We’ve made it to season 2! It’s been a long journey watching for the smallest signs of more Dr. Stone anime on the horizon. If 2020 wasn’t bad enough, it was mostly silence regarding any news about a second season of Dr. Stone. Many fans expected July 2020, but July came and went without a word. All we had to go on was the few seconds of confirmation at the end of season 1, and after many months only tiny snippets such as a single note of “Dr. Stone season 2 production is going well!”
In December, “Episode 0” was released as a full-length recap, ending with a few minutes of new footage from a future episode (not episode 1, likely episode 2). This seemed to make fans happy that it meant we would get straight into the action when the first episode begins, which would be the conversation between Gen, Senku and Chrome about the Lillian voice scheme and going to Hell.
The opening of this season takes us on an interesting journey we didn’t expect. There is still a short recap, but it’s Gen telling the story of Senku and the petrification to the village children. It’s clear that the production team is thinking about viewers who are new to Dr. Stone, since the series is growing quickly in popularity.
Once we are up to date on the story, we get straight into crafting with new scenes about freeze-dried ramen. This also seems to be for brand new viewers, to show more about how this series operates and the roles that different characters play. Of course, it’s also a great bonus for long-time fans. Many established fans were probably confused and thrown off by the new material straight away, but it has everything a Dr. Stone fan loves – crafting, problem solving, a road map, bringing back old world science, Byakuya flashbacks, and Kaseki busting out of his clothes.
Gen’s storytelling recap transitions nicely into the ramen adventure, and then another smooth transition into the set story. When season 1 ended, we were in the middle of manga chapter 60 with the whole village listening to the glass record. In this first episode, the point where we pick up the story again is to instead have a small group of villagers listening to the record again after having listened to it many times already since that day. When we see Gen come to the realization about the sound quality, this originally happened when the whole village heard the record for the first time and energy was high. This change in setting was necessary to begin a new season and it works well. With things already calmed down, it gives more focus on Gen’s eureka moment to grab the viewer’s attention.
The flow of the scene where they lay down the scheme about Lillian’s voice sets up the plan in an exciting way, demonstrating each step. Hearing Gen use Lillian’s voice, it becomes convincing that the plan will work, and will be a fun thing to see. It drives us to want to get the cell phone to Tsukasa’s empire and execute the plan. As Senku, Gen, and Chrome commit to being villains together, beautiful snow starts to drift into the scene with dreamy close-ups and Chrome’s spirit of a true Kingdom of Science soldier, all bringing in an emotional charge to set off this mission like a rocket.
Speaking of loud science-y things, the action of something like sound bombs is difficult to convey in manga, so seeing it in the anime makes it ten billion times more intense. Making the cell phone last season was a fun achievement, but the importance of the cell phone is now made clear. The urgency of getting the cell phone out of the village safely and the anxiety of entering Tsukasa’s territory make this episode a solid start to the season.
We only see Tsukasa once during this episode, and he looks quite sad. The whole scene feels sad. It’s a quiet and lonely place, and a poor stone girl is covered in snow, holding her parent’s broken hand. We don’t know if the parent’s statue was already broken before Tsukasa got there. What is this scene telling us about Tsukasa? He feels for the girl, especially since she looks like his sister. Apart from the war with Senku, he must feel empty inside without his sister.
This season will prove to be vastly different from season 1, now that we are bringing the fight to Tsukasa. We’ve spent so much time in the village, it’s difficult to predict what could happen to anyone who makes their way out of familiar territory, and what even the revived outsiders have now called “home”.
Comments