Dr. Stone S01E01 Review: Stone Age

Dr. Stone, Season 1, Episode 1: Stone World

So a couple of days ago, the first episode of the long-anticipated anime adaptation to Dr. Stone was released. And I... I have no fucking idea what this series is, so for the first time in a long while, I tuned into the first episode of the anime with genuinely no idea what to expect. All I knew was that Dr. Stone was one of the newer Shonen Jump products that are of the same 'generation', so to speak, with My Hero Academia and The Promised Neverland, and that everyone and their mother is super-hyped about it. So yeah, I'll give it a shot, why not?

The anime is handled by TMS, the original manga was written by Inagaki Riichiro (Eyeshield 21) and Boichi (Sun-Ken Rock), and the two main voice actors for the two main characters are Kobayashi Yusuke as Senku (Subaru in Re: Zero) and Furukawa Makoto as Taiju (Saitama in One-Punch Man). So if nothing else, the production quality for the show seems to be pretty dang high.

And the first episode is pretty slow-paced, although it quickly hammers home the whole "everyone in the world is turned into stone" thing as an ominous first line before we go to the incident where the huge cataclysmic event that turned everyone into stone happened. And it's... it's a typical Shonen pairing, sans rivalry? We get to see hot-blooded student Taiju who's all about heart and the burning spirit and everything, and we get to see his best friend Senku, who's a sarcastic asshole who has the weird hair. It's like a contractual obligation thing, any Shonen Jump anime must have a character with weird-ass hair. Their first meeting was a bit weird, with Senku trying to get Taiju to drink gasoline while lying that it's a "love potion", while also simultaneously trusting his best friend on earth to be earnest and shit.

And then some weird huge green light suddenly envelops the world, turning everyone into stone just as Taiju is about to confess to Yuzuriha, the girl he's crushing on. And it's sudden and honestly pretty dang horrific. There's this one poor dog who's being held on a leash while his owner got turned into stone! Nooo the poor dog! We then alternate pretty neatly between Taiju, trapped in the stone and still conscious, basically just doing the whole manga trope of hanging on with nothing but your willpower, with brief montages of chaos all over the world as Planet of the Apes happen 3700 years pass.

And then, of course, Taiju wakes up, with the stone shedding all around him like an Inhuman cocoon, and he basically wanders around the overgrown world, and we get some flashbacks to how there were hints of this happening with how Taiju and Yuzuriha found some weird stone-birds and end up bonding over it. So apparently no other animals in the world are affected by the stonification except for birds? Interesting. The reunion between Taiju and Senku, who has woken up earlier and carved in instructions next to the camphor tree that Yuzuriha's stone body has fused with, is... it's all right. I did like the hilarious random detail that Senku has basically carved "E=MC2" into his burlap sack.

And the rest of the episode is... it's sort of just hammering down the dynamic between Senku and Taiju in this brave new world? Senku might give huge speeches about science and the importance of the scientific process and how science can explain everything and how they're going to go straight from the stone age to the modern age. Because he's the brainiac, you see, but he's also respectful of Taiju and the two are the best bros ever. It's mostly an extended montage, including an actual montage over the credits, of them surviving and foraging and stuff. A mini-plot is Senku trying to figure out how to break people out of the petrification, and he ends up figuring out that it's nitric acid, which he harvests from bat guano, and an inspiration from Taiju ends up with the two of them making wine out of grapes to technobabble the nitric acid into something else... and the final shot of the episode is them restoring a stone bird into a living one while Senku gives a huge speech about science being able to solve everything.

Overall... it's an interesting first chapter, even if it's a bit slow. That's going to be the curse of most first episodes in any given show, though -- it kinda needs to be slow since it's trying to hammer home the concept, as well as the dynamics between the two main characters, and the general tone of the show. I'm not sure how much of the show is going to just be centered on "use modern science knowledge and apply it to this new stone age", which I can imagine getting pretty old pretty fast. I'm going to give this one a chance for a couple of episodes -- if nothing else, the first season runs for only 24 episodes, which is always a nice thing for these anime seasons, making it a whole lot less overwhelming for me to decide to jump into.