Dr. Stone S1E1: “Stone World”

This review was commissioned by @XHurt.

I have a friend who's into Dr. Stone. Multiple friends, I think. I only saw bits and pieces, but from what I gather its about a postapocalyptic future in which everyone has been turned into stone by something. A select few have unpetrified long after the fact and are trying to make their way in an empty world. Also, there's a major subplot involving chemistry? I think? Anyway, it's a very recently adapted series, having first premiered less than a year ago, and still ongoing.

Also, my fiance has seen a few episodes, and has told me that it's, and I quote, "really fucking weird." Which I guess is unavoidable with a premise like that one. Then again, I've got the likes of Fate and Lain to compare it to and she didn't, so who knows.

It starts out looking pretty much as I remember from the glimpses I've seen. Is it just me, or are those petrified people sort of stylistically mismatched with the rest of the scenery?

Well, it's pretty aside from that.

A voiceover reminisces about the day that everyone suddenly turned into stone, and then we flash back to that day to...well, I guess that ruined background in the above screenshot is the exception to this show's art style, and the people are the rule, because everything is equally cartoony now. Anyway, it's S-day, and some guy in plainclothes comes bouncing into a chemistry lab he doesn't seem to work at to tell everyone that he's finally going to tell this girl he's into how he feels. Most of the labcoated scientists are shocked or excited at the news, with the exception of the deadpan senior researcher who...hmm. How to describe this piece of character design? I don't think anything short of just showing it would suffice.

He looks like he fell in a vat of Joker chemicals, while also being Noriaki Kakyoin.

The man with the alien plant monster growing out of his scalp, promptly named as Senku, curtly tells the guy that he's pathetic for waiting five years before approaching this girl, and that any excitement he could have felt for this is long expired. Harsh, but probably fair. Brown haired guy yaps at him for a while longer, and eventually Senku asks him if he wants a "love potion" that he cooked up that will boost his sex pheromone output and make him irresistible. Brown haired idiot, now named as Taiju, adamantly refuses to resort to such dishonorable means, and marches out.

It was a beaker of gasoline. Senku just wanted to see if he'd be dumb enough to believe it, and claims to have been "1000% sure" that he'd refuse to drink it regardless of whether or not he did. Um. Okay.

Also, this turns out to be a high school setting. It LOOKED like a high school chemistry lab, but at this point I've seen enough anime featuring "adults" who look and act like teenagers that I didn't want to rush to that conclusion.

Senku goes outside to ask his sickeningly cute crush, Yuzuriha, out. The science club watches out the window, betting on how hard he's going to get turned down. Senku surprises the others by betting he won't get turned down at all, and he ends up winning....but not for the reasons he expected. Before Taiju can finish talking to the girl, an eerie green light and a vortex of wind washes over the sky, and human civilization comes to an end.

Human flesh petrifies, leaving clothing untouched. Trees and grass remain green. Dogs struggle to free their leashes from the hands of what used to be their masters. It is only humans who are effected. Cars pile up into flaming heaps as their drivers petrify at the wheel. Planes crash. Fires rage. Over it all, we hear a girl screaming for her parents; did a few random people remain unaffected?

Well, if so it was very, very few, because after the fires burn themselves out everything is reclaimed by nature. Over centuries, concrete is worn away and trees punch up through what once were streets. Buildings vanish under expanding forests. The art style shifts back again, though I doubt it'll last.

Through this montage of ruin and growth, we have a voiceover from Taiju. He...seems to be conscious this whole time. Somehow.

I'm not sure if we're supposed to take this at face value and infer that he actually remained conscious for multiple thousands of years, or if he just has some sort of occasional lapses of semi-aliveness, or if these are just his thoughts during the initial freezing and eventual unfreezing being superimposed over the interim period. And, bizarrely, the only thing he can think of for this period, however much cumulative time it actually is, is his stupid high school crush. Nothing about his family. Or the future he'd been hoping for, aside from how it pertains to her. Literally just how much he's still thirsting after Yuzuriha.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure this is just his thoughts from the very beginning and end. The wording suggests that he's aware of the passage of time IN REAL TIME, but...he's still thinking of nothing but the girl through it all? Erm...maybe if his thoughts calcified on the specific thought he was having at the time, and he literally couldn't think about anyone or anything else in all that time, but otherwise...just no.

The moody overgrowth montage is interrupted by a yellow droplet splashing onto stone. Senku dousing him with an antidote, perhaps? Shortly afterward, Taiju awakens. A thin layer of rock has formed around him that he needs to break through, and the trees that grew around him have likewise been covered in sediment and buried in young stone. This may have been MILLIONS of years rather than just thousands.

