A Certain Scientific Accelerator is, to an extent, the black sheep of the shows set in Academy City. It’s only 12 episodes, and it consists of only a single arc. The character designs are a little different, and the tone is a good deal darker – not that more bad things happen here (Index and Railgun have their fair share of losses), but the emotions evoked are typically more bleak. What’s more, A Certain Scientific Accelerator stars, of course, Accelerator. And Accelerator is a character who, after his first encounter with Last Order, still qualifies as an antihero at best, compared to Railgun and especially Toma who are fairly straightforward heroic characters.
There are a few things I think that bear mentioning before really digging into the plot of A Certain Scientific Accelerator. The first, I think, needs to be writing for Accelerator as a lead character. Previously, when I talked about A Certain Scientific Railgun, I talked some about the difficulty writing for very powerful characters, and how the Academy City Stories tended to overcome the inherent issues with such leads, particularly in the form of Mikoto herself.
For Accelerator, everything about the struggle is exaggerated. Mikoto was a very powerful character; one of the best in her setting, with a power set that had immense versatility. However, Mikoto was still the kind of person who might be in trouble if something got past her guard, and who had limitations that she would struggle to overcome. Accelerator has one big limiter written into his character in the form of his electrode, which gives him fifteen minutes of ability usage per battery, but when he’s actually in ability mode? He’s basically invincible. Amata Kihara, in Index Season 2, managed to fake him out to be able to punch him normally, and of course Toma has the Imagine Breaker, but neither of those is really the kind of weakness you can recycle, and other than that? I don’t think there’s any enemy or hazard in any of Accelerator’s appearances that has a realistic chance of taking him in a fair fight. And it’s not as though invincibility is his only power; the applications of his ability, both in offense and utility, are fairly impossibly vast and recognized as such. Essentially, all problems for Accelerator fall into basically two camps: social issues, which he can’t really manipulate but that don’t really make for great action, and things that he can solve with vector manipulation. I’m not exactly an authority when it comes to western comic books, but I’m pretty sure Accelerator is one of the few characters who could mix things up with Superman, the character who at least in some incarnations is the go-to example of a powerful character who’s challenging (but not impossible) to write for.
However, this is navigated in part by the other facet I kind of wanted to discuss regarding Accelerator: his status as an antihero. Though, I suppose one should ask: what even counts as an antihero? It is, surprisingly, a concept that most people are familiar with but that is actually a little tricky to define. Somewhere between an ordinary hero, who can be described as a “good guy”, and the scenario where your protagonist is actually a villain, you have a band of perceived morality where the character is an antihero, but both the upper and lower bounds are questionable. Some will reserve the term for only the darkest of scoundrels, the kind that was popular in the 90’s. Others would probably consider anyone without a strict no-kill principle to qualify. And then you get ideas like the Byronic Hero that muddy the waters even further.
For my purposes, I’d say a character is recognizable as an anithero when they’re in a protagonistic role (that is, they’re the character we’re following and who the story is structured to essentially want us to see come out with something resembling a win) and are placed against legitimately worse villainy (they’re not “the bad guy” despite our focal interest), but their actions or demeanor are notable for being presented in a dark light. And Accelerator, as a former villain who still sees himself as a villain (and to be fair, he has a kill count of teen girls usually reserved for genocides, extenuating circumstances or no) is pretty firmly in that territory.
What, though, does that mean for his show? Well, for one, we kind of allow anithero characters to be stronger than their heroic counterparts. It may seem odd, but there’s a reason for this: an antihero is always going to have some degree, greater or lesser, an internal conflict regarding how they use their power. Some are more keenly aware of it while for others it’s mostly for the audience, but there is a dramatic tension in asking not just if they’re going to win, but what they’re going to do if (when) they do. So it’s okay if we lose a little drama in an encounter because Accelerator’s battery is full and it’s a foregone conclusion that he’s going to trash anything that dares stand against him, because we pick it back up in seeing how and to what degree he does the trashing, what gives him pause and what should probably give him pause but doesn’t.
