English Dub Review: Suicide Squad Isekai Episode 4

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Queen Aldora recruits the Squad to fight against their rivals who have been bolstered by Ratcatcher, part of the squad that came in before them.

OUR TAKE

After getting a triple feature premiere to start us off, we now move to one episode a week for the remainder. As such, we’re actually almost at the halfway point already, which is kinda hard to believe. Either way, this episode sees the Squad fully cementing themselves as a cohesive unit against an enemy faction. Or to be specific, against Ratcatcher, who really only needs one clean shot to get all of his mind-controlled minions to turn on him. Unfortunately he’s not nearly as interesting as his counterpart from The Suicide Squad, but he serves his purpose well enough as a means to get the team to work together. They don’t have to do a whole lot, but it shows progress in their connection as a team, and gives further character development for Harley (who makes use of some advice she got from Joker about getting enemies to turn on each other) and Deadshot (who had a connection to Ratcatcher but has clearly gotten over it). With that out of the way, they’re allowed to go and reset the timers on their neck bombs, which unfortunately diminishes whatever tension those may have had, but who knows where that’ll go by the end of the show.

I think I’ve covered my thoughts on the episode itself succinctly enough, so I think I’ll use the time left to talk about my thoughts on the Opening and Ending. The OP is pretty stylistic in its approach, giving all the Squad members and fantasy setting presence, but perhaps due to how it handles its style, much of it all blends together and doesn’t have a lot of identity of its own, which makes it cool to look at but hard to connect with. Same goes for the ED, but in a different way. It’s basically the Squad posing a bunch while Amanda Waller does a pretty elaborately animated dance. I recently came across the third ED for the Ultraman anime that also has characters dancing in it, yet despite having next to no familiarity to these characters or franchise, I felt like seeing each individual group get a dance gave me some clue as to their personalities and placement in the story, unlike here. Though for a more closely related example, there’s also the now famous Peacemaker intro, which has live action choreography of the whole cast dancing. Putting aside that is probably a lot harder to coordinate, the fact that EVERY character is dancing does a lot to make the dancing feel like…well, it means something. I guess my takeaway here is just that if you’re going to make a dancing OP or ED, let everyone dance? Maybe I’ll come back to this, but it seems to indicate, with the OP, that Suicide Squad Isekai may be more concerned with fashion over form.