Dr. Stone S1E2: “The King of the Stone World”

The second and last episode of Dr. Stone that XHurt commissioned. The pilot wasn't my cup of tea, but I didn't hate it either, so let's see how this goes.


Start with an overly long and detailed "last time on" sequence that spends way too much time on reintroducing the basic premise of the show, and on stupid Taiju and his stupid crush. We get it already, you don't need to keep reminding us. From there, fortunately, we segue very naturally into the continuation.

Taiju is asking Senku who they should awaken first, now that they have what seems to be a universal cure for the petrification. Senku doesn't have any strong preferences. I imagine that if they could identify statues that used to be scientists, engineers, doctors, farmers, etc, then he could probably make some strategic choices, but with the ruins this buried and overgrown there's not really any way for them to do that. So he leaves the choice to Taiju, which is basically the same thing as choosing himself since it's not exactly a mystery who Taiju's going to pick.

Roll intro. As expected, it's pretty generic, just with the same incongruously pretty forest as the rest of the show. Characters walking around, posing, and doing zany science stuff with archaic tools. Forgettable, but not bad, Jpop-ish song. Only one visual really stood out to me, both because it's cool looking and because it seems almost totally divorced from the rest of the show.

Who is this character? They look like they're from a totally different anime, in which they've just jumped off their dragon mount and are about to draw an oversized glowing katana.

After the OP we return to the two boys standing before the frozen Yuzuriha, half enveloped in that tree. Senku warns Taiju that he just tested the nital treatment on a statue that had been broken since the GPE, and he ended up with a corpse. The statue's condition is important, and the parts of Yuzuriha they can't see may or may not be intact.

Taiju is disturbed to hear this, but more because of Senku's morbid delivery than any actual surprise. It's time to give this a try and hopefully quench the 3705 years of thirst.

Before they can though, Taiju remembers that Yuzuriha is going to be naked aside from her mysteriously indestructible headphones when they wake her up, and Dio's Senku at the mere thought of him seeing her like that.

Senku tells him that modesty should not be a concern given the severity of their situation, and that it was always a dumb and illogical concept anyway that their new world would be better off without. But, Taiju isn't hearing it, and insists on extricating the statue from the tree and arranging to protect her modesty before the reanimation. Senku grudgingly goes along with it. They gripe at each other as Taiju carries the statue (seemingly effortlessly, because his strength seems to be proportionate to his stupidity) back to their house to clothe it, but on the way they're confronted with a novel hazard.

Given how surprised they seem to see this lion, I'm assuming this is the first one they've run into in the 18 months since Senku awoke. And, lions are very much not indigenous to Japan. I guess some may have escaped from a zoo and managed to create a breeding population, but then it's odd that the boys wouldn't have seen one until now. Maybe lion territory is some distance away, and this is a rare outcast male that's wandered further than usual? Either that, or there's something much weirder going on.

They run away, which is a really, really dumb thing to do when you're faced with a big cat, and somehow this manages to work out for them. Bad form, show; this would have been the perfect place to drop another science tidbit about animal behavior and how to handle dangerous encounters. Anyway, they outrun the lion  and tumble into a ravine that it doesn't bother chasing them into. Senku suspects, as I did, that the lions must have escaped from a zoo and become the new apex predator of the island. It's very strange that they never saw so much as a footprint until now, though.

Then Senku tells Taiju that the only reason they escaped that encounter must be that the lions aren't used to humans, and that that one was likely too weirded out by them to commit to them being prey. Running away from it exactly like a prey animal would likely didn't do them any favors on that front, but regardless. Now that the lions have seen them, Senku insists, it's only a matter of time until they come back for them, and odds are they won't even make it to camp before then. I was about to say that this is another case of Senku's knowledge having a gaping blind spot, just like with the winemaking last episode, but then a minute later it actually happens.

...

Sigh...

Okay. If this show was JUST trying to be a dumb comedy about a couple of weirdos surviving the post-apocalypse, I wouldn't be making an issue of this. But it's also been throwing science tidbits at us with almost Bill Nye like rapidity, with the exposition about feral animal populations in this very sequence being one of them. And looking at this from a science education perspective...god, where do I start?

