Clockwork Planet

Episode 6

Well that certainly wasn't how I expected things to go. After predictably continuing the battle against aNCHOR that began last week, Episode 6 of Clockwork Planet took one hell of a tonal right turn. After Naoto and RyuZU seemingly fall to their deaths, Marie and Halter flee the battle and put on their best grimdark faces to go hunting for answers. This episode tries to transform a generally lighthearted sci-fi adventure series into a taut political thriller and then back again, all within the span of just a single half-hour. It's an experimental shift in storytelling from a series that I didn't expect such surprises from, the kind of risky move that I usually love to see a show take.

So it's too bad that the result of this particular experiment is a total mess. This isn't to say it's a complete disaster; the animation and direction remain consistently just above the bar that separates bland anime from the downright ugly stuff, and the story is at least comprehensible for the most part. The Achilles heel for this week's episode is a problem greater than the sum of its parts: a failure of tone.

Clockwork Planet just can't do “serious drama” very well at all. The quality of writing, animation, and art design simply can't support the nuanced approach this kind of material needs. The show's visuals and scripting have always been more akin to a Saturday morning kids cartoon that's produced on the cheap. The show's frequent detours into tacky fanservice already don't mesh well with the flat character designs and simplistic writing, but the foundation of the series crumbles beneath the pressure of trying to make the audience feel emotions more complex than vague interest or moderate titillation. Watching Marie literally vomit through her tears as she takes the cliché “contemplative shower” doesn't inspire sympathy as much as it does stifled chuckles, and having the camera linger on her partially exposed (and definitely underage) breasts taints the drama with a sleazy, exploitative aura.

Marie's angst feels especially campy in light of the fact that no one would believe for a second that Clockwork Planet had permanently killed off its two main characters. As she dons a silly leather jumpsuit and proceeds to torture a government official for information on the secret weapon they've been hunting down, Marie comes across less like a grieving freedom fighter and more like an unhinged Ghost in the Shell cosplayer, which I'm pretty sure was not the intended effect. This jarring shift in tone then feels completely pointless when Naoto and Ryuzu simply pop out of a manhole a few minutes later, alive and well to absolutely nobody's surprise. The status quo has been reset, and the heroes head off to their next battle against aNCHOR.

Leave it to Clockwork Planet to make sure some truly bizarre writing slips in before the end credits roll, though. As the episode took great pains to explain, the area that Naoto and RyuZU fell into is essentially the planet's core, inhospitable to any human life. So how did the boy and his robot manage to escape certain doom? Why, the strange old man who lives in a cabin down there helped them, of course! Despite RyuZU reminding Naoto and the audience literally seconds beforehand that a human shouldn't be able to live more than ten seconds in those deeper levels, absolutely nobody seems to be curious about this nameless, superhuman senior citizen. Not one question is asked, and everyone moves on as if nothing ever happened.

This is a deeply strange note for the episode to end on, and I can only imagine that scenes have been highly condensed or rearranged from the manga and light novel source material. I'm guessing this old man is Y, the planet's creator, and the decision to introduce him in a nonsensical throwaway flashback is absolutely baffling. Even if he isn't Y, I refuse to believe that the others wouldn't at least take note of this odd detail. This isn't just confusing writing; it's genuinely maddening. I hope next week does some serious course correction, because sloppy writing like this is always a terrible sign for single-cour adaptations. We're six episodes into a twelve episode show, but I think I know less about what's going on than I did when this whole thing started.

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.