Steins;Gate
“Achievement Point”, Season 1 Episode 24
Requested By
jakkdl on our Discord server
What do I know about this series going into it?
I’d heard of it but I knew nothing about it. Unfortunately there are several different episodes that could be called the finale, and while trying to research which one was correct I couldn’t help but absorb a few pieces of information: there’s a time-traveling microwave; World War III; a sequel series called Steins;Gate 0; and a series of video games set in the same universe.
Recap
A man discusses what he calls the “final mission”: Operation Skuld. He has to go back in time and ensure that Makise Krisu1 ends up lying in a pool of blood, with someone else seeing her that way, but without her actually being dead.
It’s August 2010. They only have enough fuel to go back in time once, not even enough to return to the present. But the girl points out that if they manage to change the past they won’t need to return to the present because the “her” that went back in time will be erased and she’ll have never left the present. Whereas if they don’t manage to change the past, they might as well stay there because it’s not worth returning to the present, I’m guessing because of the blurb that mentioned World War III2.
The rules of time travel here aren’t clear. On the one hand, if they need to keep Krisu’s death the way it was, this sounds like they’re in a world with an immutable timeline: the past can’t be altered, can never be altered, so the only thing they can do is Trick Out Time. But on the other hand they’re talking about their timeline being erased. Is Krisu’s death crucial to the invention of time travel, perhaps, so it is the only thing that can’t be altered without leading to paradox? Whereas anything else can be changed? But how is that any different from the paradoxes that arise from other motivations for going back in time – such as trying to prevent the other adverse events arising from Krisu’s death? If the trip will erase the girl’s existence, and she was crucial to planning the trip, that should cause exactly the same paradox as saving Krisu without faking her death.
Back to the episode. The girl doesn’t seem clear on her relationship to the speaker: she calls him first “Dad” – I’m not your dad – then uncle – I’m not your uncle. He finally introduces himself (to me; I assume she already knows him): Hououin Kyouma, mad scientist, who wants to destroy the world’s ruling structure. Curious: this is usually the kind of speech a bad guy makes, yet here it’s being presented as a good thing. Are we rooting for him or not?
After the opening credits, Kyouma is looking for something in the closet of an apartment. I thought it was a previously-mentioned screwdriver but instead he finds a rare and powerful high-tech weapon…. No, it’s just a children’s toy that he can use to fake the blood around Christina.
Odd, though: I know I’m not spelling “Krisu” correctly, but they definitely weren’t calling the murder victim “Christina” before. A little bit more information: Christina is the mad scientist’s assistant and girlfriend, so no wonder he wants to save her. Unfortunately, there’s a flood of other discussion in this scene, with lots of character names mentioned in quick succession, and I fail to follow it altogether.
Kyouma and his assistant go back to July 2010. First things first: he has to ensure that no metal ends up in a “folder”. This involves buying a toy from a vending machine. He needs to get the metal “Upa” ball, the rarest one, before his past self arrives and buys it for his (I assume) daughter; unfortunately, he fails and his past self gets the ball as had happened in the original timeline.
While hiding from his past self, though, Kyouma runs into Kurisu/Christina. Kurisu has the Upa – how? The daughter dropped it? Apparently this envelope needs to be destroyed and any metal inside will protect it from being destroyed. But he says it’s “no longer metal” – did he switch the balls somehow? Or is the green Upa not the metal one, and he did succeed in getting it before his past self did? I’m missing way too much context here.
There’s another problem: the liquid in the Cyalume Saber has evaporated. What can I use for blood? My own. But first he has to stop the man from murdering Kurisu in the first place. He confronts the murderer, who has a knife. Kyouma charges at him and is stabbed.
Turns out the blood around Kurisu was his all along. (Or is it? Is he actively changing the past while making sure certain important bits of it remain to influence the future in the same way as they did originally, or was this always the way it happened?)
Kyouma pulls the knife out of his abdomen and brandishes it at the murderer, who flees. Christina calls an ambulance, but Kyouma tasers her – and she collapses unconscious in the pool of blood.
To complete the scene, Kyouma squeezes his own wound to spill enough blood on and around her to fake her death – until the pool of blood looks like the one he remembers seeing. Aha! It was his own past self that had encountered her dead body, and whom he needs to fool.
His assistant arrives and helps him into the corridor.
Hiding from behind a corner, they watch Kyouma’s past self walk into the room and discover the body. She then takes him back to the time machine3. Whatever they have done, it has saved the world. I’m not clear on the details, but they mention some race of time-traveling beings, maybe aliens, maybe future humans. And then the assistant vanishes because her timeline no longer exists4. As she vanishes, she says she’ll meet him in seven years.
When Kyouma returns to the future for the denouement, there’s a news report about the plane crash, in which a crazy person who I think is also the murderer tries in vain to convince the world that the crash burned up the schematics for a time machine.
A bonnet-wearing young woman, who we saw earlier and is eventually identified as Shiina, goes from place to place looking for someone by name, but they’re always gone before she arrives. Everywhere she visits, Kyouma has preceded her, giving out small circular “badges” that identify their recipients as Lab Members and which they can use to summon him if necessary. The lab members are named; I manage to write down only “Hasida” and “Feyris”. Lab Member #008 will arrive in seven years, he also says, so that would be his assistant. I am so confused.
