- esselfortium
- Jul 19, 2006
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Cumulonimbus Antagonistic Posting
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I've generally been enjoying this when it focuses on Mira and Kyoma, but even after the lame haunted-house arc ended, it's been spending most of its time on big groups of random side characters that I have a hard time caring about, so it's been pretty disappointing past the first couple episodes IMO. I keep watching in the hope that it'll get better, and it hasn't yet. Haven't seen episode 9 yet though.
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Mar 7, 2016 17:44
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May 10, 2024 14:10
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- esselfortium
- Jul 19, 2006
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Cumulonimbus Antagonistic Posting
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Dimension W started out looking somewhat promising, but it seemed to quickly abandon its initial concept and dive headfirst into madness. Each episode just confounded me more than the ones that came before it. Most of the characters served no apparent purpose, and the Dimension W tech itself turned out to be pretty silly as well. Moments that seemed intended to get an emotional response invariably just left me asking "Who? What? Why??" as the show rewrote its own rules and pulled magic out of thin air.
After episode 11 I wrote a longer reaction:
quote:The premise is that unlimited energy is now accessible via "energy coils" that tap into "Dimension W", an alternate dimension of pure magic and possibility, or something like that. The actual workings of this dimension start out pretty vague, and manage to make less and less sense as we learn more about it. In practice, Dimension W is just whatever the show currently needs it to be, which usually comes down to something involving someone-or-another's tragically deceased girlfriend.
There's a potentially interesting thread in the idea that energy coils are tracked and monitored, but the show completely ignores the surveillance and privacy implications, seemingly not even noticing that they exist. The world also doesn't feel believably like a place revolutionized by infinite energy. Energy coils are used to power stuff, a few people have robot bodies, and that's about the extent of it, at least when energy coils aren't malfunctioning and ripping holes in the universe. Hooray for needlessly dangerous technology that's barely being utilized.
Having a nonsensical universe can sometimes be workable, if the characters and their journey is meaningful enough to make up for it. Unfortunately, Dimension W doesn't really deliver there either. Our main character is Kyoma, a grumpy luddite whose job is to seek out and collect illegal coils. Kyoma hates coils, which we know because someone randomly tells us "Kyoma hates coils" every few minutes in the first several episodes.
Kyoma's assistant is a robot girl named Mira, who he hates (because coils!), and who may or may not actually be his dead girlfriend. (Update: Not exactly!) Mira has some cute moments which are generally the highlight of the show, but aren't really enough to make up for its other shortcomings. There's also a guy named Loser, which is a wonderful name for a character. He's a failed thief whose attempted heists have become a spectator sport. He's pretty fun, at least early on. Other characters seem to appear and disappear from the story with no reason or explanation, and it's often unclear what purpose any of them serve.
Four episodes in, the show leaps off the rails with a two-episode haunted house arc in which we discover that Dimension W can house dreamworlds made from memories of alternate timelines and the ghosts of peoples' dead girlfriends, or something goofy like that. It's honestly hard to even write about this show because of how quickly it's piled up nonsensical story threads.
I've seen comments suggesting that this arc needed more episodes to be fleshed out better, but I'd actually say the opposite: this story maybe could have worked as a streamlined single-episode diversion in the middle of a show twice this length, where it could be sandwiched between some episodic coil-collecting adventures to develop the characters and set up their idea of normalcy before shattering that normalcy for a story climax, a la Cowboy Bebop, but in Dimension W it's just a weird derail that precedes the even weirder derail that overtakes the show's plot. What do Evil Steve Jobs, the flamboyant technician from Gurren Lagann, and an African cyborg prince have to do with each other? As far as I can tell, the answer to this question is "basically nothing".
Then a few episodes later, we're suddenly introduced to a massive number of new tertiary characters who are comically incongrous with each other and the rest of the Dimension W universe, and have no apparent narrative purpose. They're like this show's equivalent of the "Sense of Right Alliance", the bootleg-knockoff superhero toy set for sad children, that pairs Batman and Spider-Man with a Power Ranger, a talking Pixar car, and Shrek.
Dimension W's Sense of Right Alliance is like a set of ethnic stereotypes as remembered by someone from a parallel universe, and includes such unforgettable characters as "Mexican guy with sewn-shut eyes and shark-toothed catgirl girlfriend", "morbidly-obese Norwegian twins with hands bigger than their abdomens", and "geriatric Aquaman cosplayer". They mostly exist to occupy a lot of screentime and make the story even less coherent.
In the end, the Sense of Right Alliance amounts to nothing, Kyoma meets up with Loser and an old war buddy, and our heroes end up on Easter Island to face off against a genius scientist who went mad and started wearing a lot of eyeliner when his teleportation experiments were confiscated. He steals a magical do-anything coil and restarts his teleportation experiments in secret, turning hundreds of human test subjects into exploded piles of goop. And because dead girlfriends are apparently Dimension W's one and only consistent narrative theme, his plan also involved turning Loser's wife into a giant killer tentacle monster, for some reason.
I'm doubting that much of this will make more sense after the final episode airs. Dimension W is a show in which few things make any sense or add up to any coherent whole, but it's not even as entertaining a trainwreck as that description might imply. It's just bewildering and disappointing.
To end on a positive note, the OP and ED are quite good, much better than the show they're attached to. The ED theme is especially fantastic, and the OP has a fun song full of memorably broken English that's charming in the same way as the lyrics to Black Lagoon's OP, accompanied by stylish action visuals from the better show that Dimension W initially looked like it was going to be.
Episode 12 continued the bewilderment, and the last 30 seconds or so after the end credits were a good reminder of the show Dimension W looked like it was going to be originally, as a final disappointing "remember how much better this could have been?"
esselfortium fucked around with this message at 16:36 on Mar 28, 2016
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Mar 28, 2016 16:32
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- esselfortium
- Jul 19, 2006
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Cumulonimbus Antagonistic Posting
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this is my issue with this show and why I find it completely unwatachable, honestly.
A good show is good and I feel good feeling watching it.
A bad show is hilarious or has interesting ideas and I can laugh/ponder over what could've been with friends.
A mediocre show is mediocre and I don't feel a drat thing besides my body age 25 minutes per episode
This is exactly how I feel about it. Dimension W had some potential early on, and some moments later in the series where the sheer "who? what? why?!" factor was enough to be amusing in and of itself, but most of it fell into the third category where after a while I was actually hoping for it to get worse so that it could become more entertaining.
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Apr 3, 2016 02:28
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Mar 7, 2016 17:44
