Clockwork Planet

Episode 4

The more Clockwork Planet delves into its own premise, the more questions I end up left with. In the last review, I mentioned that the whole concept of a planet being made of clockwork is ridiculous, so you have to be able to accept that fact to enjoy the show. But interestingly enough, so much of the plot is about the very illogic of an entire planet being made up of gears. What happens when parts start breaking down? Is it easier to commit to fixing every minute detail, or does the inevitable death of the planet's machine works mean the sacrifice of an entire city, not to mention millions of lives? These are interesting questions, but answering them requires the finesse of, well, a clockmaker, and Clockwork Planet doesn't seem to have that finesse so far.

It just isn't very interesting watching characters perform maintenance for most of an episode; without exceptionally skilled production work, there's only so much drama that can be wrung out of our heroes going around and finding tiny screws to turn. It's a little fun seeing the creative and odd mechanical solutions that a culture based entirely around this sort of thing might produce, such as Marie's little screwdriver spiders, but I still find the bigger questions surrounding this story distracting. If this planet is made up of trillions of gears, wouldn't they be breaking down all over the world, every minute of every day? I get that they're magic gears, but still, if a small handful of misaligned cogs and loose screws are enough to warrant an entire task force, plus the aid of a gear-otaku with super hearing, I can't imagine how this place could stay up and running for any period of time. I'm trying to suspend my disbelief, but when over half the episode is devoted to fairly bland montages of flying through gear labyrinths to find even smaller gears that need to be fixed, I'm going to start asking questions.

It also doesn't help that this week was fairly light on plot, essentially dividing its time between the crew trying to fix mechanical problems and holding off the government forces while they use RyuZU's heart to reverse the polarity (or something) and keep Kyoto from falling into the planet's core. The animation hasn't improved at all, and the government villains are as lacking in menace and personality as can be, so even though the show tried to move me to tears with RyuZU's potential sacrifice, I couldn't help but wonder about how Naoto's hearing actually works. If it's sensitive enough to hear the tiniest of problems among literally thousands of moving parts, shouldn't every normal sound around him cause unbearable pain or at least distraction? Even with his noise-canceling headphones, I can't help but feel like the world around him must feel like nothing but a cacophony of terror and incomprehensible nonsense. How did he even get this power, anyway? Is it an innate ability? A magical gift? Did he clean his ears with cotton swabs coated in radioactive waste?

I'm sorry for getting distracted again, but the episode itself doesn't give me much of anything else to talk about. Some gears get fixed, Halter destroys a couple of robots, RyuZU's heart prevents the purge, the city is saved, and everyone is pretty happy about that. If this is ostensibly the end of the show's first arc, it's a bit anticlimactic – the villains and conflict have yet to be fleshed out, the character relationships remain pretty static, and RyuZU and Naoto's relationship is devoid of any real emotional weight or growth outside of slight cuteness. Visually, Clockwork Planet remains a little on the ugly side, though not what I'd call outright unpleasant to look at, just definitely lacking in execution. We're only a third of the way through the season, so there's every chance that the show will actually develop its setting and central conflicts in a manner that gives the characters more to do outside of fix things or blow things up. We'll just have to see how it goes.

Rating: C-

Clockwork Planet is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

James will probably never get over the fact that gears and sprockets are literally the worst imaginable material to build a planet out of. You can find him on Twitter and his blog.