Finally, he wanders the streets, idly wondering where “you” – Christina - are at this very moment now that I’ve saved you. And by astonishing coincidence, as he’s doing so, they pass each other in the street. She remembers him as the man that saved her, but protests that her name isn’t Christina, it’s Makise Kurisu. He gives her a badge.
Unresolved questions
I wish I understood anywhere near enough about this episode to even identify unresolved questions. This has happened before, but it’s very rare.
Ratings
These ratings evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. The analysis accompanying each rating is written from that point of view as well.
The ratings do not necessarily apply to the episode if it is watched in the proper context. And it should go without saying that none of them apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.
Story: 8/10. While I have questions about the time travel that are, shall we say, plot hole-adjacent, those questions are mostly borne of not having seen the rest of the series. Presumably previous episodes made clearer the distinction between things that can be changed and things that can’t; my rule is always that if the parts I understood are handled well, I assume anything I didn’t understand was handled equally well.
And I really did like the plot as presented. Sure, I had no idea what the connection was between any of these characters and World War III, and knew nothing about this other race of beings, and the entire episode with the vending machine went right over my head.
But the basic idea of going back to a specific time and setting events in motion using very slight adjustments… well, I have a weakness for that type of plot and I can’t help but grade it highly when it’s well done.
Writing: 6/10. Overall I was happy with the writing; slightly better than the average of 5. I don’t have much more to say, other than the symbolism of the character who saved the world by dying and coming back to life being named “Christina” did not go unnoticed.
Production: 8/10. I loved the minimalist, mostly-monochrome animation style. The use of light and shadow - not to mention the frequent still frames and slow motion - sold the drama and helped me identify crucial moments in the narrative even while I had no idea what was going on. Very good music, and very good voice acting for the most part, with one or two exceptions.
Characterization: 3/10. The episode was focused on the mission, which means I got very little exposure to the characters and personalities involved. I’m still not entirely clear on Kyouma’s motivations. While editing my notes on the episode, I started to reassess what I knew about him: okay, he’s clearly the good guy, so maybe the “power structures of the world” that he wants to destroy are those of the aliens/future-humans/whatever-the-Steins;Gate-things-are. But then again, he made the same claim while in the past and talking to the would-be murderer. Presumably the a/fh/wtSGta don’t already control the world at that point in time, do they? But then time travel is involved; maybe they’ve been controlling all of human history and by removing the invention of time travel he has retroactively destroyed the “power structures of the world”. Or maybe, since his mission hadn’t yet been completed, he was talking about the future power structures. Or maybe he’s not talking about them at all and he really is an anarchist.
You can see the problem. Without context I had no idea what Kyouma’s motivations were5. Worse6, Kyouma was the only person the episode followed for any length of time. I know nothing about Christina, or about Kyouma’s assistant, or their overweight friend, or Shiina, or any of the other people on the show; I don’t even know most of their names. So I have nothing to go on when assessing character.
Accessibility: 2/10. This isn’t the single most confusing finale I’ve ever watched… but it’s close. I got the bare-bones basics of the main plot: go back in time to save Christina and also replace a tiny doll in an envelope, two events which, by some machinations, will save the world. But the rules about what can and can’t be changed; the side characters who appeared for less than a minute each but were clearly important to the plot; the details of how (or whether) Kyouma succeeded in switching out the Upa ball; how Kyouma knows Christina at all if she was dead when he first saw her; why she has two names; what the Lab Member stuff was all about… all of that went right over my head.
Closure: 9/10. Kyouma succeeded in his mission and saved Christina’s life, undoing the timeline where unspecified bad things happen and erasing his assistant from existence. There’s a bit of an And the Adventure Continues ending, where he gives out those buttons to (I assume) his friends and allies, but the story seems to have reached a satisfying conclusion… so far as I could tell. Honestly, I don’t have a clue.
Do I want to watch the series now?
Surprisingly, I do. It’s piqued my interest, and while there are many things I dislike about the anime genre none of them seem present in this series. I want to learn about the connection between Christina’s death and the end of the world, I want to explore the rules of time travel, and I want to learn who the a/fh/wtSGta are. The finale definitely succeeded in making me curious about this world.
I probably got the spelling of most of the characters’ names wrong. It takes longer to read a name in captions than it does to hear it, and I’m not as familiar with Japanese names.
Since I’m going to discover shortly that they are only going back in time by one month, I don’t entirely understand this. Maybe I misunderstood and she just meant who cares if we live through that month a second time?
Didn’t they say they don’t have enough fuel to return?
But doesn’t his own timeline have the same problem? In his personal history he encountered the Steins;Gate beings. So if they no longer exist, shouldn’t he vanish too, to be replaced by an alternate version of himself who never met them?
If you’re new to the blog you might at this point be saying that this isn’t a fair criticism. Of course I didn’t have context; how is that the show’s fault?
The answer is that this isn’t meant as a criticism. It is simply a fact that this episode seen in isolation does not showcase character motivations. Which is fine. It can mean that the finale was particularly focused on plot or action, or it can mean that the show was so heavily serialized that the character aspects of the finale are opaque to the new viewer. From what I can tell, in this case it’s probably a little of both.
for me
Loved the review. I adored Steins;Gate and its timey-wimey complexity, obviously watching only the finale is gonna make very little sense, but I think it's healthy for your project to tackle both more understandable and more bewildering finales, it's an interesting balancing contrast!