Christina has some terrible naming sense. They had a list of pretty decent names— Nostalgia Mail, the Mail that Leapt through Time, DeLorean mail— and she decides to go with D-mail. Shorter is not necessarily better. But naming sense aside, the dialogue in this show continues to be top notch. It just flows really smoothly, in spite / because of Okarin’s ridiculous comments.

We get another beautiful evil laugh from Okarin as well. His voice actor deserves an award for this. I still can’t believe it’s the same guy who did Setsuna F. Seiei, my least favorite character of all time. I guess it goes to show that voice acting isn’t everything.

Now for the conspiracy theories. I’m wondering if Moeka Kiryuu (cellphone girl) is John Titor. She is looking for the IBN 5100 after all, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she posted on message boards. Seems a bit too obvious but you never know. Suzuha (CRT girl) also seems to be from the future, but I can’t really see her as being John Titor. She doesn’t appear to care about the IBN 5100 and seems too genuinely horrified about Christina. Perhaps Okarin actually succeeds at time travel and Christina does something using it, and Suzuha was sent to prevent it.

Moeka gives me a bad feeling though, since she appears to know more than they do about time travel, asking about the FB. It kind of makes you wonder if she is with CERN (or has some other evil intentions). Although I doubt CERN would need to look for an IBN 5100… perhaps she wants to stop CERN but to go to some other extreme in controlling the future. Overall the conspiracy is continuing to develop nicely, but is being set on the backburner to the great dialogue and character development.

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.

Ookarin’s banter continues to carry this show. This show has a great script.

I was questioning all of the new female characters in Okarin’s harem that were introduced in the last episodes, but they’re slowly starting to grow on me. This episode was Feiris-tan’s chance to shine. At first she seemed like a completely worthless character added as an afterthought to so they could have a girl in a maid uniform and cat ears, but this episode proved that this wasn’t true (well, at least not entirely). Her back and forth with Okarin is great, almost to the level of Christina.

Hououin’s rant about how the world has room for only one mad scientist was beyond awesome. At last we have someone who is honest about his own motivations for saving the world. 🙂

If Stein’s; Gate can avoid Chaos Head’s path of stereotypical final boss fights and characters of dwindling interest, it’s going to end up as a great conspiracy show. It does need more work on the side characters, and the mystery didn’t advance much this episode, but I feel that it’s getting there.

Steins; Gate really stands out for its great dialogue. The exchanges between Okarin and Christina, and the computer guy in this episode were especially fantastic. I could just watch an entire show just about them fighting with each other. They can all push each other’s buttons just right.

However, the second half of the episode was rather disappointing. Way too much technobabble. Time travelling microwaves are only going to make less sense the more you try to explain them. Just allow your viewers to suspend their sense of disbelief instead of trying to explain why time travelling microwaves work. The more you try to explain it, the harder it is to ignore.

The same thing is true about the hacking, although the SQL injection is an improvement over the usual hacking by 3D space shooter. Still, it would be nice to portray CERN as somewhat competent if they are supposed to be the big bad guy. And the ending creepy email message, “Human is Dead”, was just kind of pathetic more than foreboding or worrisome. I’m guessing that it would sound more intimidating if English isn’t your first language.

Next episode it seems that Okarin may meet John Titor, and I’m curious to see who this is. It doesn’t make any sense why people from the future would need an old IBM machine— hopefully they won’t bother trying to explain this too.

Steins; Gate has a great chemistry between the characters and makes great use of it, but is getting too wrapped up in the details of its pseudoscience. Trying to explain illogical things like this only serves to take the mystery out of it and point out to the viewer that it doesn’t make any sense. I personally enjoy watching shows about conspiracy theories because they’re confusing and mysterious and fun to speculate about, not because I like to have them explained to me.

On an administrative note: I will be traveling this weekend starting Thursday, so the site probably won’t be updated until Monday. I’ll be trying to catch up for what I’ve missed early next week.

In this episode we’re introduced to Okabe’s surprisingly large harem as the mystery deepens. Okabe remembers more things that the rest of the world has forgotten, and a banana teleports from the microwave. The biggest mystery though is why our main character is so popular.

Okabe is a great character. I really can’t see him getting boring even after two seasons. Makise also seems like she’ll be a great character based on her bullying of Hououin at the lecture. That beginning scene was great. But in this episode we’ve met a ton of new characters that seem rather lame by comparison. We have Mayuri and her friend at the maid cafe, corn girl, cell phone girl, and shrine maiden girl guy. They all seem rather generic. Of course, this is only the second episode, so hopefully I’ll be proved wrong. But since the story is by the same people who made Chaos Head, well, I would say I’m not too optimistic.

But if Okabe remains the driving force behind the show it can still turn out well. Take the scene with the shrine maiden guy— tons of shows have crossdressers like this. Usually everyone only finds out by accident and surprise / horror / hilarity ensues. Except this variety has gotten rather old. Here all the characters are aware of it, but Okabe says in his cynical monologue that it’s a guy after every line. It was Okabe that made this scene work. Okabe’s voice actor, Mamoru Miyano, is doing an amazing job. It’s hard to believe he was also the voice actor for my least favorite character of all time, Setsuna F. Seiei. (Although to be fair, my issue with Setsuna F. Seiei is not his voice, but everything else).