English Dub Review: Girls’ Frontline “THE MESSAGE 02”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

The Griffen dolls go on a mission to find and infiltrate another Sangvis base, but it turns out to be a trap that leads them right to the Sangvis commander called Intruder. The dramatic doll has set up a stage of death for the AR team, but they easily outwit her and, along with AR16, send her offline—but not before she gives them an ominous warning that the real performance is about to begin.

Our Take:

Girls’ Frontline is a dumb show. Between the nonexistent world-building and the paper-thin characters, I’ve come to expect each episode to be a real exercise in patience. But this week’s new dubbed episode, THE MESSAGE 02, is even dumber than usual. With virtually no action and nothing interesting happening, it’s basically one long theatre joke filled with half-baked puns and by the end of it, I was rooting for someone to just die already, whether it was Sangvis or Griffen, anything to make it end.

Okay, maybe I’m being a tad dramatic, but if there’s any episode to get dramatic about, it’s this one. The Sangvis commander Intruder is maybe the most theatrical anime character I have ever seen. And she manages to accomplish that while being a robot, which is even more noteworthy. The script writers must have been having too much fun with her dialogue, and it shows. Every other line mentions curtains, or setting the scene, or bringing the house down. It’s almost painfully impressive.

It’d be nice if her love for theatre made her an interesting character, but sadly, there’s not much to Intruder besides that. She’s brought up as being this major threat who M16 has been stalking in order to bring her down, but her plan of attack is so easy for Griffen to evade that I broke out laughing. After planning this thing for who knows how long, and then luring the AR team into a room surrounded by guns, all it takes is for M4 to move six feet to the left and into a blindspot and boom, that’s it. Intruder is kind of an idiot, but she’s still the most entertaining Sangvis doll we’ve seen so far, so at least that’s something?

For a show that’s supposedly all about the action, this episode demonstrates how awful Girls’ Frontline is even when it comes to its strengths. Pretty much every battle in the ep starts with one side standing up and shooting. Then the other side stands up and shoots. And they’re standing there aiming at each other, with bullets flying everywhere, and neither side suffers any direct hits. It was so laughably noticeable when Intruder pulled out her giant cannon and started blasting from like twenty feet away, aiming at static Griffen dolls who are standing up making no efforts to conceal themselves, and somehow she misses every single one of them.

Sometimes it’s hard to watch a show like this one. Usually, Girls’ Frontline is right in the middle of bad and so bad it’s good. It’s awful enough to be a slog to get through, but not awful enough to be funny. This week’s episode is the closest it’s come to being a legitimately fun hate watch, however, so I hope we can keep up this energy going into next week.