It’s a quite different way of dealing with the power level than Railgun. Accelerator can go all out, or even be a bully, and is still engaging to watch in a way that a more conventional lead wouldn’t be if they had to punch down as much as Accelerator is set up to. That’s not to say the show doesn’t also try to give him some legitimate challenges, but it doesn’t have to be the full story.
So, speaking of the story, let’s get into the plot summary. After a first episode that essentially ties into nothing and largely serves to just remind us of who Accelerator is and what he does (including where he stands on that anti-hero scale right now, mercilessly maiming some of the thugs who come at him yet letting their meek scared girl off with basically a warning when she stands up for her friends rather than any Accelerator-annoying mission), as well as what his supporting cast of returning characters is like (Last Order and Yomikawa Aiho, the latter being a woman in Anti-Skill who acts as a motherly figure for both Accelerator and Last Order, particularly the former), we get into the plot proper.
At first, this seems to largely concern DA (standing for “Disciplinary Action”), a rogue group split off from Anti-Skill who have a much harsher sense of justice for Academy City. They’re harsh, dogmatic, and consist largely of faceless goons. We’re introduced to them when a random girl, depressed due to poor performance at power development, attempts suicide. She survives her attempt, but is scooped up by DA, who finish her off while talking about how she’ll serve the higher purpose of justice in death.
We find out more about this shortly – DA (posing as Anti-Skill) pursues a blonde girl into the hospital where Accelerator is. She tries to talk to him to little effect and DA grabs her, but she drops a picture of Last Order in the process, piquing Accelerator’s interest. He goes out to get some answers out of her, but quickly intuits that the people carrying her away aren’t really Anti-Skill. Accelerator forces the issue, and they bust out a secret superweapon, a big robot called a “Coffin” that uses Level 4 tier Pyrokinesis – hardly a challenge for Accelerator who breaks the robot, incidentally allowing the blonde girl to flee. The real Anti-Skill shows up about as the robot’s central chamber opens and the corpse of the poor girl from earlier falls out (greatly disturbing Accelerator. After all, he’s had enough dead teenage girls for several lifetimes). DA books it, with their central authority executing their own boots on the ground for failure, and Yomikawa is able to defuse the idea that Accelerator would be anything worse than a witness. When he goes back to his room, the blonde girl is there. Accelerator’s initial demands are… less than polite (he nearly chokes her into submission with manipulated air currents), but soon enough we reach the point where he’s willing to accept her as not a threat.
This girl is Esther Rosenthal. By her account, she’s a necromancer from a prestigious line of necromancers (which Accelerator writes off as being just a weird way to think of her Esper power, since he doesn’t properly know about magic being real), who needs Accelerator’s help because she made a terrible mistake and now needs to put the toothpaste back in the tube, which concerns Accelerator at all because Esther’s enemies will likely be coming for Last Order.
And, since I’m front-loading the character explanations in this one, a word about Esther and Necromancy. To most western audiences, at least and especially those with a background in the modern incarnations of the fantasy genre, the idea of a “necromancer” has a very clear and consistent image, an evil wizard who raises the dead, usually en masse, to serve as the rotting legions for the necromancer’s nefarious means. Warhammer’s Nagash; Warcraft’s Kel Thuzad; D&D’s Szass Tam, Acerarak, or Vecna; M:tG’s Liliana Vess… these are what most people, I feel, would tend to think of as necromancers: spooky scary folks (most of them are, themselves, undead) who make it the Night of the Living Dead whenever they show up and are probably trying to take over the world. And Esther doesn’t really resemble that archetype in the least – her character is completely divorced from any of that lot, and her power suite is tangentially related at best.
