English Dub Review: Girls’ Frontline “THE ECHO”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

An M4A1 doll from 16LAB is on the run from a Sangvis Executioner. Commander Gentiane is given orders to locate her, so she dispatches the Griffin squad to find the doll and rescue her from behind enemy lines. They find no sign of their target at first, but then a trail of sugar cubes leads them to a data disc leading to her location… and saying that she’s setting a trap for Sangvis.

Our Take:

The third episode of Girls’ Frontline takes viewers on a mission to track down a missing doll that’s in hiding, navigating past enemy lines and dangerous obstacles. It sounds exciting, but ultimately it’s still just as dumb as last week’s episode because there’s no stake or investment in the bigger picture.

The overall plot of THE ECHO is definitely more exciting than last week’s episode, to be sure. A soldier stuck behind enemy lines trying to escape is always a sure bet for a tension-filled series of events. But just because it should be prime storytelling doesn’t mean that it is here. M4A1 may be trapped, but it’s hard to care about her when we’ve never seen her before and have no idea why she’s so valuable or why the Sangvis Executioner is after her. Also, and I keep coming back to this point: these are mechanical dolls. They can just transmit their memories back to base and then who cares if their physical form is blown to bits. It literally doesn’t matter.

That’s even brought up a bit this episode when one of the Griffen dolls comes up to commandeer Gentiane and tells her that just because she was exploded in last week’s episode doesn’t mean she’s not fine now. I’m still the same me, she tells Gentiane, which is kind of a silly thing for a robot soldier to say, but it’s also true. There’s literally no stakes when these dolls die. Perhaps this is setting up for something down the road where their memories can’t be restored for one reason or another, but for now it just makes everything feel pointless.

The only real allure of the episode is the back and forth mind game between M4A1 and the Sangvis Executioner, but even that’s not very complex. Basically, the ‘good’ doll has been in hiding so the Executioner can’t find her. Even when a patrol of Griffin dolls comes through the area, she stays put and doesn’t join up with them because… reasons? I guess they haven’t been told the ‘sugar cube’ code word yet, but I’m still not sure why she didn’t just alert them to her presence. It seems like she’s really scared of the Sangvis Executioner, but at the same time she was taken down by two other Griffin dolls easily, so I have no idea why she’s supposed to be so much of a threat.

In the end, THE ECHO is a small improvement over last week’s episode, just because the storyline was a little more streamlined and easy to follow, plus there was a bit of excitement due to the whole ‘cat and mouse’ game going on. But there are inherent problems with this series that I don’t think it’ll be able to overcome, and that makes every episode an uphill battle.