Looking back on this season, I really have to say that its big strength is storytelling: showing interesting stories, and deliver them well, ranging from the wonderful pacing of Ano Hana, the impeccable timing and dialogue of Hyouge Mono, the great ideas of Tiger & Bunny and C, the outrageous Deadman Wonderland and Kaiji, the action-packed X-Men, the really well detailed Hana-Saku Iroha, and of course Stein’s Gate with its excellent delivery of its plot twists and atmosphere.
This episode took a step away from this focus in order to focus on one of the main characters, Christina, and show her background. At least, or so I thought until Okabe got that phone message out of nowhere, followed by a very artistic and stunning piece of animation about him running back. Seriously. That was good. That’s how these artistic animation bits should be used: instead of random clutter they bring out even more out of the characters than what conventional animation would be able to do.
Really, the ideas of this series rock. It’s also the way it gradually became clear at the end that Cern (I still refuse to call it Sern) pretty much let themselves get hacked (probably using its data as bait in order to find out about the microwave). I also like how this show is being really vague on who exactly is from Cern, and whether or not that mysterious message sent to Okabe was from one of them. Also, did Okabe check the number where it came from? It didn’t look like it came from anyone he knew, or there must be characters in this show using multiple cell phones.
As for the annoying parts in this episode, I’m not going to list the “accidentally walking in the shower”-scene because it was well built up for once. It’s just about the most terrible twist you can pull right now, but at the very least I am glad that at least the creators put some meaning behind it as an anti-climax. Seriously, this is more than just about any other show that pulled this crap during the past number of years. Instead, what annoyed me about this episode was the point where the characters started talking in various internet memes I didn’t understand up to the pint where the dialogue became hard to follow due to all of the random rambling.
Rating: ** (Excellent)
So I suppose that with this episode the introductory part finally ends… Next week hell is gonna break loose.
Next week’s episode is going to explode the internet… 🙂
as for memes – the point is very basic, Makise’s hobby seems to be 2chan, which is very well known as basic chaotic gathering of internet consciousness full of stuff ranging from very obscene material to complete nonsense.
All Your base are belong to us is mostly the MOST famous meme in the world and it actually started quite a long time ago(20? 30? years)
What I think is interesting is that it is still good character development.
Okarin understands her. Let’s face it a generic scientific community would never know what 2ch is. And here she has a person who is quite obsessed with science and yet, at the same time, is not disconnected from the world and not just from the world, but from the world she longs for and is in. Someone she can relate to.
Its quite interesting to note that each of those interactions almost always lead to Makise opening up to Okabe a little bit more.
I love Christina (haha), she is pretty much a tsundere done right… Its just so cute how she is obviously falling in love with Okarin but has trouble admitting it (but doesnt outright deny either)
I expect great things for the 2nd half
Okay, let’s see… Who: Has Okabe’s cellphone #? Is very suspicious? Was after the IBN computer?
No spoilers here folks. But it was pretty obvious to me who the spy was.
@UnknownVoice
i’m pretty sure that the “generic” scientific community is aware of them, i’d go as far as to say that a lot of them used it during their uni yrs
Huh, strange, I never considered Moeka to be the spy, but it certainly seems likely now that you think about it. She’s been elusive all this tim and was shocked when she heard about the transplanting of memories into electronic data.
Also interesting though, is Suzuha’s knowledge of a lot of the going-ons at the moment. She knows a lot more than she’s letting on and that basically fuels the theory that she’s a time traveler.
@passingby
And just how many of the hardboiled scientists you know who are still using it? 🙂
Regarding the threatening message. It is an email he receives (at least the “from” is an email address. I was a bit frustrated that Okabe isn’t sharing the fact that he received the threatening emails, because Daru might have helped him trace the sender by looking into that address (although I think it was a Gmail-like address).
@psgels
I’m really wondering that you so often don’t get or don’t know some of the most obvious things (like akiba, 2chan or that japanese cellphones have numbers AND email addresses), despite watching so many anime.
Watching anime is my hobby and this episode is currently being watched.
2ch (2channel) ≠2chan (Futaba channel, the image board) though.
What an amazing episode! Next week might be when the show starts to get serious.
I heartily concur with Animevo. And especially Frost.
Christiiiiiiiiii~na da (!)