First of all, lions are both social and territorial. That means that you have fairly large numbers of them (at least, by apex predator population standards) continually inhabiting the same area. It beggars belief that Senku and Taiju wouldn't have seen at least footprints or stool from the lions after living here for over a year. Especially if Taiju has been hunting pigs as the foraging montage in the last episode showed; that's exactly the kind of prey that lions typically go for, so he's been hunting in the exact same places that they'd be hunting.

Second, and much more bafflingly, the show seems to be asserting that that first male lion wasn't sure what to make of them when it saw them, but then ran back and told the rest of its pride, who made a collective decision to go kill the two weird animals that he'd already decided NOT to pursue on his own. That's not how...well, that's not how ANY predator behaves, as far as I know, but it's especially bizarre to put a male lion of all things in this role. While male lions DO sometimes participate in the hunt (despite some pop cultural rumors to the contrary), they don't act as scouts for the rest of the pride.

It's just such a missed opportunity to work in an actual zoology lesson. If they wanted to have something slowly stalking them throughout their trip back home, they should have just used a tiger. Tigers are solitary and claim very large territories (so it's much likelier you could live near one for an extended period without seeing any signs of it), they're known for their unpredictable behavior, and they've been known to stalk their prey for hours before attacking on a cue that nobody's been able to figure out.

Running from one would have still been stupid, though. Cats. Moving objects. This part isn't esoteric.

...

Taiju is strong, but he's never been much of a fighter per se. Not that it would matter anyway against a pack of at least 3-4 lions, but regardless. They need someone who can help defend them, so during the interim while the lions were making up their mind they headed for the statue of someone Taiju recognized in the previous episode. Shishio Tsukasa, the "strongest primate high schooler."

Primate?

What? As opposed to the strongest high schoolers of other mammalian orders?

Also, look at this shot and tell me that it isn't a deliberate Battle Tendency reference:

Don't come crying to me when the sun gets conquered, Taiju.

Well, the lions catch up and surround them, cue much less facetious ayaya than last time as they pour the nital they'd meant for Yuzuriha onto Shishio. He wakes up completely battle ready, without any shock or confusion, and needs only a two sentence situational overview from Senku before breaking out of his mineral shell and punching the entire pride into retreat without taking a single scratch in return.

I guess he's the ridiculous cartoon teenaged martial artist to Senku's ridiculous cartoon teenaged scientist. Also, now that I can see his skin and hair colors it looks like we've met that Final Fantasy character from the OP.

...

Okay. Another missed opportunity, and this time it's very obviously a consequence of the show deciding to put the shonen ahead of the science.

A much cleverer approach to the "escape the lions by waking someone else up" concept would have been for them to go to the biggest, densest crowd of statues they could find and splash the nital on ALL of them. Predators are much less likely to attack a herd of large-ish animals than they are to go for a lone individual or pair who wandered off on their own.

Introducing a ton of new characters this early in the show would obviously be a problem, as would the question of how much nital they actually had prepared. But...that's actually another problem that replacing the lions with a lone hunter like a tiger could solve. Even the best fighter in the world isn't going to make much of a difference against a group of lions, but he might have a chance against a lone tiger if he had two other people helping him.

So yeah, there's at least two obvious ways they could have fit some more real science into this part. They just chose to forgo that opportunity in lieu of throwing in a superhuman fistfighter, because that really helps this show stand out from the crowd amirite?

...

Shishio tells them that as long as he's with them, they'll have no need to fear attack, or suffer any shortage of prey. His rapid adjustment to this really is coming across as spooky. Taiju is excited to have this new team member aboard, but Senku is nervous. While Shishio examines the body of a lion he killed(!), Senku quietly points out to Taiju that with Shishio's strength and combat ability, he could easily make himself a tyrant if he chose to.

Where Taiju's imagination goes with that is unsurprising.

Fortunately, Shishio doesn't seem to have any interest in dominance. Our next character establishing moment for him is him asking for a stone knife to skin the lion with, and before starting work he does this:

Is this kid from an actual hunter gatherer tribe?

