So, A Certain Magical Index is the kind of series you don’t expect a consensus on. Some people are going to hate that it’s the type of show you can turn your brain off for, others will love it. Some people are going to hate how much effort it goes through to explain every spell and power, others will enjoy the technobabble and mythical references. Some will love the main character as a comedy victim and appreciate his ability to be a badass despite also being kind of a moron, others will despise how he always gets into contrived situations and never understands anything. One thing that most people seem to agree on, though, is this: Mikoto Misaka, aka Railgun? She was pretty cool. Not only is she a spunky, sporty, tsundere middle-schooler with top-tier power (making her fun), she’s also got one of the best and deepest emotional arcs in all of Index with the Sisters arc. And, for her well-deserved popularity, she was granted her own spinoff: A Certain Scientific Railgun.
Before getting into the show itself (and it’s going to be a long one, with three 24-episode seasons) I’d like to bring back a topic I first discussed way back at the start of the blog when commenting on Kaze no Stigma: it’s difficult to write for characters that are powerful and versatile, especially relative to the rest of their setting. And Railgun is, absolutely, in that bracket. She’s both objectively extremely powerful and the third most powerful Esper in Academy City (when her show doesn’t deal with the magic side). There’s not a whole lot that can really go toe-to-toe with her as a real threat under fair conditions. And, more than that and much more than for her appearances in Index, Mikoto’s power allows her a lot of secondary effects that make her shockingly versatile in a number of scenarios. She doesn’t just throw shocks and railgun shots around; she nearly flies around by magnetizing herself to buildings, manipulates objects in a manner not unlike telekinesis, manipulates iron sand (apparently endemic to Academy City) to form shields and constructs, she even hacks computers with her mastery of electricity.
Because of this, the show has a big challenge when it comes to making her struggles compelling or interesting. And, I’m going to go ahead and say this at the start, A Certain Scientific Railgun hits every note of how to properly challenge and write for an overpowered heroic character. Over the course of the show, Railgun runs across some of the few individuals more powerful than her. She faces down against foes that can use guile to subvert and avoid her abilities or utilize their own well enough to threaten her despite the power gap. She goes into battle when she’s far and away not at 100%. She encounters “Kryptonite” scenarios where her powers are artificially rendered less useful or even useless. And, most critically, she’s placed in scenarios that can’t be won by brute force alone, where the stakes and the conflict aren’t the type to be solved just by shooting it away. Because Mikoto’s struggles both have a sense of the potential for failure and an emotional and dramatic backbone, the show works beautifully.
Railgun also introduces a mostly new supporting cast, rather than leaning on other recurring characters from Index. Toma appears at the end of the Sisters arc, of course, and again in one of Season 3’s arcs, but he’s overall deemphasized. Accelerator, similarly, shows up for his villain role and then (since Mikoto wasn’t part of any of his later arcs, even through the Sisters) pretty much never again. Shirai Kuroko, Mikoto’s roommate and friend, has a massively expanded role. In Index, she wasn’t much of a character, mostly serving to support the cast in trouble, disapprove of Toma, and maybe have a little much in the way of affection for “big sister” Mikoto. In Railgun, she’s given a much louder comedic persona, intensifying her obsession to the point where she might outright hit “funny yandere” levels of interest. Mikoto, of course, has none of it and ultimately ends up shocking Kuroko about as much as Index bites Toma (in literal events, not per-appearance).
However, comedy isn’t all that Kuroko is good for. She gets some fairly badass moments of her own, and also serves as a frequent plot hook seeing that she’s a member of Judgment, the student-police organization that, along with the proper adult police of Anti-skill, maintains much of the order in Academy City. Mikoto actually knows most of the rest of the supporting cast through Kuroko. They include Kuroko’s co-workers at Judgment, Konori Mii and Uiharu Kazari, as well as Uiharu’s friend, Saten Ruiko. Uiharu and Saten are the more focal of these supporting characters, and shouldn’t be taken lightly despite being a Level 1 and Level 0 respectively. Uiharu is still a Judgment member in good standing, is brave enough to stand up when she’s needed, and is great with computers (to the point where she’ll usually do the hacking while Mikoto is doing the fighting). Saten is also pretty darn courageous, and has her ear to the ground in a big way, with a nose for urban legends and rumors that often have a grain of truth and usually tie into the main plot. Over time they’re joined by a classmate of Misaka: Kongou Mitsuko, a Level 4 air manipulator who, with her two hangers-on, starts out as more of a bully than a friend.
After dealing with a number of individual cases with strange components, as well as indulging in some episodes of backstory and character building (which are quite welcome, but do tend to slow the pace a little) we get into the meat of the arc surrounding the “Level Upper”, a mysterious sound file that causes those who listen to it to develop their Esper powers, gaining levels literally overnight. However, the users of the Level Upper start falling into comatose states. This ends up including Saten, who managed to track down her own Level Upper in order to unlock her ability and escape the scorn that Level 0’s often suffer in Academy City. With their friend on the line, Mikoto and Judgment manage to track down the creator of the Level Upper, a scientist called Dr. Kiyama who was briefly met earlier – a woman of neither social graces nor particular shame, but apparently strong convictions. Her scheme almost at fruition, she ends up kidnapping Uiharu and making a run for it.
