Dr. STONE SCIENCE FUTURE

Episodes 25-27

With barely a moment to catch its breath, Dr. Stone: Science Future's third cour launches at rocket-propelled pace into the stratosphere, cramming an unbelievable number of new developments into its compact runtime. Last season ended with tiny melon-head Suika spending several years alone in the Amazon rainforest, working her little butt off to save her petrified friends. Upon doing so, Senku takes charge once again and, surprisingly, revives his arch-rival Dr. Xeno, only to team up with him to tackle a common goal. What goal? To conquer the moon, of course!

Escaping Earth's gravity well and surviving the journey through the vacuum of space isn't exactly easy, so Senku and Xeno have their work cut out for them. Just as well then that the Amazon Basin is rich in mineral deposits easy enough to locate with a homemade Geiger counter, “even a middle schooler could build”. Um… ok? My middle-school-aged son barely has the attention span to build Lego models unprompted. Perhaps he's not a great example.

All previous antipathy resolved, Xeno and Senku now collaborate, though each with very separate roles. Xeno's busy working himself up into a frenzy building skull-shaped material refinery plants that produce horrifically poisonous gases, while Senku gets to work using explosives to create spherical fuel tanks to fill with poop-derived petrochemical substitute.

They're both like little kids playing with new toys, and their enthusiasm for the exciting new metal alloys they create is infectious. Who knew stainless steel was so intoxicatingly awesome? I'll never look at my cutlery in the same way again. All of this metallurgy culminates in the fabrication of a brutally powerful rocket engine and an implausibly modern-looking new version of the Perseus ship. Apparently, this shiny new metal vehicle can propel its crew across the entire Atlantic Ocean within seven days, as opposed to the forty days its predecessor took to traverse the Pacific. At this juncture, the non-petrified members of the Kingdom of Science split into three complementary teams, though I'm unsure of the wisdom of leaving Xeno to his own devices, with some of his old pals, and only Ginro to keep an eye on him.

Dr. Stone's always so bright, breezy, and full of life that it's easy to forgive its more exotic flights of fancy. I'm not sure the pace has always been quite so hyperactive as this inaugural episode (it takes until nine minutes for the new opening sequence to a great new tune by Asian Kung Fu Generation to even begin), yet it's so much fun I'll forgive it. It's also nice that the show debuts with a release-day dub, which, as always, is excellent.

However, Crunchyroll continues to neglect translating any on-screen text in the English dub, which is actively detrimental to multiple on-screen jokes and essential clarification material. This is a science-based show, with diagrams and labels. It's almost unwatchable without adequate translation. I gave up within moments and switched to the sub. This seems like a massive oversight, likely caused by the limitations of the awful closed captioning software Crunchyroll uses for its dubs, rather than the far superior subtitling. For this reason, I'll likely stick to the sub for the rest of the season too.

Episode two maintains a brisk pace with the Perseus making a brief stopoff in Spain for Senku and friends to mine for heat-fluorescing mineral fluorite (essential component for space-age technology, apparently). Along the way, they randomly wake up some indigenous Spaniards, build them some straw huts, and feed them cold-pressed and centrifuged olive oil-drenched seafood before Ryusui entertains them with an impromptu bullfighting display. It's incredibly random in that adorably kooky Dr. Stone kind of way.

Then, of course, Ryusui reintroduces the concept of cold, hard cash (in this case coins made of actual precious metals) to this embryonic neo-Spanish civilization, lest we forget that author Riichirō Inagaki is also responsible for the capitalism-worshiping Trillion Game. I'll interpret Ryusui's role here as a necessary evil, since human beings tend to become more motivated by the promise of a reward, and the stone-world people need all the motivation they can muster to rebuild modern society.

The second half of the episode provides some unintentionally timely geopolitical commentary with a U.S.-built (Dr. Xeno) rocket destroying a large piece of Middle Eastern infrastructure (a naturally occurring debris dam across the inexplicably still patent Suez Canal). With this artificial strait cleared by the might of TNT and a remotely-guided missile, it's once again cleared for worldwide shipping travel. Economists (Ryusui) of the Stone World rejoice! This newly-cleared shortcut chops 11,000km off the Perseus' journey from the Mediterranean to their next destination, India, saving a year of time that would otherwise have been spent harvesting and refining fuel.

Their reason for traveling to India, apart from the fact that they kind of pass by on their way back home to Japan, is to acquire a human computer! As Senku explains at the beginning of episode three, the original NASA missions used actual human beings to handle all the complicated trajectory calculations, using pi to the 15th decimal, which is pretty nuts if you think about it. India has a strong reputation for producing skilled mathematicians (though, to be fair, so does China, but it's a much bigger, and further away…), and Ryusui somewhat suspiciously knows exactly where to find one particularly skilled example of his profession…

It's quite bold for a show this late in its run to continue to introduce new characters, though Dr. Stone has always been keen to bring in fresh new talent to help solve the latest technological conundrum. Although Senku is essentially a scientific polymath, he admits that fast and accurate orbital ballistic calculations are not his forte, so we're introduced to Sai Nanami – Ryusui's (half?) brother! It's telling that the first thing the poor lad wants to do on glimpsing Ryusui's blankly grinning face is to run for the hills. I'd react the same way.

Turns out the main reason Ryusui knew where to find this blessed mathematician was that he knew his brother's routine inside-out, correctly identifying his exact position at the time the Medusa petrified mankind. We get a nice flashback of Sai's life, which makes him instantly relatable. All he wanted to do was code and play games, yet his imperious father and demanding younger brother did nothing but get in his way, even going so far as to remove his creative outlets to force him to study harder. No wonder he wanted to escape!

Being revived into a world without even a simple pocket calculator is devastating to him, as all he wants to do is code, leading him to scribble across multiple walls of madness, covering them in machine code. Instead of locking him up and administering antipsychotic medication, Senku's inspired to embark on a side project: producing a Nintendo Famicom??? Apparently, the 1983 games console is the pinnacle of human civilization.

You know what? I can get behind that. If the man can generate Dragon Quest code from scratch, it's surely mandatory to build a machine upon which the code can run. I hope for the sake of the Stone World that computing's revival doesn't eventually result in Sai coding Fortnite or something. Then nothing really will get done.

Episode 25 Rating:
Episode 26 Rating:
Episode 27 Rating:

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Dr. Stone: Science Future is currently streaming on Crunchyroll on Thursdays.