Dr. STONE SCIENCE FUTURE

Episode 32

Like the plot itself, Dr. Stone's pace is racing to the moon. Apart from the first episode (most obviously) and Suika's lonely adventure last cour, no single episode has featured such large time-skips. Rocket science is a seriously tough endeavor; make the slightest mistake and everyone's work immediately goes up in flames, so it makes sense that Team Senku's first attempt at entering low Earth orbit goes horribly wrong. So it's at least vaguely realistic that our group of plucky rocket engineers spends years building a series of rockets, making mistakes, going back to the drawing board, and gradually iterating on improvements. Xeno spent three years producing “Senku 1,” only for it to fall into the sea. The next two or so years are spent building another six rockets, with only the seventh generation making it to its destination, launching the Stone World's very first artificial satellite.

While it does seem absurd that our small group of characters could have built this many rockets within the space of a few scant years, we have to remember that all around the world are multiple new cities full of newly revived people, all pulling together to achieve a common goal. You rarely hear about the countless thousands of low-level NASA workers who are essential to successful modern space missions, and that's the way Dr. Stone plays it here. We're expected to infer how much hard work and unseen manpower have gone into the production of these colossal vessels. What's perhaps less believable is how no one (apart from Suika) seems to have aged in any way, even though they should all be in their mid-twenties by now. And unless Senku has (re)invented the contraceptive pill, I find it hard to believe none of our main characters aren't parents already. Or perhaps there's an army of illegitimate children hidden away in a daycare center somewhere just behind the rocket launch site, slightly off-camera.

Beavering away in the background, Chrome and Suika are too hard at work cramming PhD-level ballistic engineering formulas into their non-mainstream-educated brains to even consider more carnal activities. Their determination not to allow their friends to sacrifice themselves on a one-way suicide mission to the moon provides this episode's powerful emotional through-line. Who would have thought the introduction of representative democracy would be the force that changes both Senku's and Xeno's almost pathologically pragmatic minds? Does it still count as democratic if the ten representatives eligible to vote don't appear to have been voted in by the unwashed masses? Dr. Stone never thinks to stop and question this society's extremely loose governmental structure. That's social science, you see, and therefore not real science. You heard what I said. (Runs and hides from an army of furious, slavering, liberal arts majors.)

Anyway, the final reveal of the unanimous vote is yet another tear-jerking moment, as both Xeno and Senku admit that Chrome and Suika's idea for a two-way return mission is preferable, even if it will delay their plans, possibly for more years. It's worth remembering that both Chrome and Suika are descendants of astronauts, a group of highly intelligent, highly motivated individuals. Even thousands of years of inbreeding (let's try not to think about it too much) doesn't seem to have dulled their cognitive prowess. Senku and Xeno may be the marquee geniuses, but here they acknowledge Chrome and Suika as equals. I'm not sure why this leads Senku into declaring he needs to invent the internet, and by extension all of the social media horror that's likely to follow, though. Once Ryusui invents his own version of X, it's all downhill for the human race from there.

Rating:

---

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