Welcome all, to an incredibly late double feature of Dr. STONE! I have no excuses, I just sort of forgot to watch last weeks. I’m sorry. But you don’t pay me so you aren’t my boss, so take that! Jokes aside, I do apologize for the delay on this. As the only writer left on this site, I have to keep the legacy going. So let’s get back on schedule!
Now before we get to deep into the episodes I want to start with my major apprehension about the season. What these two episodes opened my eyes to is just how much content there is in this arc and just how much Dr. STONE will have to cover this season. Not only do we have to do all this prep-work to get to the island, we then have the entire island story itself. With a short 11 episode season, so only 6 episodes left, I just don’t see how Dr. STONE can cover all of that. Which means that, more then likely, we’re going to get a cliff-hanger ending right as the main conflict starts. Will that end up fine in the long run after all the seasons are out and you can jump straight to the next one? Probably, sure. But in the now? I’m concerned.
Getting into the episodes proper, first up is episode 4, “Eye of Science”. This was, by and large, as prep episode. You could say that all Dr. STONE episodes are prep episodes, it’s the nature of the show, but this one especially fell into that. Building a minecart, laying down roads, establishing a transportation network, etc etc. This episode felt like when you get to that stage in Factorio or some other civilization building game where you aren’t big enough to do the cool shit, but you’ve accomplished all the little shit, so you have to start transitioning. Is it necessary? Do I like that Dr. STONE is establishing that all of this was done? Is the constant reuse of technology in new and interesting ways kind cool? All yes! But it’s not the most exciting content for an episode.
That said, even episodes like this have standout moments. The first of which was Chrome. I love Chrome, his place as the “Caveman” of the group is just perfect. He exists to show how just because civilization fell, the inquisitive nature of humanity is eternal. You don’t need to be “modern” to understand this stuff, the people of the past aren’t “superior”. Chrome is just as skilled, intelligent and intuitive as the rest of them. He just didn’t have the benefit of a modern existence/education system. And we see that this week as he, completely on his own and separate from Senku, creates a metal detector to find an iron vein. He shows us exactly why he’s one of the “5 Wise Generals”, along with 4 people from the modern era. Dudes smart!
Speaking of the “5 Wise Generals”, lets sidetrack for a bit. This is basically Dr. STONE laying out our 5 most important characters: Senku (Duh), Ryusui, Gen, Ukyo and Chrome. Each of them have their own specializations, but together they basically run the Kingdom of Science. On the surface, this makes sense. All of them are pretty smart. But what I never got was how they sort of just… ignore the decision making input of the Power Team/villagers? Like surely someone like Taiju would be able to contribute on how much they could actually get done. Or Kaseki would be able to contribute on just how realistic some of their craft ideas are. I feel like it’s a missed opportunity for a more diverse leadership. That said, I like all these characters, so it’s not a big deal.
The other great bit for me was the ending. Ryusui is slowly growing on me, I’m really starting to get into his whole “Empire Building” business, which episode 5 expands on. I especially love the continued use of the old style photographs. They simultaneously make for cool inserts as well as being in-universe historical recordings. That combination just feels really cool to me, with the in-universe justification lending it an extra bit of meaning these sorts of inserts usually don’t have. This continues into episode 5, giving them even more meaning, and I really like that. That emotional connection is something Dr. STONE has always been really good at, and that continues here.
Moving on we come to episode 5, “Science Ship Perseus”. This episode is sort of the capstone of this preparatory arc. The ship is finally finished, they set sail, all that jazz. So it makes sense that the star of the episode is ship’s captain himself, Ryusui. And you know what? This episode actually helped me come around on him a decent bit. I mentioned a few episodes ago that I found his “Greed is Justice” shtick to be a bit naïve. But this episode shows that while Ryusui is greedy, he isn’t entitled. He works for what he wants, and expects others to do the same. He invests, he works hard, he experiments. He’s this idea that money alone does not fill the soul, you still have this human drive to create and explore. It makes him a lot more likeable, I feel.
