English Dub Review: Akudama Drive: “Mission Impossible”

Overview:

Their mission. Should they choose to accept it. Is to steal the  vault that is aboard the impenetrable train, the Shinkansen. But when things go awry, they must improvise if the mission is to succeed and everyone is to make it out alive. 

Our Take: “Mission Impossible” managing to tease/juggle various story beats while exhibiting an intense, entertaining plot is the true impossible mission. And it’s safe to say it was a success. This aspect truly stands out as the episode nicely weaves this aspect in moments of downtime and it never feels forced in the context of the exhilarating hijacking. Courier is hinted to be built for this sort of life running from place to place and person from person based on how he lived his life This is all done however in the beginning of the chapter before the big plan from Black Cat gets underway. Or how Hacker has high hopes for the future in which he wants to visit Kanto. This scene in particular takes place just before they have to make their way through towards the button. They are brief but memorable. Teasing tidbits of what to expect moving forward from these characters. This also squishes another concern of them only being one note characters and not adding much in the way of depth. 

As the episode goes on, Ordinary and the rest of the team get more comfortable with each other. She begins to see them as “ordinary” folk if you will. It is great to see how the episode communicates this through the increasingly comfortable way the team begins speaking and acting towards one another. Akudama Drive actually shows the audience this without feeling the need to spoon feed it to audiences through contrived dialogue. Similarly to how the brief moments of reprieve feel organic, as to do these scenes, specifically. 

Lastly, one other way this episode truly shines is how each team uniquely handles the pushing of their own button. It was both and quite funny to see each stumble frantically and figure out how to accomplish the task with each akudama’s respective skills. While one favored brute force and, surprisingly, a bit of intelligence from Brawler, Doctor and Hoodlum, another chose precision and some quick thinking from Ordinary, Cutthroat and Hacker. How they vary from one another is yet more reason as to how “Mission Impossible” finishes strong and, along with the entire season thus far, works as not only a great self-contained adventure but continuation too.