♪ Ayaya~

For a moment, I thought that maybe everyone was just covered in stone, rather than having actually petrified. In which case, maybe the entire human population is actually just in suspended animation inside of those shells. But as soon as he Taiju exploring, we see statues that have been broken by plant or weather action, and they're the same shade of granite gray all the way through.

As he explores, he's still monomaniacally searching for Yuzuriha.

...

I could invent an elaborate headcanon justification here about how having your brain frozen on one thought for millions of years might make it a hard one to break, but at this point I'm pretty sure that this is all supposed to just be a weird sort of dark comedy, so I won't bother. This show's tone is hard to nail down, but farce SEEMS like the best fit.

...

As he searches across the forests and crags that were once his home city, we see one of Taiju's "recent" (depending on how this works) memories. Not long before the Global Petrification Event, he and she each found a petrified bird, and ran into each other outside of a local vet because they were both dumb enough to think this was the work of a feather-hardening disease that the birds could recover from. They bonded over this, and laugh at how stupid they were for assuming these were real birds at all rather than hyperrealistic statuettes someone dropped. Ironic.

Hmm. A handful of birds were effected a day or two before the GPE, but then the big one only effected humans. Sounds like whoever's responsible for the GPE did a test run first.

Eventually, he finds Yuzuriha. She's still at least mostly intact, thanks to a tree that grew around her. He attributes his survival to her, claiming that his doggedly thinking about her is what kept him from shutting down entirely and dying. Uhuh. Sure. Taiju has loved her (in the high school crush sense of "love," I suppose, but still) for thousands of years, longer than anyone has ever loved anyone or anything else.

There's also a message carved on the tree beside her that's worded in a haughty, insulting way that makes it sound like it's from Senku, telling him where to meet him. Senku must have known Taiju, specifically, would be waking up soon, for him to have left a message there where he'd be sure to find it. That yellow droplet was indeed probably him using a chemical he invented to unfreeze Taiju. If so, he must have had a way of knowing that Taiju was more savable than most of the others, or I kind of doubt he'd have been the first choice. Wonder how Senku himself woke up, also? Anyway, he follows the instructions, and soon finds him foraging near the river.

Once that awkwardness is over with, Senku fills him in. It's been 3,700 years since the GPE. Senku has been up for six months, and dedicating his time to working on a cure for whoever else is curable as well as survival. Senku claims to have counted the passing of every single day since the event. This was his own obsession that kept him from fading away. His equivalent to being obsessed with his stupid crush.

Speaking of which, he claims that knew that he knew Taiju would still be savable because he knew that Taiju was way too obsessed with Yuzuriha to let just a few millennia wear him down. Uh...huh.

Then there's this just utterly baffling explanation that Senku deliberately timed his OWN awakening so that it would be late spring during a mild year, using his own counting to keep track. Which um. Earlier, when he said he counted the days to keep himself conscious, I inferred that he was able to see and hear to some extent despite being petrified, but now its clear that he was actually counting the SECONDS all the way through. And he knows the exact date because of that. But, how long did it take him to start counting the seconds after he got frozen? How could HE know how long it took him to start counting the seconds before he got frozen? But even assuming that Senku is just being his pretentious self and doesn't actually know the time nearly as well as he's claiming, there's a much bigger problem here. Senku says that he TIMED HIS OWN AWAKENING so that the climate would be mild and survival as easy as possible. Which means that he had the option of awakening at any time up until then, he just didn't want to yet.

How?

Pretty much everything else so far I can handwave away under rule of funny. I haven't been finding most of it all that funny myself, but I'm fairly sure that that's the intent, so I can roll with it. But outright ignoring your own foundational premise (rather than coming up with a hilariously improbable workaround for it) isn't covered. Like, imagine a Rick and Morty episode where instead of coming up with some knowingly ridiculous troll-physics nonsense or overpreparation to get himself out of trouble, Rick just...shrugged it off with no explanation. That's basically what this is. There's no cleverness or humor in it. This is one kind of bad writing that's as toxic to a farce as it is to any other genre.

Senku also said that the reason he revived Taiju, aside from knowing that his teenaged thirst would have kept him semi-alive all this time, is because he needs a dumb musclehead to do the heavy lifting. Brains alone aren't going to let him survive in this postapocalytic forest. And he just knew that of every strong person in the city, Taiju would be the easiest to save, I guess. Well, granted, the fact that Taiju also seemed to look up to him somewhat during the high school sequence indicates that he's also CONTROLLABLE, and an insufferable teenaged megalomaniac like Senku might well have prioritized that over more practical concerns, so I guess it works.