She can, it turns out, ‘raise the dead’ after a fashion, but it doesn’t look like how the pop-culture necromancers do it, instead using a ritual to have a corpse possessed by a magically-created “psuedo-soul”, allowing said artificial spirit to make use of a body rather than just a paper talisman as long as the spell is maintained. You’re not going to see any groaning rotten zombies or clattering skeletons walking around at Esther’s command. Instead, the focus of her magic seems to be on the soul. After an abortive conflict with her main villain (who pulls his Coffin robots out on seeing Accelerator, despite the fact that their power-boosting magic means he has access to Level 5 equivalent telekinesis), we first see her perform necromancy on the body of that girl who committed suicide and got used to power up the pyrokinetic coffin. The main purpose of the ritual is actually to lay her to rest, since Esther was able to detect that parts of her spirit were still lingering and wouldn’t pass on properly without help. In the process, she ends up conjuring up the girl’s remaining experiences and memories, which Accelerator is able to see and feel when he touches the spiraling power emerging from the body. Only when Esther is imperiled mid-ritual by DA goons come to clean up the evidence of their misdeeds does the psuedo-soul, Huotou, animate the body and take it for a drive in order to protect her master.
As the Toaru shows like to do, this pillages folkloric roots, rather than the common fantasy perception. I can’t say it’s necessarily “more true” to the essence of the concept, but I can say that the dealing with souls, possessed corpses, lingering memories, and mystic talismans does resemble more a Doctor Faustus (“historical” version) or Joseph Curwen than a Kel Thuzad or Liliana Vess. And Esther’s practices, which are said to have roots in both Taoism and Kabbalah, has elements that are recognizably Taoist (the method of animation being similar to Jiangshi) or Kabbalistic (frequent references to the Sephirot and ‘tree of life’). Recall, the roots of the word “Necromancy” indicate it as a form of divination first; the idea of getting knowledge from the dead is probably older than the idea of seizing power and control with a swarm of walking corpses.
As to Esther herself… she’s both a sweetheart and kind of a dork. She clearly has a very strong moral compass, even if it’s a little off true north on some matters, but also clearly hasn’t been socialized very well, having only a limited understanding of the kinds of mores that normal people would adhere to. For instance, when the show does the typical “Walk in on the girl changing” gag, it actually makes a funny scene of it as Esther does not understand why should be bothered. And it’s not because she’s enamored of Accelerator either (there’s a solid argument that she is, but the angle she goes for is student to teacher, not necessarily romantic), it’s because she’s not enough of a normal person to ‘get’ it.
After having that brief talk/confrontation with mad scientist Hishigata and the arrival of Huotou (in a conflict in which Accelerator’s wound, not yet fully healed, reopens briefly), we start to set up the first of two big, complicated conflicts in the show. One of the DA members, escaping the hospital, ran into, fought, and ended up kidnapping a Sister (the previously indistinct Misaka 10046, to be specific. This is one show in which 10032 finally gets a rest) and Esther goes after them, with Accelerator soon to follow. Meanwhile, DA’s trouble-making has displeased some of their shadowy backers, one of whom hires a group called Scavenger to clean up the mess.
If you’ve read my review of A Certain Scientific Railgun, Scavenger has already been introduced from your perspective, but in terms of both production and series chronology, this is their first appearance. They feel more ‘at home’ here, having an extremely nasty disposition that’s toned way down when they appear in Railgun, being not just willing but eager to kill ‘teachers’ (anyone associated with Academy City’s structure as an adult) and to a lesser extent ‘honors students’ (any young person who’s not outright criminal, particularly those who show a more principled streak).
Their membership, as in Railgun, consists of four characters – the leader, whose ability can search out targets with a sort of clairvoyance; an energetic girl who makes durable and powerful constructs out of paper (which she normally conceals as her clothing, leaving her rather exposed when she’s doing impressive things); a sullen melee fighter with power over friction; and a calmer girl with the power of combat chemistry, producing deadly mixtures on the fly (unlike Frenda’s bombs, this one is actually achieved via esper power).
