Feb 20, 2014
Let me begin this review by cutting to the chase: Steins;Gate is a watchable anime, but it is by no means the masterpiece that so many hail it to be. Why do I say this? Read on to find out.
My first problem with Steins;Gate is that it is full of plot holes. Time travel stories often are, but this particular one tries too hard to be clever. Unfortunately, every attempt it makes to fold disparate temporal events together or explain the nature of time travel introduces a new weakness into the story, and before long any viewer keeping track of things realises that there is
...
no internal consistency to be had anywhere. Logic? Do not expect it.
Next, the attempts by the writers to bring in scientific concepts are painful to witness. While we do not usually need the science part of (soft) science fiction to be perfectly accurate, the importance of these concepts to the story put the spotlight squarely on them. Because of this, it is extremely difficult for those of us with even the most basic knowledge of neuroscience or physics to take the technical aspects of the story at all seriously. If you're tempted to argue that this is fiction and therefore protected by literary licence, I would simply shrug and say, "The pseudoscience is strong with this one." This is really not SF but fantasy with an SF veneer. I like my fantasy just fine, but when the authors insist on tagging on so much nonsense science, all the wincing I keep doing distracts me from the show.
Thirdly, the characters are surprisingly uncharismatic. I say surprisingly because many of them have unique looks and personalities, and the voice actors do a good job with them furthermore. They are certainly unforgettable. However, despite all that, it is quite impossible to really care for any of them. Additionally, it is difficult to take Makise and Okabe for the geniuses they are supposed to be - neither comes across as particularly intelligent.
Fourthly, the relationships portrayed here are *meant* to be deep and emotionally powerful, but they really don't feel that way at all. It does not help that the banter between the characters is invariably flat and unamusing. This is not a terribly witty or funny anime.
The show is not all bad, however. The art is very nice and production values are high. While this does not rank as a top 10 or even top 50 anime in my book, it is still a decently enjoyable series. It's definitely something one could watch when there's nothing better to catch up on right at the moment.
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SPOILER ALERT
Here are some of the many plot holes, inconsistencies, and unintended conflicts in Steins;Gate. Please do not read further unless you've already watched the show or do not plan to watch it. If you read further but have trouble distinguishing reductio ad absurdum from equivocation, please do not write me to disagree with me because you will just look foolish; if you must write me, please at least take an undergraduate course in formal logic first. A grounding in physics and neuroscience would also be a plus. Yea, I'm a big, mean, arrogant SOB with too much education and too little patience for fools. You have been warned.
1) There are multiple coexisting world lines and the time machines are actually nothing of the sort - they are instead devices that send data (in several different formats) from one reality to another. Therefore, whatever the characters do or do not do, nothing actually changes in their original reality - all they do is cross over to a different reality or create a new reality.
> 1a) The old reality still exists. The show is therefore not about changing the future but escapism.
>> 1ai) If the original traveller actually remains in his reality, then this original self actually does not experience any change in reality. This means that from the POV of the person "left" in a timeline, the time machine does absolutely nothing.
>>> (1ai1) This effectively means that the time machine actually *really* does nothing - there is merely a branch of existence in which that version of the person experiences different things. I.e., time travellers are actually just delusional.
>>> (1ai2) In the best case (if one can call it that), the “time machine” creates a whole new timeline to accommodate the new scenario. This is still an escapism problem.
> 1b) Or the old reality is destroyed. Great, because this means an entire universe of living things gets wiped from existence every time some idiot does a jump.
> 1c) The old reality still exists except that the jumper now no longer exists in this world. But whomever they are trying to save is still dead. Refer to escapism problem.
2) If (1) is true, then when a traveller from timeline T1 moves to timeline T2, he effectively wipes out the alternate version of himself from existence, taking over that body and deleting the original awareness.
> 2a) Again, we have a cold-blooded murder. If you think it's ok to do that to yourself, my question to you is this: if an alternate reality version of you wants to take over your existence because your world is better than his, would you think that's perfectly acceptable?
> 2b) If this traveller than jumps again, whether back to T1 or over to T3, what happens to the taken-over T2 identity? The possibilities are:
>> 2bi) The "deleted" person returns abruptly. We now have the following problems:
>>> (2bi1) Where was this person during the time he was displaced?
>>> (2bi2) What agency decides how to splice versions of the person in and out?
>>> (2bi3) If the T1 traveller had not moved on from the T2 world, the T2 version of him would presumably have remained in his data limbo = consigned to hell for all eternity?
>> 2bii) The deleted person no longer exists. (Assuming that this reality isn't just completely wiped from existence.) In this case, there are two possibilities:
>>> (2bii1) This person was not meant to exist anymore in this timeline to "begin with". This version of events suggests that nobody is actually doing anything - that everything is exactly as it should be, and people in some timelines are essentially suffering delusions that they are time travellers.
>>> (2bii2) The jump has changed this timeline. Every jump is a murder.
>> 2biii) A "copy" is made and there is now a T1 version of the traveller in the T2 timeline as well as in the 2nd jump's destination timeline. So a version of the traveller still suffers. The questions to ask here are firstly which version is the one who suffers - the original or the copy? And secondly isn't every jump actually creating more misery by trapping a copy of the suffering fool in yet another reality?
3) Now, let’s discard (1) and consequently (2) and consider the possibility that there is only one reality and the alternate timelines are basically “unrealised probabilities”. In this case, the future is strictly determined by the past, and it becomes impossible for non-time-travellers to “have lived through” other lives before.
> 3a) This means that the majority of the déjà vu plot makes zero sense.
> 3b) Unless we take it that each time a jump occurs, the other experienced timelines become more real.
>> 3bi) But we have already established that there is only one reality, so this does not make sense either.
4) Let’s try a different scenario: there are multiple realities, but time travel only affects the “condensation of probabilities” rather than shift one into an alternate reality.
> 4a) The déjà vu plot still fails completely.
> 4b) Unless we take it that when a jump occurs, the current reality is twisted to become more like another existing reality, and that people can then perceive these similar realities even when this reality is later changed to be unlike them.
>> 4bi) If you’re tempted to say “resonance” here, I suggest you go back to middle school and learn physics from scratch.
5) Then there’s the problem of how a person who “no longer ever existed” could have done anything in this world. You can’t drop a bottle when you were never there to hold it in the first place. You can’t buy something for someone or tell someone something if you had never existed.
> 5a) So perhaps its only memories of that person that disappear?
>> 5ai) Firstly, why would that be the case? For the uninitiated, memory most categorically does not work that way.
>> 5aii) But the person actually disappears from this existence as well.
> 5b) Where does he go? To a convenient pocket dimension where only he exists? To some other dimension where he murders his other self?
I could do this the whole day.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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