Shishio's religious display seems to reassure Taiju. I'm not sure that it reassures me, but for now it's not like they have any choice but to keep Shishio anyway. Also, Senku claims to have eaten lion before, but I'm pretty sure he's just fucking with Taiju.

They bring Shishio and his lion derivatives back home, and he seems earnestly impressed with what they've managed to build. When they tell him that meat is a rarity for them, with Taiju only managing to snag the rare rabbit or small pig, Shishio promises he can solve that problem handily. Cue a montage of him spearing fish, beating fully grown boars to death, and literally leaping out of tree branches to snatch birds out of the air. He also smashes his way through fallen rocks to recover more statues hidden underneath them, for later reanimation.

Basically, yeah.

Okay, I think I see what the show is doing now. It's not really a Family-Matters-post-Steve-Urkel-takeover type of thing with the wacky supergenius amid a crowd of otherwise mundane people, so much as it's just cartoonishly exaggerating the archetypal members of human society. The warrior. The inventor/artisan. The laborer. They're all over-the-top, almost Platonic embodiments of those niches.

I'm not sure how well this plays with the science education aspect of this show. Or with the shonen-y stuff like "the true love of a teenager can keep him alive and sane through 3,000 years of total paralysis." These three things all work in isolation, but the show seems to still be finding the right balance to make them complement one another rather than get in each other's way. It's a fascinating concept, and even if I find it to ultimately not work out it'll surely at least be an interesting failure.

Next order of business, now that they have more free hands and fewer pressing concerns, is to get ahold of what Senku considers the most important discovery in human history. Not fire (which they already have), or agriculture, or animal husbandry. Calcium Carbonate.

Okay Senku, you're going to have to work to sell me on this.

As they powder seashells to obtain it, Senku says there are four critical uses for CaCO3. Fertilizer, of course. It's not essential for farming (which is why I'd say that farming itself is a bigger deal), but lime fertilizer does make growing things markedly easier. Cement, which will let them reinforce their structures and build furnaces for metallurgy with much less difficulty than it would otherwise involve. And, when combined with oil and sodium nitrate refined from seaweed they harvest, it can be used to make a primitive soap. The most important piece of medicine you can make and use in a stone age society; a "doctor stone."

Oh, right! I forgot you can refine lye from limestone powder. Okay, Senku has a strong argument then. He could have just said "soap" instead of "calcium carbonate," but showing off how smart he is in really dumb ways like that is very much in character. Anyway, as Senku points out, its lucky that neither of them got very sick in the past year, but with soap they'll be able to greatly reduce the chances of it going forward.

Taiju asks what the fourth use of CaCO3 is, and Senku tells him that he never said there were four, only three, and convinces Taiju that he's too dumb to have remembered correctly. Notably, Shishio was not within hearing range when he started his speech, and is now.

God, Senku was really projecting his own megalomaniacal leanings onto Shishio.

It gets worse when Shishio, in his usual hunter-gatherer way, praises Senku for his boundless knowledge and intellectual support for their survival. Senku's inner monologue reacts like this:

The fuck?

What the hell is Senku's problem?

This does explain his own constant abrasive behavior, insults, and arrogance. For Senku, anything besides that is a veil hiding sinister motives. I'm just wondering what the hell kind of background he must have come from to have ended up thinking and feeling this way.

Shishio sees that he's upset Senku somehow, and backs off with an apology. When the other two go to sleep, we see Senku working on some sort of wooden contraption.

Is he hollowing out a barrel tube?

I didn't think calcium carbonate was an ingrediant in gunpowder, but looking online it can apparently be used as a substitute for potassium nitrate (saltpetre).

Earlier, when Senku was going on about the dangers of strongman tyranny, he specifically said that *without guns* they'd be helpless against a fighter like Shishio.

Goddamn, he just can't risk anyone being able to challenge his authority. He's EXACTLY what he accused Shishio of being.

Cut ahead some time to Shishio stands at the seashore, fishing spear in hand, and muses on the natural beauty and pleasant life they have for themselves.