That said, I'm not sure that he really does need a musclehead to help, given what he's already managed on his own. He says he's just barely managed the minimum to keep himself alive each day, but, well:

Maybe Senku was lying about the counting, and what kept him alive this whole time was his tsundere lust for Taiju. It actually makes the most sense. He doesn't actually need him to build stuff as he claimed, obviously. His stated reason for choosing him over any other person doesn't hold water. And, the one thing that we know can keep you thinking throughout the petrification is being obsessed with your teenaged crush. So yeah, that's probably it then.

Actually, scratch the "probably." Senku has a Freudian slip and practically admits it outright a minute later.

So, they set about foraging and building more stuff than Senku could on his own for a while. Senku also clarifies that he did NOT awaken Taiju. He just...somehow...expected him of all people to awaken, enough to have left a message for him. And his reaction when seeing him awake was "that took you long enough." What.

The yellow liquid that dripped on Taiju before he awoke was nitric acid, which formed naturally in that cave as a result of mineral and animal activity. Senku was also near a source of nitric acid when he awoke, so he suspects that the cure might be related to that particular chemical. However, despite his ongoing experiments, he hasn't been able to replicate those results. Unless he's lying about not having unfrozen Taiju, of course. He's also been testing his concoctions on more of those petrified birds; apparently it was more than just a few that got petrified before the GPE, and he's found a good number.

Of course, the mistake Senku might be making here is in expecting the nitric acid to react the same way with petrified birds that it would with a petrified human. Especially given the evidence that obsessive teen crushes are a vital component in making this work; birds don't really have those, I don't think. I can understand why Senku might be reluctant to resort to (preferably teenaged) human experimentation, of course, but that's probably the only way he'll ever have a chance.

They have a brief argument over whether science is even applicable to this puzzle, and then Senku wishes he had some alcohol. Not to drink, but to mix with the nitric acid to make nital for further experiments. I'm surprised that's something he has trouble making, given everything else they've been crafting, but maybe it's just too early in the year for anything sugary to be harvestable. As luck has it though, Taiju found some wild grapes during his latest foraging trip. They were too sour for eating, but they should still be fermentable. Taiju isn't smart, but he apparently had a not-technically-legal liquor making hobby back in the 21st century, and it pays off here.

The wine they end up with a few weeks later is vastly inferior to what Taiju is used to, as far as drinking goes, but they still have a toast before getting to the distillation work.

All summer, fall, and winter they labor. Their first few attempts at a distillery fail to withstand the heat and pressure, and once winter comes it becomes hard to boil wine and still have enough fuel to warm and cook for themselves. Still, they manage. New clothing is made. Taiju grows a beard and clumsily shaves it while Senku somehow keeps his insane mutant growth of a hairdo. The makeshift laboratory is expanded. By the following spring, they've managed to purify some alcohol and make the nital...and it works.

When they douse the entire bird with the compound, the outer casing cracks away, and the brightly colored swallow bursts free and flies away seemingly no worse for wear. After their year of work, they can finally begin reviving humans. And seemingly not just thirsty teenaged humans, if that swallow's example can be trusted.

Hmm. Maybe everyone actually IS just covered in stone, rather than having been petrified all the way through? Unless that swallow was recovered from the same cave environment as Taiju, it wouldn't have formed the same kind of mineral coating, and Senku did say that it was nital's use as an etching agent that made him want to try it. Though if that's the case, why isn't just scraping or chiseling the coating off also effective?

Also, why didn't that bird die horribly of chemical burns when it woke up covered in nital? This show seems to really want to emphasize these science tidbits, but if that's what it's going for I think it's kind of a glaring oversight for it to forget that nital isn't something you can safely touch. :/

Anyway, that's the end of the pilot.


I'm getting the overwhelming sense that Doctor Stone is a parody of something I'm not familiar with. The absurdities all seem like they're poking fun at something, but I don't know what, and I think I'd find them a lot funnier if I did. As it is, the characters aren't all that compelling for me (largely due to how little there is to either of them. No mention of family or close friends besides the one girl. Barely any more nuanced characterization than "really smart and condescending" and "really dumb and enthusiastic." Etc), and I'm not sure sure how seriously it wants to be taken as an educational program either given the extremities of shonen-logic-over-science that the premise leans on.

It's not the show's fault if I lack the cultural context to get much of the humor, of course. And even if there isn't any satire I'm missing, I wouldn't call it "bad." But - and remember, this is with the caveat that I might well be missing much of the humor - based on this episode, I don't think I'd call it good either. It would work as dumb fun, but the fun is a little sparse at least for me. From a technical standpoint, the overgrown ruins are beautifully drawn, but everything else is just your average well funded anime in terms of sound and visuals. Anyway, I have another episode of this coming up, so my thoughts might change for better or worse.