This brings us to a major clash between Anti-Skill (with, of course, Yomikawa there for drama) and DA, the former unaware of what’s coming and just trying to take down what’s been outed as a criminal element. DA fights back tooth and nail, but their ultimate robot weapon is stopped by Scavenger, who are (per their theme) rather indiscriminate about who they’re killing. Esther arrives on scene with Huotou to attempt to rescue Misaka 10046 (who is unconscious in a body bag, and a subject of interest to Hishigata, who is spared the DA purge and watching remotely), but Scavenger has no intention of leaving surviving witnesses, putting Esther, Yomikawa, and 10046 in a bad way. Scavenger viciously mocks teachers, and Esther for being a ‘teacher’s pet’… but then, of course, Accelerator catches up with the scene, gives them a talking to about how they’re prattling on (rejecting Leader’s offer that he should join them in the process – not that she knows who he is), and then declares himself teacher for a day with a lesson plan of pain.
He does his usual act of taking their worst without flinching, causing Scavenger’s leader to lock up with utter terror as she realizes just who she’s facing, the top-ranked Level 5 quickly beating her friends into submission, breaking their best one at a time until the leader herself faints dead away from fear alone. They’re allowed to live, but aren’t in great shape. It’s probable that Accelerator wouldn’t have killed them dead anyway, but their not being arrested is probably helped by the fact that Hishigata sends in the Coffins to snag Misaka 10046 and download her memories, as this is apparently what Hishigata needs to advance his plans. They fly off with 10046 and Accelerator does his best to pursue, leaving Esther and Yomikawa to their devices. The sky chase here is actually pretty well done, with some good back and forth (made possible for a conflict involving Accelerator by the fact that his enemy is just trying to stall him and flee), but it’s worth asking what, exactly, the drama is over. The memory download doesn’t look pleasant, and running off with a Misaka is in bad form, but it would help to know what the evil plan is.
Which is probably why, with the chase still hanging, we get a flashback episode showing who Hishigata and the girl with him are, what their evil plan is, and how Esther figured into all of this. This is also effectively what we get as a breather between the two major conflicts in the show: DA is more or less finished (they still give us some faceless mooks to die, but not much else) and it’s on to the more esoteric and personal antagonists, like Esther needed to deal with in the first place.
So, on to that flashback. We see that Esther came to Academy City to assist Hishigata and his sister, Hirumi, with their research, starting with efforts to discover where in the body Esper powers are housed, and ultimately hoping to use her necromancy and its study of the refinement of the soul to work on upgrading Esper powers (much like the Coffin mechs do when loaded with the dead – Huotou’s host was Level 2 while the Coffin that held her used her power at Level 4) with the goal of allowing Hirumi (and eventually others) to ascend to the mythical, god-like Level 6. Esther bonded with the siblings and became their friend, being especially close with Hirumi. However, Hirumi had a terminal condition that even her brother wasn’t aware of the extent of. She hid her grief until it reached a breaking point, causing her to force Hishigata and Esther’s hands by committing suicide, leaving them a message and trusting Esther to bring her back. In her grief, Esther tried to do just that, even though she knew it was something that should have been impossible to do properly. This resulted in Hirumi’s body being possessed by the psuedo-soul Taowu. Unlike Huotou, who’s servile and robotic, Taowu proves to be a cunning manipulator, playing Hirumi to her overjoyed brother while mocking Esther for her foolishness. This lead Esther and Hishigata to have a falling-out in which Hishigata got away with most of Esther’s psuedo-soul talismans (used to produce the Coffins), leaving Esther with her need to stop Hishigata’s ambitions to empower “Hirumi” and correct her mistake by returning Hirumi to a peaceful death.
To that end, Esther prepares a special dagger that should be able to put Taowu down, and heads towards the final conflict herself.
What of the deal with 10046, though? Well, according to Taowu, ten thousand lives (and deaths) is what is needed for a soul to reach a new level of existence. Normally (of course) achieved through reincarnation, at least in theory, the Misaka Network’s memories of ten thousand and thirty one deaths would be the last ingredient for Taowu’s necromantic ascension into a godlike form – not the Esper Level 6, but still something transcendent and world-shaking. With that known, it’s time to come back to the present.
