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

Overview (Spoilers Below):

After nearly being overrun by a surprise Sangvis attack, Griffen recovers and returns to normal operations—except for the fact that a member of the AR team has been compromised. AR15 was embedded with a virus and she’s the reason why Sangvis found their secret base so easily. While Griffen studies her codebase, the rest of the AR team goes after Destroyer.

Our Take:

Girls’ Frontline had one of the bigger twists in the season last week, when Sangvis crashed Griffin’s private party. So how does the show follow it up with part two of THE KINDLING? Pretty ho-hum, really. It’s no different than previous episodes, and the turning point that I hoped last week’s episode might have put into the ground didn’t come to pass. So it’s just more of the same boring old basics—but that doesn’t mean there aren’t a few bright spots.

The first of these is AR15 and the whole angle she’s got going on in her storyline. Apparently, Destroyer was able to infect her with a virus while holding her captive, and that’s why she betrays the base. Having sentient dolls that are machine capable of being hijacked by rival programming is a really interesting idea. I have no faith that Girls’ Frontline will explore it in any meaningful way at this point, but at least it’s the start of something that has the potential to be entertaining.

Then there’s the one who put the virus there in the first place: Destroyer. The new Sangvis Ringleader was set up to be a criminal mastermind last week, but this week we get to see just how pathetic she really is. Despite being in charge of leading the surprise attack on Griffin HQ, Destroyer doesn’t really live up to her name, being easily chased around by the AR team while pleading with the next higher up, Dreamer, to save her. In a typical series Destroyer might be pretty forgettable, or even annoying, but when the last Ringleader talked a big game but didn’t deliver, it’s kind of refreshing to see Destroyer straight up admitting how useless she is—and her dynamic with Dreamer has me a little curious to learn more.

SOPII also gets to be a bit more interesting than normal this week because she brings up a good question: if there purpose is only to aim and shoot, then why were they built with emotional modules? One of her comrades brings up the fact that their emotions can give them insights that a simple machine could not, which is true to a certain extent, but they can’t really get into it too much because the real answer as to why machines of mass destruction have the personalities of teenage girls is because this is a stupid anime made to promote a computer game.

THE KINDLING 02 doesn’t manage to deliver on another step up after last week’s inciting incident. But it also doesn’t get quite as dull as some of the earlier episodes of the show did. It’s just another so-so mark on a scoresheet full of them—not in the back of the pack, but definitely not on the frontline either.