As for the episode itself, there was a lot of cool engineering. Using lathes to make bigger, fancier lathes. That big pantograph thing for scaling up sketches larger and larger. The explanations about Nazca lines, or Ryusui’s hobby of model ship making translating to the bigger ship. It was all just really cool. Dr. STONE once again is showing us how each piece of technology leads to the next. How the original tools never become useless, they just need to be improved to be able to do more stuff. More then that though, it also shows us how these things can be used to improve our daily lives rather then just another notch on the tech tree. Chocolate, vanilla, silk clothing, snowboards, etc etc. They’ve reached a stage where they can start to add some leisure into it all.
Cooler then that though was the timeskip. It’s very rare for an anime to use a timeskip well. Many are just standard training “powerups”. They lifted weights for a few months, come back jacked with some new powers, done deal. But hereDr. STONE’s felt like it made a lot more sense. Science takes time. In fact speed running the tech tree as fast as they have has often felt like the most unrealistic, crazy part of the series. So when things slow down and they spend a year building a galleon, complete with all the technology required for the ship, it just feels… natural. Maybe that’s a silly feeling to have, I don’t know. But Dr. STONE’s timeskip felt good to me like few others have, complete with the journalist girl taking photos the entire way through and cataloging their time together.
And actually, on the topic of the journalist girl, this was a really poignant story beat for me. Not just her love of taking photos and using it to catalog the passage of time/recording history in a way few shounen ever really explore, but in her feelings of separation as well. The knowledge that they may never see each other again as they set sail across the world, splitting up for who knows how many years. Dr. STONE has already established that it’s willing to skip a year to build a ship. Why can’t it do the same when actually sailing across the ocean? It just made for an effective way to end the episode in my eyes, and one I really appreciated. Plus all the photos on the wall were cute.
So yeah, all in all these were a good pair of episodes. “Science Ship Perseus” was definitely the better of the two, finally moving us forward after a couple episodes of prep, but both still retained that “heart” that Dr. STONE is known for. Hopefully now that we are out at sea and on our way to Treasure Island though we can start to get a bit more conflict mixed into the narrative. Not combative combat of course, Season 2 made it very clear that Dr. STONE doesn’t do the best with action/fighting. But that doesn’t mean we can’t have some kind of threat. Just that the solution for it needs to be based in science rather then action. Whatever the case, I’m excited.
I’m still here (albeit semi-dormant at the moment) ^_^
I bet they’re going to do a cliff hanger then another longer OVA. I agree with you on the overall plot, Ryusui is becoming a great character – I think “ambition” is the word they’re looking for instead of “greed”.
I was kind of thinking before the journalist said it, that this voyage has high likelihood of causalities, and everyone is just being quite nonchalant about it – good on her for bringing the magnitude of the risk home.
The one thing that I don’t love is that all the characters would have died many times over from all their escapades. The mine carts jumping the rails? Dead straight-away. Pouring asphalt (-ish, it’s more like an oil and chip road, I think?) with just cloths over their faces? Dead in a few years. Chrome grabbing an electromagnet with his bare hands that uses unregulated, crude batteries? Probably dead or at least in great pain. Flying a hot air balloon above a cumulonimbus in a lightning storm without a lightning arrest system? Immediately dead. So it’s a good story, and it’s all good fun, but I just have to wince at some of the suspension of disbelief that has to occur for their survival. (I’m not even going to comment on the ammonia that they’re just casually using everywhere).
Still one of the best shows this season.
I mean, fair. They would have. But this is also anime. People would die from 90% of the gags and shit they do. That doesn’t bother me. Were this a serious character drama that tries to be super realistic like My Home Hero, that might matter? But it’s a science action shounen so… It doesn’t bother me at all. It’s exaggerated for effect. And even then it’s still an impressive amount of generally correct science.