Steins; Gate 05 — Hououin Makes Girls Cry

This episode had some plot development, but was mostly an opportunity to further develop the relationship between Hououin and Christina. I can appreciate that decision, since the two of them are just so much fun to watch together. My favorite moment was their posing in lab coats. A pose of radiant intelligence indeed! Hououin also has an amazing evil laugh, the best I’ve seen since Lelouch. His reaction to CERN’s conspiracy is equally awesome: instead of stopping their plot to change the future, he wants to beat them to it.

It seems that Christina had some issues with her father in the past, but for once they don’t beat us over the head with it but have it revealed through Hououin’s aggressiveness. The show’s characterization so far has been great — even the CRT store girl is becoming interesting. The only exception seems to be Mayuri, whose main role is to act cute. She’s probably batshit insane, but not in a very interesting way compared to the rest of the characters. Hopefully she will have a chance to develop soon.

The mystery further deepens as we learn that Christina and CRT girl will become enemies in the future. One question is what Christina will do, but for me the more pressing question is how does CRT girl know this? Is she from the future (perhaps John Titor)? She did just recently appear at the shop and seems to know about the IBN 5100. The more likely candidate for John Titor is the cell phone girl though. I should mention that if this show ever ends up having any action scenes, it’s going to be awesome. Just seeing CRT girl jump back and crouch was intense. Imagine what they’ll do with a full blown fight.

Although Steins; Gate has overall done an excellent job at building a conspiracy based on “history” and good pseudoscience, there were a few gaping inconsistencies in this episode. First of all: our favorite super hacker is copying a JPEG file from the IBN 5100. The JPEG spec was invented long after 1972. Besides, the IBN 5100 displays characters, not pixels. Is CERN supposed to be looking at the JPEGs converted to ASCII art? Second, Christina claims that the humans become squeezed out like a sponge because they’re compressing 10-21 grams into 10-19 meters (according to the translation I have). Let’s assume she means cubic meters and that they aren’t converting matter into a single dimension, since that probably would squeeze some stuff out. Then the process is achieving a density of one hundredth of a gram per cubic meter. The density of air is about 1 kg /m3. So the density that’s squeezing everything out of the matter is a whopping 10-5 times the density of air.

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