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Clockwork Planet
Episode 8

by James Beckett,

How would you rate episode 8 of
Clockwork Planet ?
Community score: 3.0

This week on Clockwork Planet, the giant super-weapon that our heroes have been looking for finally makes its appearance. The Yatsukahagi is a giant spider-bot straight out of a PS1-era Final Fantasy game, a mechanized monster whose primary function is to bombard the city of Tokyo with electromagnetic attacks. Since the entire planet is made up of metal gears, this is obviously bad news for everything within the Yatsukahagi's blast radius, as all mechanisms are rendered functionally useless.

Not only are the buildings and machines rendered inoperable, but three-fifths of our core cast are down for the count as well. The two androids are unconscious for almost the entire episode, and even Halter is left immobile when his cybernetic parts go haywire. On the one hand, it's nice to have an imposing antagonist force in the story again, but on the other hand, a lot of this episode turns into watching Naoto and Marie sit around and think while a bunch of other ancillary characters yell at each other about the impending Magnet Apocalypse. Given that watching the five main characters play off one another is the most consistently decent part of Clockwork Planet, putting almost all of them out of commission for an entire episode doesn't bode well.

It's also a bad sign when the show tries to play with different subgenres of science fiction. This week, Clockwork Planet turns into a mini disaster film, constantly cutting between our protagonists on the ground level, bickering government agents, and the mysterious man that RyuZU and Naoto encountered in the deep underground, who seems to be controlling Yatsukahagi. The whole thing has Godzilla-esque overtones, especially the recent Shin Godzilla, which used the titular giant monster's rampage to political effect in a way we haven't seen a lot of since the original film premiered over sixty years ago. The problem is that when the Godzilla films do this, they're entertaining and thought-provoking, whereas Clockwork Planet's foray into the territory is mostly just boring.

The writing and direction just isn't up to the task of getting the audience invested in characters we hardly know fighting a monster that's only been an oversized MacGuffin until now. The scenes with the frantic government lack any tension or suspense, and the brief action beats we get of the military attacking the Yatsukahagi are too stiff and lifeless to be entertaining. So while I appreciate Clockwork Planet trying to create a more worldly political conflict, it's undone by the fact that I really struggle to care about Clockwork Planet's world and politics.

All of this puts the burden of entertainment on Marie and Naoto's shoulders, and the results are typically mixed. Marie spends the entire episode feeling bad for herself, which she seems to be doing a lot lately, despite it never being fun or interesting to watch. Naoto fares a little better, getting some time to demonstrate his devotion to his robotic companions, going so far as to badly burn himself attempting to move RyuZU's overheating body. This is typical Anime Hero stuff, showing how ceaselessly optimistic our protagonist even in the face of certain danger or bodily harm.

Unfortuanately, Clockwork Planet struggles to even get the clichés right. In the screencap above, you can see that Naoto didn't just burn his hands; they look positively mangled. Then the script manages to undercut its own cliché by showing that aNCHOR and RyuZU are actually fine, using internal heating mechanisms to override the magnetism that's harming them. When Marie realizes that Naoto knew this the entire time, and that he burned himself moving her to a colder floor that would help cool her down, she takes it as a sign of his heroic instincts guiding him down the right path.

But what all of this tells the audience is that Naoto is a pretty terrible main character. He's obnoxious, foolhardy, and prone to making really stupid decisions that he only survives thanks to arbitrary hand waving by the author. When he leapt into the inhospitable core of the planet, he only escaped by meeting The Mysterious Bearded Guy, and now he's able to overcome genuinely crippling injuries because the story has decided that nothing can overcome a boy's devotion to his robot maids.

Honestly, even when a giant robot is laying waste to the city, it still feels like the story is going nowhere. The script just keeps ambling along between lazily animated setpieces and boring exposition, stopping occasionally to enjoy some oversexualized shenanigans and lazy character development. Clockwork Planet isn't an awful show per se, but it is becoming more irritating by the week. Seeing as next episode seemingly has our characters ignore the impending destruction of Tokyo to go on a clothing shopping spree and parade the girls around in a bunch of pretty dresses, I have a feeling that things are going to get worse before they get better.

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.


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