With that, we end up learning Kiyama’s motivation, how she was once a researcher who became the teacher for a group of orphans (called “Child errors” in Academy City), slowly bonding with the kids and coming to care for them, only to see them used in a morally dubious experiment that saw them put into comas. Kiyama’s research with the Level Upper is meant to give her the power to oppose the shadowy directors that orchestrated such an outcome. While sympathetic with Kiyama’s motives, her means are, of course, terrible, which brings them into conflict. Mikoto squares off against Kiyama who, thanks to her acting as the core of the Level Upper network, can use the powers of everyone who has used the Level Upper, at a heightened level of ability. Mikoto both beats her down and talks her down, but it’s not quite over: the merging of the abilities of the “AIM Fields” (sort of psychic, well, fields) of Espers, as merged by the Level Upper, manifests as a horrific monster, which provides a properly epic battle for the survival of Academy City. In the aftermath, Kiyama’s research and Judgment’s connections are able to be used to save the victims of the Level Upper, but her Child Error students are still, largely, unaccounted for.
We spend some more time focusing on the characters, with a swimsuit episode with the girls, and another where Saten and some of the other students who experienced the Level Upper are given a special training camp, hoping that their glimpse of power would let them develop their ability for real.
This leads us to the next arc, a minor one dealing with an armed gang of Level 0’s called Skill Out. These armed games are typically a nuisance, owing to the fact that they’re out-powered by Espers and thus can’t typically bully them very effectively. Of course, numbers do have their own value, and the Skill Out gangs have been getting more numerous and bold. It turns out, though, that Konori has ties to one of these gangs, as she was romantically entangled with its former leader, back when the gang was more of a mutual aid group for the powerless Level 0s, whose identity and crew have been stolen by the man who presumably killed him for it. Said old flame returns, though, with an interest in ending some of the more violent abuses done by the “Big Spider” gang. It’s a good thing to have his help, too, as the gang has come into possession of a strange device that emits a frequency that disables Espers, interfering with their powers and even, with prolonged exposure, knocking them unconscious. While the arc generally serves just to introduce that plot device for later, the growth and development for the tertiary character, Konori, is actually quite welcome.
Along with the next few episodes, which also have a lot of lower deck material, this is something that’s rather different about the first season of Railgun as opposed to the later seasons and, to a lesser extent, the rest of the Toaru series: it’s willing to take a much more sedate pace at times in order to build up its characters and explore more of Academy City, really soaking in some general atmosphere. This is a bit of a double-edged sword: the more sedate episodes are nice, but they don’t really play to the strengths of A Certain Scientific Railgun or the series overall. It’s remarkable that the characters play as well as they do in less intense scenarios, but we still want to see them taking on mad science or weird sorcery in dramatic fashion.
Which brings us to the last major arc of season 1, which we’re eased in to. We meet Uiharu’s new roommate, Haruue, who has a missing old friend named Banri that she seems to be telepathically linked to . That telepathic link also seems to be related to “Poltergeisting” incidents related to nasty little AIM Field knots. If that sounds somewhat familiar, like it’s possibly related to Dr. Kiyama and the weird monster that got summoned when she took on the weave of far too many Esper powers at once, then you’ve been paying attention. It’s not the exact same phenomenon, but it is connected. Haruue and Banri, it turns out, were two of Kiyama’s students, Banri now being one of the ones who’s locked in a coma. Kiyama, working with the Frog-faced doctor, is attempting to wake up her students, but the attempts are causing the poltergeisting incidents, centered on Haruue because of her link to Banri.
That isn’t the biggest problem, though: An official behind an Anti-Skill associated group, Therestina Kihara, seems to be a bit sinister. If the name “Kihara” sounds familiar, that’ because it’s the name of a whole clan of dark-side scientists and researchers, including Amata Kihara (who Accelerator squared off with towards the end of Season 2) and Gensei Kihara, Therestina’s grandfather and the mastermind behind both the experiments that hurt Dr. Kiyama’s students and Project Level 6 Shift that (while not yet introduced in Railgun) saw the slaughter of over ten thousand Misaka clones.
And, what do you know, it turns out she’s got evil plans for the kids, intending to use them to refine crystallized Esper essence, hoping to (like many villains in the science-side shows) attain Level 6. She’s also been testing other armaments, including powerful mech suits, and that anti-Esper sonic weapon that Skill Out had. Mikoto, Kongou, Konori, Kuroko, Kiyama, Uiharu, and Saten all get involved in uncovering Therestina’s deception and attempting to rescue the unfortunate children she’s trying to spirit away from any hope of help for her evil plans.