I really feel like this guy got Yithian body swapped into modern Japan from the paleolithic or something.

He then recounts a story from his childhood, which surprisingly does NOT seem to have taken place in 800,000 BC. The seashell-harvesting reminds him of a time when he went down to the nearest beach that wasn't covered by docks or boardwalks to collect some shells for his little sister who wanted to dress up as a mermaid. Unfortunately, those stretches of beaches were private property, and the drunken landowner who caught the child trespassing beat him unconscious for it.

Apparently, that landowner is preserved in statue form here on this shore he once owned.

Or, well. He was preserved.

Senku asks if he's aware that he just murdered a human being. Shishio seems surprised by the implication that Senku is planning to revive literally everyone. At this point, I'm surprised by it too, considering how much time and surplus resources they've accumulated without him unfreezing any more. He'd been sure Senku wasn't ever going to bother saving this guy, and he's still not sorry at all for having eliminated that potential.

Shishio then lays out an anarcho-primitivist manifesto, going on about how modernity was on the brink of killing the world before the GPE, and that it would be a crime against the universe and against themselves for them to just bring that back. Shishio says they should only revive the young and openminded, and avoid the old exploiter classes as much as possible, taking care to prevent a hierarchical, consumerist culture like their last one from occurring again.

Senku says that he plans to save everyone. Though as I pointed out, his actions don't really point to that. Also, he doesn't care about nature or happiness, just science, and science would stop happening if Shishio got his way.

End episode.


That ended up getting surprisingly nuanced, at the end.

What I found most striking was that Senku and Shishio are both projecting their own worst traits onto their ideological enemies. Shishio makes plenty of effective abstract arguments against the old way, but the only specific anecdote he shared was...a bigger, stronger guy physically assaulting him for wandering onto his territory with nobody around to interfere. That's not a crime of civilization, or technology, or capitalism. That's the sort of crime that those things have made us safer from with every passing century. We might not know how similar paleolithic societies were to historical hunter-gatherer ones, but the archaeological evidence we do have suggests a similar level of ambient violence on average. And, even if that wasn't the case, Shishio just acted out the worst of lawless society in front of us when he killed a man without warning over a petty grudge. He also has had no problems with enjoying the fruits of the pre-GPE scientific culture while claiming to reject it; someone like him could never do what Senku does, and he'd much rather live in a world that has room for those things.

At the same time, while Senku hasn't murdered anyone as far as we know, I'm not sure that that makes him the good guy in this dispute. He's not as hypocritical and self-unaware as Shishio, but he's not far shy of it. He claims that being complementary and polite is a sign of veiled intentions and treachery, when within the minute he had deceived and manipulated Taiju using insults and smugness. He immediately feared that Shishio would try to become a tyrant, but unlike Senku himself Shishio has expressed zero interest in exerting power over others for its own sake. Where his projection is most obvious is in his accusing Shishio of the one sin he's least guilty of; dishonesty. Unlike Senku, who's always keeping things close to his chest and most definitely isn't putting his money where his mouth is when it comes to noble goals, Shishio has never been anything but completely honest and forthright about anything. He didn't pretend to not know what he was doing, when Senku accused him of murder. If he actually had veiled intentions against Senku when he complimented him to his face, I don't think he'd have been so willing to openly tell him his manifesto just now.

I'd be afraid to turn my back to Senku. But I'd also be afraid to face Shishio. I suspect that Taiju, the erstwhile lumpenprole who's only followed orders and deferred to the others thus far, is going to have to rise to the occasion to resolve this.

This whole sociological drama is pretty well executed. It reminds me a lot of "A Discourse by Three Drunkards on Government," by Nakae Chomin, with its use of a few characters in an isolated setting as personifications of different social currents.

However, I still think it's a messy fit with the Magic School Bus-esque science education aspect, and with the feelings-over-logic-and-sense high school centered shonen fantasy element. The screwball comedy side of the show...I don't know. I think that could work in conjunction with any one of the others, but with all of them together it just makes the tone even harder to follow. Episode 2 is a vast improvement over the pilot, and the show definitely has the potential to continue improving from here, but it's still got a lot to figure out.