Accelerator takes on the Coffin mechs and manages to defeat them, saving 10046 in the process (with some fairly impressive work with his ability. The enemy can use level 5 teleportation on anything they can see? Blind them by whipping sand into a tornado until the friction turns it into a fire tornado. That gets at least some credit.) but the necessary memories of ten thousand deaths have been downloaded, allowing Hishigata to finalize his ascension formula for the entity he believes is his sister Hirumi.
Esther, however, is making her way right there. At the last moment she appears and, unable to reason with Hishigata to get him to stop, attempts to stab Taowu/Hirumi with the blade she prepared earlier, which should end the possession. Hishigata, however, steps up and takes the knife for his sister, leaving Esther horrified at the blood literally on her hands for the remaining seconds necessary for the program to complete itself.
Expecting Hishigata to die and now empowered, Taowu drops the deception, mocking Esther and revealing itself as being not just Taowu, but the preserved spirit of Isaac Rosenthal, a former head of the family who tied his soul to the necromantic process in order to experience ten thousand deaths with continuity and in so doing gain godlike power. Isaac-Taowu-Hirumi sprouts a massive new body, a plant-like abomination of flesh and spirit with what’s left of Hirumi as a hood ornament and a massive radiant Sephirot rising into the sky over Academy City. It’s actually worth noting the color here – the Sephirot structure of Hirumi’s body is fully chromatic, shining prism-like light down on everything… but the world it illuminates is rendered gray, as though the only color allowed to exist is that which comes from the creature, washing out the rest of the scene and being more striking by comparison. It makes a very impressive visual design for the climactic clashes. It looks spectacular, and feels desperate, a sense intensified by the fact that Accelerator is running out of battery after his previous stunts.
We get an extended fight over the building Hishigata was using as his lair. Anti-Skill is attempting to storm in to deal with the monster apparent and, more pressingly, DA holdouts. Said monster, meanwhile, is spreading root/tentacle things everywhere and devouring what people it pleases as it mutates into more and more complex forms… though snacking on DA for fuel seems to give Isaac a sort of psychic indigestion, as he begins to recite DA’s dogma in fugue moments apart from his normal evil monologue about becoming the perfect ultimate being.
Esther, Huotou, Accelerator, and Misaka 10046 (who seems to be taking a shine to Accelerator) make their way inward and upward to have a real confrontation with Isaac. They’re eventually able to deliver a fatal blow, with everyone doing their parts, but all that magical power doesn’t die quietly, and Accelerator’s turn comes trying to keep that from obliterating Academy city with a huge explosion. He uses his last seconds of ability mode to contain the magic and redirect it straight up (proving that his ability can work on magic, which is interesting). Hishigata succumbs to his wounds (after a brief moment where Hirumi, herself at the end, says goodbye and passes on) but everyone else manages to be pulled out in more or less acceptable condition.
After that, Accelerator is back in the hospital (now with 10046 and Last Order fighting over who tends to him, much to his chagrin), Esther deanimates Huotou and says her goodbyes, not intending to stay in Academy City, and we end with a blatant hook for the next season that doesn’t presently exist when Accelerator is chilling with his canned coffee only for a strange woman in a wedding dress to fall out of the sky to land near him. Never a dull day in Academy City.
While, when it comes to structure and content, A Certain Scientific Accelerator may be the black sheep of the series, it’s still solid in terms of quality. The plot isn’t the most emotionally wrought thing in the setting (after all, Accelerator himself is essentially a bystander to the main conflict, and unlike the more shiny heroic leads he doesn’t get particularly invested in it) but it is good, with some real pathos for Esther. The action isn’t the strongest in the series, but that’s mostly because A Certain Scientific Railgun is an unreasonable show to have to compete with on that score. In isolation Accelerator’s action is pretty good. It has the kind of intensity and creativity you want to see out of the setup. On the whole, I think it’s a solid entry that’s perfectly entertaining in its own right. As for the letter grade, that gets it a B+ along with the solid recommendation.