Dimension W

Episode 12

At the end of the previous episode, Haruka Seameyer sent over a Cthulhu-fied version of Loser's wife in order to mess with everyone. This makes Loser mad, so he (using the five Numbered Coils) opens up his own portal to wherever Seameyer is. Using his robot hand, Loser grabs Seameyer through the portal and tries to drag him through. However, Seameyer distracts Loser by making Cthulhu-wife do that thing from the episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion where the Angel infects Rei and makes weird tentacle clones of her. Loser falls for the clay monstrosity bearing his wife's visage, which puts him out of the fight, allowing Seameyer to (for some reason) start going all Tetsuo from Akira and yell that Kyouma is next, mwahaha.

Kyouma's standing around somewhere underground. He's busy rejecting the hero's call, whining about how he's useless and can't do anything because his wife and friends died. Eventually, Mira tells him to get over himself on the grounds that she (as the person “born” when Kyouma's wife died) has a stake in this situation too. That's enough to guilt him into action, so Mira recovers his missing memories by doing some robot things.

It turns out that Kyouma's wife died at the exact same time as the Andrastea Plant crisis by sheer coincidence. The experiment was botched because souls don't want to leave bodies or something. Kyouma saw this because he happened to be holding the Genesis Coil, which sent him on a soul-journey to see her while she died. He returns to the real world, where Loser gives them the information to stop Seameyer by blowing up a fault line on the island. Meanwhile, Mira is running away because she's about to explode. I guess messing with Kyouma's brain was a big drain on her coil? Seameyer finds her, and she decides to take him out with her. Right at that moment, however, Kyouma arrives to save the day. He reveals that he destroyed the Genesis Coil at his wife's insistence, so Seameyer's escape route doesn't exist. He's trapped in deep space forever! I hope he likes drinking his own pee! This makes Seameyer really go Tetsuo. Our heroes manage to take him out with some teamwork: Lwai holds him down with cables, while Kyouma throws a needle (powered by one of Loser's coils) to kill him. Seameyer dies, the dimensional rift is destroyed, and Easter Island returns to normal.

In the epilogue, Loser also dies from his extensive injuries, Salva attends a business meeting, and Kyouma continues his work as a coil repo man – alongside Mira this time. Everyone's happy, except for Elizabeth, who is now an orphan. The end.

Overall, Dimension W started out promising, stood on shaky ground until about episode five, and then threw itself off of a cliff. Things bottomed out with Seameyer's introduction, and this final episode is about on par with the series' recent quality. This is especially unfortunate, since a more successful show would've been quite the boon to US anime fans. It's an experimental co-production by Funimation, making it an anime made specifically with a Western audience in mind. And while they did a good job with the general style that might attract an audience (rough poppy sci-fi ala Outlaw Star), they dropped the ball on what keeps people interested – a good story and characters. The Toonami run is only up to the fifth or sixth episode, so we'll see how the ratings do. While I personally cannot vouch for Dimension W, I'd still be happy if it were embraced by a general public. These types of co-productions have given us good stuff before, like The Big O, that wouldn't otherwise have gotten made. I'd sit through some duds for that.

While there's little that Dimension W does right overall, here's a summary of its most overwhelming problems:

1. None of the characters received any development. Kyouma was nasty toward Mira until the end, when I guess he just magically started liking her. Mira, meanwhile, remained doe-eyed and compliant throughout all this mistreatment. What little development we do get amounted to a bunch of bargain-bin clichés. Both Kyouma and Loser have tragically dead girlfriends who they yearn to resurrect. Mira tells Kyouma to get over it and he does. Yawn.

2. The Isla characters ended up being totally worthless. They hogged two or three episodes worth of screen time (particularly Salva), but in the end, all they really contributed to the story was a reason for everyone to be on Easter Island. The show could have easily been rewritten to exclude them and spend time on that woefully absent character development.

3. Dimwub as “alternate possibilities/timelines/dimensions” is totally discarded by the end, where it becomes some New Age-y magical memories thing. In the beginning, Dimwub was a neat sci-fi concept with a lot of interesting thematic potential, both for social commentary (with the energy angle) and general aspects of the human experience (how we relate to “the path not taken”). By the end, it was just gobbledygook.

4. Haruka Seameyer is a terrible villain to the point where I felt embarrassed every time he was onscreen. His character is just the most cliché mad scientist possible (he was driven mad by scientific curiosity of course!) wrapped up in a hideous jacket. Yūki Kaji's performance is extremely irritating, although I'm sure he was directed to just mug his face off. To see him play a similarly over-the-top character well, check out One-Punch Man's Speed-of-Sound Sonic. You can even pull up that clip of Sonic getting punched in the nuts, close your eyes, and pretend it's Seameyer for some quick stress relief. It worked for me!

5. The production values also did not hold out until the end. The direction was always questionable (Kanta Kamei does not know his way around an action scene), but that didn't need to be as big a problem as it became. The initial character designs (Kyouma and Mira) were cool, but as new major characters were introduced, the design work only got worse – bottoming out, of course, with Seameyer. The animation and art design were slickest during the haunted hotel arc, where there were some genuinely inspired sequences. The Easter Island arc, however, rapidly turned into a morass of stills and dull grey landscapes. Once again, wasted potential.

I'm grateful that Dimension W made Mira into Kyouma's symbolic daughter rather than the reincarnation of his wife. That would have been creepy. Other than that, there is very little that I can give the show in terms of praise. It may seem like I'm being unduly tough on Dimension W, but that's because three months ago, it looked like it might be one of the season's standouts. Now it's near the very bottom for me. By contrast, something like Girls Beyond the Wasteland (which I also covered) might be worse overall than Dimension W, but that's okay because my expectations were tempered from the very beginning. Girls Beyond the Wasteland is a bad show, but it was consistent in quality, so I was able to adjust my expectations and, eventually, find moments of good in it. But Dimension W entered complete free-fall at about the mid-point. Each episode had me grappling with a new bundle of bad decisions, and I never had time to catch my breath.

Dimension W turned out to be a profoundly disappointing experience. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to watch something else to take my mind off it. Blegh.

Grade: C-

Dimension W is currently streaming on Funimation.

Gabriella Ekens studies film and literature at a US university. Follow her on twitter.