What They Say:
Okabe gets a call: Titor’s father has been found. They are reunited, and the time machine repair is finished. Titor promises to get them the IBN5100, and tells them it will be delivered to them in the present. When they get back, there’s a knock at the door…
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
While the end of each episode of Steins; Gate may feel like it’s filled with promise and potential, tension and more, the start of each episode tends to be more relaxed and conversational. The previous episode ended with the feeling of progress with revelations and the like while this one opens with an attempt to find Suzuha’s father, the elder Titor. While that goes in a rather roundabout way as they look for a barrel or balloon man based on what they’re getting on the street, Daru is hard at work on the time machine trying to get it fixed. And what helps fix a time machine? Daru filled with ice cold Coke Zero. Ah, product placement in anime. Sometimes we don’t notice it much, other times it’s just so there. Still, it’s an amusingly blunt segue to handle that particular answer and it gets a really good scene later in the episode.
Steins; Gate does have an interesting area to play in while Daru does his work though. In conversations with Suzuha, they have to deal with the fact that she can only travel back in time and when she leaves, it’ll be goodbye in essence and there has to be some sadness associated with it. Considering what they have to do, it’s a given that she has to go through with it to try and fix everything and make it right. But at the same time, she has bonded pretty well with everyone in a general sense and especially since the revelations about who she really is. As we’ve seen from the start, the various members of the Future Gadgets Lab have been fairly diverse in their own way, all loners to some extent as well, but they’ve come together through this project and have become very close friends.
With time travel being the main focus here, along with divergent realities, when it does tackle these kinds of issues with the actual time travel, you can’t help but to get into the fun of it all. Suzuha’s time leap in the machine she crashed into the area with, to go back in time to find the IBN5100 for the group, leads to some great anticipation as they hope to see her again, though she’d be in her 50′s and arriving with the device. The reality of the situation is far different though, and her pained letter to them, explaining what happened, is definitely properly emotional and filled with regret and sadness. There’s definitely some real questions to ask here, choices to be made even though Suzuha made herself clear, but it’s very well handled. The consequences of time travel, the emotional stress of it all, the inability to fix things or to make the right changes, it can be too much for someone. Seeing Suzuha go through this and then the fallout in the present again, is definitely one of the best scenes of the series so far.
In Summary:
Steins; Gate continues to be the kind of series that can really work you over when it comes to how the characters have to go through things in order to try and fix the divergence. Suzuha’s story here brings together a lot of things and is instrumental to how the timeline has arrived at this point, and how it can change everything if Okabe does try to go back to fix everything. There’s painful choices made across the board here, and while the focus is only on a small part of the Future Gadgets Lab group, the pain is felt across all of them when the realize the truth of the matter, though it hurts some more than others. Definitely an excellent episode and another one that really plays with the time travel aspect in solid and interesting ways.
Grade: A-
Simulcast By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDS-R70XBR2 70″ LCoS 1080P HDTV, Dell 10.1 Netbook via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
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