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To Aru Kagaku no Railgun - 05

Summary:

While trying to bust a car thief, Kuroko ignores Uiharu’s warning and instead charges ahead. She gets caught off-guard when it turns out that there’s a second thief, and the two end up escaping, stun-gunning Uiharu in the process. Although Uiharu is okay, she’s unhappy that Kuroko ignored her warning, and the two get into an argument that leads to Uiharu bringing up the promise they once made. Kuroko doesn’t even remember what that promise was, so Uiharu storms off. Back in her dorm room, Kuroko’s loud fretting annoys Mikoto and prompts her to question how Kuroko and Uiharu came to work together in the first place. It all goes back to elementary school, when both girls were still relatively new to Judgment, and Kuroko was assigned to patrol with Konori Mii. Uiharu had run into them at the post office, and all three of them had then gotten caught up in a robbery attempt. Thinking that there was only one robber, Kuroko had attacked and defeated him, but it turned out that there was second one, and he took Uiharu hostage. What’s more, this second robber had an ability that allowed him to destroy a security robot, and in trying to protect Kuroko, Konori had gotten injured.

Realizing that her own rashness was at fault, Kuroko had vowed to save Uiharu and had managed to teleport her outside the now locked-down building. The bigger problem then had been the second robber whose ability was Equal Speed. It gave anything he threw a constant speed, regardless of what was in its way, until the object broke or he canceled his ability. He was thus able to use large metal ball bearings as projectiles that could both help him escape and hurt his opponents. Having shown this to Kuroko, he wanted her to help him in exchange for the freedom of all the other hostages. Kuroko, however, had refused to bend the justice she believed in, so the robber had attacked. Much to Kuroko’s surprise, an electric burst was fired between them at that exact moment, disintegrating the ball bearings. She used this opportunity to subdue and capture the man. In the aftermath, the person who had fired that electric burst disappeared, and Kuroko had been left wondering what happened. Having heard what Kuroko had said about justice, Uiharu had vowed the same, and the two had promised to work together to mature and become full-fledged members of Judgment. Remembering all this now, Kuroko gets a phone call from Konori informing her that Uiharu has gone after the thieves from earlier, and at Mikoto’s urging, Kuroko finds and joins her.

Preview



Although it doesn’t compare to how great last week was, this was still a pretty good episode. I think I’ve said before that I’m not the biggest fan of Kuroko’s character, but I didn’t mind them doing character development by revealing the past like this, and I thought it was a nice touch to have Mikoto be the person who secretly helped save the day. Young Kuroko and Uiharu were also very cute, especially Uiharu, though it did bother me a little that Arai Satomi’s voice felt even more ill-fitted for an elementary school kid than it does normally for a junior-high school girl. The other thing that bothered me is why, instead of teleporting Uiharu to safety, Kuroko didn’t just teleport the bad guy instead. I doubt the robber would have tried to break back into the building in broad daylight, and although he might have gotten away, it’d have been the much safer thing to do for everyone involved.

This episode also made me a bit more curious about Konori Mii’s character and her x-ray-vision/clairvoyance ability because it seemed like it would be very useful in the sort of scrapes that Kuroko and company get themselves into. Maybe we’ll see a bit more of her from now on, though it looks like next episode will be more Mikoto focused.


Reviewed by OMNI