Clockwork Planet

Episode 9

We begin this episode with the incredibly lame visual joke of Meister Konrad decked out like some kind of mid-2000s punk skater surrounded by groupies, and the rest of this episode is all downhill from there. I was worried about the prospect of sticking a “shopping spree episode” into the middle of what's essentially a kaiju attack on Tokyo, and it proved to be just as distracting and unnecessary as I feared. While the plot does technically move forward this week, the whole affair amounts to ten minutes of exposition stretched out with meandering padding to fill an entire episode.

Marie says it herself as she reluctantly joins Naoto and AnchoR on their shopping trip: “We don't have time for this.” They've just used the body of a sex robot to revive the severed head of a dying cyborg (which is a sentence I never thought I'd have to write), and that cyborg revealed that the whole purpose of the Yatsukahagi attack isn't just to cause mass destruction and chaos – it's a full-blown coup d'état. The government is in a frenzy trying to maintain damage control and cover up the existence of their electromagnetic research, and the Prime Minister is considering using the Tall Wand, a space-borne weapon of mass destruction, as a last resort. The resulting cataclysm and fallout would result in the destruction of the current status quo, which basically means everything is going completely to hell if Naoto, Marie, and the others can't find some sort of solution within about sixty-seven hours.

The first arc of the show dealt with a fairly effective ticking-clock scenario, so you would figure this is old hat for Clockwork Planet, but Naoto decides that the best course of action is to take AnchoR shopping, so she can experience everything she's missed out on for the past thousand years. Never mind that this is a monumentally silly decision to make in the middle of the worst crisis this planet has seen since it blew up the first time around, but this is just plain awful plotting. Of all the things that would maintain dramatic tension and keep the story moving forward, having your supposed hero just shrug off his responsibilities and completely ignore the problem may be the absolute worst option. Not only was this a boring episode of television, it was irritatingly boring, because every minute it spent goofing around is another minute the audience spends wondering when something important is going to happen.

The episode doesn't even work as character-building, because all of Clockwork Planet's characters are so firmly rooted in their clichés that I don't think there's any way for the show to develop them even if it wanted to. Marie is the headstrong girl of action, and Naoto is the insufferably optimistic protagonist who always seems to come up with a brilliant plan at the last minute (even though all his plans are nonsense). AnchoR is the unbearably moe maid girl, and RyuZU is the slightly-more-tsundere-but-still-moe maid girl, though she's been in a coma the past couple of episodes, so she doesn't have much to do either. There isn't any dynamic here that we haven't seen done a thousand times before, so everything feels tired and predictable. When an episode lacks any kind of action or interesting direction, it's up to the characters to carry the burden of entertainment. That unfortunately doesn't happen for Clockwork Planet.

The only saving grace of this episode is the ending, which finally seems to be righting the ship and steering the series in a slightly more interesting direction. Naoto's decision to embrace the role of antihero terrorist group feels a bit out of character, like a blatant rip-off of multiple Final Fantasy plots, but at the very least it will give our cast something to do. The only thing left to worry about is how the show will execute this final arc. If the last nine weeks have proven anything, it's that Clockwork Planet often struggles to realize even its most modest and uninspired of ambitions.

Rating: C-

Clockwork Planet is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

James is an English teacher who has loved anime his entire life, and he spends way too much time on Twitter and his blog.