English Dub Review: Clockwork Planet “Criminal Act”

or RuPaul’s Drag Race, Illogical Clockwork Edition.

Spoilers Below

After all the gears in Akihabara have ground to a stop, the only place the gang can go to repair RyuZU and the two cyborgs is in Ueno, a little under a mile away. One of Marie’s old subordinates has a new job there, complete with an automata lab. He’s more than willing to help. Only downside, it’s a shop for buying, selling, and repairing hookerbots, so every step is one closer to having to explain the birds and the bees to AnchoR. In the lab, they set RyuZU up to cool down for repairs. They aren’t able to wake Halter up, but they can get Vermouth into a new body so they can talk to him. Well, “him” is a bit off now. The body they found for him is one of those aforementioned hookerbots. The information in his head is still intact, even if his masculinity isn’t. This whole thing is a coup, attempting to pit the military against the government so that the two will tear each other apart, while those behind the Yatsukahagi take over. The giant weapon doesn’t have to even do anything to make that happen. It just has to be there, where people can see it, and the chaos comes raining down. Naoto also surmises that it isn’t moving because it is charging itself. Using its hybrid clockwork generators, it requires an additional sixty-six and a half hours before it can attack again.

So let’s go shopping! Really? Shopping? Now? And to top it off, Naoto is in drag, dressed in a skirt and cat-eared hood, with a matching wig. Did he lose a bet? Nope, this is just a disguise… Okay, I’ll give that to him. That isn’t a bad plan. When everyone is looking for a boy, be a girl. Especially if you’re young enough that nobody could tell the difference. He takes AnchoR out about town to give her all the fun she’s been denied while she was under the control of the bad guys, while Marie sulks and pouts about not having a plan. She’s mad that Naoto and AnchoR are so carefree. In actuality, he’s working hard on a plan, and in serious pain. Not only are his hands horribly burned from his overheating wife-bot, but his broken headphones left his sensitive ears in a vulnerable position. Marie’s yelling won’t help that. Sufficiently humbled by Naoto’s effort, she decides to go back and fix RyuZU at full force. She asks for his help, but he doesn’t have any technical knowledge to assist her. Everything he did to fix the Y-Series the first time was based on instinct and keen hearing. What he can do, however, is come up with the perfect plan. They are going to take the Tower of Heaven, central core of the Japanese multigrid. They’re already considered terrorists. If they pull this off and take credit for the Yatsukahagi, they can prevent the enemy from taking over the world!

I’m going to start with the technical aspects of this episode. Animation? Well, really, I think they devoted the animation budget to the scenes of the hookerbots doing pole dances. everything else here felt like it was just snapshots of people talking or getting photos taken. Near the end, the scene with Marie repairing RyuZU had pretty good animation… of CG gears flying into the air. No effort there, really. And the fact that they just slapped together into complex mechanisms with a flash effect doesn’t win it any points either. Voice acting? Not really. I felt like the actors were phoning it in a bit. Dallas Reid tried a bit harder than the rest of the cast as Naoto, and Monica Rial’s AnchoR is intentionally #cutepan, but Skyler McIntosh as Marie just felt like she had no motivation or feeling behind her voice. Many times, I had a hard time telling what was her dialogue, and what was her inner monologue. When she apologizes for her actions only as an internal monologue, you start to feel like the script was misread. Of course, there’s no real emotion behind the voice to be able to tell anyway.

I want to sit here and rail on all the illogicalities of this episode, all of the inconsistencies and out-of-character actions, all of the “that isn’t how reality works”, all of the “that isn’t how clockwork mechanisms work”. But I would be here all day. Suffice it to say that this episode shows off all of the problems of this series in one handy package. When in need of comedic material, it rushes to the gutter instead of actual comedy. It sacrifices plot and character development for more attempts at its brand of “comedy”. The entire universal concept is thrown out the window because the writers and directors don’t stop to consider the ramifications of that universe. For example, Marie asks Naoto to make a circuit board for RyuZU. But everything in this world is supposed to be clockwork. Further, a circuit board is an electromagnetic device, which they have stated is anathematic to the entire Clockwork Planet dealio. So why is it something he has to build for repairing a clockwork mechanism? It’s poorly written, lazily animated, and provides poor subject matter for otherwise talented voice actors to work with. And that’s a shame because the root concept isn’t a bad one. The political intrigue, the military conspiracies, hidden secrets of an extremely complicated machine planet? It’s a good concept, but it has been put in the hands of hormonal teenagers on “Fanfiction.net”. So yeah, I give this episode four dancing hookerbots out of ten, because it seems that’s all it cares about anyway.