The changes to the past are starting to pile up and the results are still being felt in surprising ways.
What They Say:
The IBN5100 is gone, and nobody else can remember it ever being brought to the lab! Ruka says that she remembers it being brought to Yanabayashi Shrine, but can’t remember when it disappeared. Okabe turns to Feyris for help, but she wants to use the D-Mail in exchange, and she won’t tell anybody what she’s sending…
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Rintaro is an amusing character to watch at times as he can run the gamut of personalities in a few short seconds sometimes. The start of this episode has him offering up some comfort and a shoulder to cry on to Christina, though she denies that she was actually crying. His soft approach is really interesting to see happen as he goes on about how they’re friends for life because of their work, only to turn it around a moment later and go on over the phone about how he’s just using her for his own means. But that’s part of the theme here as the prologue to the show has Feyris trying to get information about of Rintaro about the time machine and uses Daru to do it since he’s smitten with her.
Rintaro does find himself forced into an interesting corner as they have to start focusing more on the science behind the Phone Microwave since Christina isn’t convinced that the microwave itself is really doing anything and that it may be something else. The effort to get Rintaro to do this hits his wall of it being boring and she calls him out on how 99.9% of science is boring. His response is priceless in that he practically stomps his feet that he isn’t a scientist, he’s a mad scientist and there’s a difference there. What he may also be is going mad as it turns out that the IBN 5100 has gone missing and he doesn’t even realize how it happened. And with him being the only one with the memory that they have it, the pressure is definitely on him to figure out what actually caused and where they can find it since they need the data that’s on it.
Because of this, Rintaro ends up working through the whole Butterfly Effect thing as he tries to backtrack where things changed. Looking at the way the characters have come together and how some of them are aware of others which happened at certain times, it puts him into the right frame of mind to start getting a better idea of things and the way altering the past has such a huge impact. What he really wants in the end though is the IBN 5100 and the only way to get that is to let Feyris in on the whole messages through time thing by letting her send one that she wants to put out there. But without letting anyone else know what she’s sending. The potential consequences are staggering when you really think about it and it just shows how dangerous this whole endeavor really is.
In Summary:
The quest to find the IBN 5100 feels a bit like a retread in a way, but there are obviously significant differences here and it’s all designed to show the greater impact of having the messages going into the past and altering things. Rintaro’s struggles through this are fun to watch as he tries to piece it all together while finally, finally, really understanding the scale of what’s involved with what they’re doing. There are some welcome smaller moments throughout this and some amusing humor in the right places, but it’s the bigger realizations as they happen that really drive home the series. Steins; Gate continues to be one of the more unusual series to come out this season but one that is very appealing as it avoids doing much of what every other series tends to do. There’s a lot to like here and it continues to be a show that you can really dig into with the layers it has due to all the time travel.
Grade: B
Simulcast By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDS-R70XBR2 70″ LCoS 1080P HDTV, Dell 10.1 Netbook via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
