video if it’s all the same to you guys.

It looks like the two interns animating this show in a back room looked up a few flash tutorials on line. During the abduction, the animation of the effects is really smooth. There are a few shots where Eleanor runs around touching people who have been disguised by the illusionist, revealing their true selves. The transitions zip into place quickly, cleanly, and with precision, so it all comes across with better animation than the rest of the show. Later on, Steel Ruler shows up and whips out her metal tendrils to block a shotgun. The motions are complicated but done with the same precision as the abduction scene above. It’s just a shame that the rest of the show can’t have even that much attention to detail. Most of the time, they can’t even get their line thicknesses right.

When I first went through the episode, I was entertained enough by it. After thinking it over a bit, I realized how amateurish it feels. I mean, the baddies are acting very conveniently for the plotline, only going after the Allens that are in the same town the heroes are at. I mean, they know how many Allens there are, so they had to know WHO they are, and from that, they can figure out where. Are they just following the heroes, then? So much is left undefined, which could be a good thing in most shows. But since the enemies are acting incongruously and we have already seen that we can follow their viewpoint, why not fill us in? This Wraith guy seems to be someone who knows quite a bit about the Reflection, given that he speaks about the Darkness represented by the smoke as if it were a living being. Unfortunately, his visit served no purpose other than to say “Hi!” to Eleanor. It’s awfully late in the game to be nothing but cryptic and ominous, buddy. Content is king, come back when you have something to say. My other qualm about this episode’s plot is that after learning that Nina is in Los Angeles, Michael announces that Maggie, Nina’s mother, is a Reflected. They were planning on just heading out, but upon hearing mama’s a mutant, they up and kidnap the old woman. She’s an Allen, so the baddies are looking for her anyway. But suddenly, because she’s Reflected, she’s worthy of their concern enough to force her halfway across the country?

Normally, this show has me watching for the story, but between that, the terrible voice acting, and the lousy art and animation, the only thing this episode was good for was the action… which was kinda good, actually. Good enough to keep this episode from dipping below three badly accented old ladies out of ten.

 

SCORE
3.0/10