Dimension W

Episode 11

After five episodes of faffing about on the damn island, our heroes finally arrive at the Andrastea facility. Loser beat up Jason Chrysler to get the fifth Numbered Coil, allowing him to open up a wormhole at ground zero. Hoping to find his wife in there, he instead encounters Haruka Seameyer. When Kyouma and the others arrive, they all learn what happened in his missing memories. Things went about as expected: Seameyer was performing his coup for the Super Secret Ultra Coil when the Grendels invaded the Andrastea facility. Most of them died, but Kyouma managed to get to Seameyer. He had gone crazy after performing experiments teleporting living creatures, which only ever resulted in bloody deaths. When he thinks that the Ultra Coil might result in successful live transportation, he uses Loser's wife – an important scientist – to obtain access to it by holding Loser hostage. He proceeds to kill a bunch of people in order to determine whether his teleportation theories work. Not wanting to empower a madman, Loser's wife planned to blow the place sky-high instead.

But at the last minute, Kyouma barges in and snatches the Ultra Coil out of Seameyer's hands, messing everything up for everyone. While trying to get away from Seameyer, he activates it, and the two end up getting teleported elsewhere. Seameyer winds up stranded on one lost half of the Andrastrea facility. He's been stuck there for a while, stewing in his evil and building himself a sick robot hand. For some reason, Loser's wife also get dragged along with him. Kyouma is transported far away from them with the other half of the facility and the Ultra Coil. That's where his amnesia kicks in again. It's a mystery how he got back to Earth, although I suspect that it has something to do with dead girlfriends. Anyway, Seameyer talks to everyone through a projector that he teleports to their location. (Moving flesh still proves troublesome without the Ultra Coil.) Seameyer wants the Ultra Coil back so he can teleport to Earth and start annoying people there again. The problem is that only Kyouma knows where it is, and that knowledge is trapped under layers of plot-convenient amnesia. So Seameyer sends over Loser's wife, who he's somehow mutated into a giant Cthulhu monster. Loser is understandably disappointed.

Salva and Lwai are also around, but they're so peripheral to the main narrative that I don't even have to mention them in the summary. I have no idea why they're even in the show. Based on how much backstory it's given him, Dimension W seems to assume that Salva is some kind of third protagonist, but he's more like a houseguest that won't leave and eats up all of your food/screentime. Dimension W is already behind on crucial characterization (particularly with Mira who, like Salva, I don't need to mention at all in this review). We don't have time to spare on this other guy. I have no idea what I'm supposed to feel when he finally teams up with Kyouma. Are we supposed to be happy that two characters we (supposedly) identify with are on the same side? Maybe wary that Kyouma has formed a temporary alliance with a villain? I have no idea. Of this show's many narrative failures, its almost nonexistent characterization stands out most. Why are these clumsy deadweight characters here? The only thing Salva's really contributed to the story is creating a reason for everyone to be on the island, and that could easily have been rewritten into an assignment from Albert or something.

Of course, this is all way more difficult to follow than the summary makes it out to be. Dimension W is really convinced that building suspense means withholding crucial information from the viewer. If the big reveal just amounts to the most obvious possible thing – the bestest coil and a mad scientist – that just makes the audience mad. You've got to pack something really crazy into a secret that's been built up for this long, like what Gen Urobuchi did in Psycho-Pass. Even then, Psycho-Pass had a ton of wheels spinning to keep the audience invested outside of the question “What's the deal with Sibyl?” Dimension W doesn't. Before you know the crucial backstory, the story's still unengaging, because you don't know why anyone does what they do. The reveals, when they arrive, don't justify engagement in hindsight. Of course Kyouma has a tragically dead girlfriend. Of course Salva is a Machiavellian leader with a chip on his shoulder and a soft spot for his little brother. I could have guessed all this just from the character designs. Do I even have to mention Seameyer? It feels like weeks spent unpacking an ornately wrapped gift box just to discover that it's empty.

Also, Dimwub's initial definition as a dimension of “alternate possibilities” now officially means nothing. The show somehow conflates memories, teleportation, and some sort of abstract life force into the workings of Dimension W. They even drop a Schrodinger's Cat reference – an immediate signal that technobabble has gone too far. They keep interspersing plot clarification with this philosophical technobabble, which makes the story even harder to parse. The specific ways in which a story tries to justify its fake science don't matter, just so long as the tech has consistent rules and limitations. Alternately, other aspects of the story should be entertaining enough that the audience won't stop to ask questions like “So why don't they just use the Time Turner to go back in time and kill baby Voldemort?” Dimension W adopts neither of these two methods for its fantastical elements. Trying to follow its logic just makes you feel crazy. So Dimwub is infinite possibilities, but it also has ghosts in it – as in the actual souls of dead people. So souls are real? And since souls somehow work within Dimwub, that means they have something to do alternate dimensions? Who has ever associated souls with alternate dimensions? This is too big of a metaphysical can of worms, taking me right out of whatever the show is trying to do.

Dimension W's recent crash especially hurts because the premise did have potential. Dimwub is a cool concept that immediately conjures a number of narrative and thematic possibilities. The plot is too nonsensical to ignore and on top of that, this isn't even a good action show. The direction remains weak, the animation quality has plummeted, and the art style has been brought down by a series of increasingly questionable character designs. I wish that I could say something good about Dimension W, but I honestly can't think of anything by this point. To be fair, this episode isn't especially worse than the two that preceded it – it's all just starting to wear on me more. All the same problems, over and over. It's like being stuck in a time loop.

Grade: D

Dimension W is currently streaming on Funimation.

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