This episode was rather disappointing.

It was, more or less, an infodump to the highest degree. Suzuha finally spills the beans and, unfortunately, it’s rote sci-fi:

• Technology eventually leads to the enslavement of mankind.
• Someone forms a resistance group to combat the oppression, but their struggle is all for naught…
• …until someone decides to play the final gambit. Mankind’s fate rests solely upon this last-ditch attempt.

In this case, the gambit is time traveling. We’ve seen this before. We’ve seen this in The Terminator. We’ve seen this in Dragon freaking Ball Z. As a result, this episode is largely a throwaway.

There is a tendency in some stories to overexplain itself and we, the audience, are largely at fault. Human beings are naturally truth seekers. We want to understand the nature of things — just look at the vast array of academic interests. There’s almost nothing we can’t study. But while this insatiable thirst of knowledge leads us to fascinating insights most of the time, it also does us a disfavor when used indiscriminately.

When we don’t know much about ‘X,’ it makes sense to investigate ‘X.’ Unfortunately, the developments in this week’s episode of Steins;Gate don’t tell us anything we don’t already know. Unfortunately, if things aren’t spelled out for some of us, we feel uneasy; we demand answers. Just look at how people react to the stopwatch in Revolutionary Girl Utena.

If I had to make a choice between mystery or unoriginality, I’m going to pick the former each and every single time. I think it would have been much more effective to leave the details of Suzuha’s future completely offscreen — just leave it to our imagination. Unfortunately, the anime’s compulsion to over-explain leads us to a tale that is just plain boring and overdone. More importantly, Suzuha’s exposition slams the brakes on the plot, especially when momentum had been building for weeks.

So what happens after the infodumping (which takes up nearly half or more of the episode’s runtime)? The characters flounder until the anime decides that it’s time to advance the story. I suspect Steins;Gate’s visual novel roots are now working against itself. It is fairly typical of these video games to feature monotonous sequences wherein the player character literally does nothing but wander about the city until a flag is triggered.

Okabe gets Daru to work on Suzuha’s time machine. In the meantime, he and the rest of the gang try to find Suzuha’s father, a man she’s never met. This largely entails a vaguely racist exchange between Okabe and a black man, and Mayuri’s cute but largely pointless antics (I liked her better when she was dying). In the episode’s final seconds, the story throws us a cliffhanger. Hopefully, Steins;Gate gets back on track next week.