English Dub Review: Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction 14

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

The mothership begins to fall apart, throwing the world into further chaos.

OUR TAKE

This episode takes us away from the perspectives of Kadode, Ouran, and their group and instead puts in eye on some of the lives affected in different ways by the ship’s arrival on August 31st. And hey, what do you know, it’s August 31st TODAY! Funny how that works out. But yeah, we get to see what seems like a little vignette following a journalist documenting a woman and her elderly mother who are living off government subsidies because they live in a supposedly contaminated zone, which highlights a less than comfortable side of how the world would be impacted by something like this. Though as interesting as that was from a worldbuilding perspective, I did find myself wondering why we were giving this so much time when we’re less than a handful of episodes from the end of the series (assuming it still sticks to its eighteen episode order). Well, with tensions seemingly reaching a breaking point and the ship itself collapsing onto the land below, it seems like this is a way of kicking off the final stages. The end of the last episode did say that there were only five days left until the end of humanity, so what better way to light the fuse on that than by starting to see the literal collapse of the status quo that has hung over Tokyo for years.

The setting of this story has been described as a “Cold War” after all, and the real life Cold War also ended with a wall coming down, though that’s where the similarities end. We most certainly did not have a group of scientists getting ready to rocket off Earth and a bunch of radical alien assassins creeping around government buildings. And while the plot following the scientists that are essentially building a new Noah’s Ark and the real world politics that touch on Japan’s weird relationship with the United States (a topic that’s as old in fiction as the first Godzilla movie in the fifties) was never my favorite, I understand that it’s going to become increasingly in the forefront as everything builds to a climax. Not to mention one of the major themes of this show overall is seeing daily life adapting to these less than normal circumstances. So, I’m guessing that we’ll be getting back to the usual main cast for the remainder of the series, which I’m eager to see.