The final battles of the arc are really amazing. Railgun has a way of topping itself and giving something even more dynamic and involved every time you think it’s done the best, but that doesn’t mean that the season 1 action, especially this last sequence, doesn’t hold up. We have car chases, gunfighting, and an onslaught of superpowers used in all manner of different ways, leading up to a final standoff between Mikoto and Therestina, the latter with a weapon that supposedly duplicates Mikoto’s own Railgun.
When the smoke clears, of course, Therestina’s plans are put to ruin, Mikoto and the others are out safely, and Dr. Kiyama is finally able to safely wake up her former students, rescuing them from the nightmare they’d been forced to live in. All’s well that ends well, and we close the door on season 1 of A Certain Scientific Railgun.
The second Season (technically “A Certain Scientific Railgun S”) is a bit of a different beast, as after an initial episode to get us reintroduced to the main players (as well as the significant bump in animation quality; not that the first season was bad, but the latter ones have clearly had better), we embark on the long, strange trip that is the Sisters Arc. Not that you’d know it at first – we start much earlier in the timeline than Toma does (a general truth for Railgun, I suppose: S2 Railgun roughly takes place during S1 Index, and S3 Railgun during S2 Index, with Railgun season 1 having mostly been before even the first season of Index, chronologically speaking) and don’t immediately get the Sisters as the main hook.
It’s also a different beast in that we’re not going to be seeing a whole lot of Kuroko, Konori, Saten, or Uiharu for pretty much the whole of the season. They are still in the show and they are still important at least from time to time, but between the loss of that sedate pace that existed in season 1 and the fact that Mikoto, reasonably or not, has a strong determination to face most of her trials this season alone and not get anyone else in trouble, their screen time is a fraction of what it once was overall.
Discussing as much brings me back to what I said at the beginning about writing for powerful characters, and how Mikoto manages to both go all-out with her ability, more and more as the show goes on, and still have compelling drama. In season 1 this was largely accomplished with technical challenges that got around her power level. In season 2, we struggle with a much more natural set of limiters, in which Mikoto is usually trying to do things that aren’t easily accomplished by strength alone.
To start with, we actually trace a seemingly unrelated rumor of money cards being found in the back alleys and hidden places of Academy city; a rumor that Saten, of course, is eager to chase. These money cards should technically be turned in to the authorities, and the idea that they’re being intentionally left around is a possible issue, because of course the question is why. Mikoto ends up tracking this down and encountering a girl, Nunotaba, who has a pretty creepy mannerism, taking out some Skill Out thugs with fear alone. She’s also a genius who took part in Project Radio Noise, also known as the Sisters project, the original effort to clone Mikoto. However, the effort to mass-produce Level 5 espers wasn’t a success, causing the project to be canned. Nunotaba alludes to experiments (which viewers will probably know to mean Accelerator’s battles with the clones) which she was trying to stop by putting human eyes where Academy City’s security system was otherwise blind. However, seeing as this just got her tracked down and imperiled, it’s time for a change in strategy.
At first, Mikoto doesn’t want to believe it. She does a little hacking and a little breaking and entering to get information on the Sisters. She manages to confirm the original project, but only learns that it was mothballed, while the audience is let in on the fact that there’s more, with one of the clones being brought in just after Mikoto’s own little visit to scrub the data.
Shortly after that, Mikoto encounters one of her clones out in Academy City, Misaka 9982. Actually, this is one of the last points where the show really breathes, spending most of the episode with Mikoto out with her friends and, parallel with that, the creation of 9982 (being awakened from a cloning vat, educated with a brain-programming machine called Testament, and finally clothed and made ready for her time in the limelight). Mikoto only encounters her clone at the end of the episode. In the next one, they spend a good amount of time bonding, with Mikoto inadvertently showing her clone a fairly good day of life, but being unable to learn more from her due to not being able to solve a passcode the clone gives her. After they part, Mikoto does some more snooping, and this time learns about Level 6 Shift… and the fact that Experiment #9982 is set to take place.
Mikoto tries to rush to find the place while Misaka 9982 battles Accelerator. She arrives in time to see the sister she met and spent the day with, bloody and dismembered, be finished off when Accelerator uses a train car to squash her. Mikoto attacks Accelerator in a rage but, quite naturally, he shrugs off even her ultimate attack, leaving her broken and afraid as Accelerator (actually polite, which is a rarity out of him, if mocking in his politeness) introduces himself to the original of the “wind-up dolls” he’s been breaking for his ascension. As Misaka watches, beside herself, a small army of clones appears to help clean up the site, meanwhile reinforcing the idea that they’re lives without value, little more than guinea pigs. Of course, Mikoto herself feels differently, having seen her other self as a person and even an equal.
This is a big crux of the Sisters arc as seen in A Certain Scientific Railgun. In A Certain Magical Index, the heart of the arc was that girls were in trouble so of course Toma would try to help them. In Railgun, it’s more about the desensitization and brutality of Academy City’s darker elements, and the difference between seeing someone as a resource or a person. Because of this, the ‘villain’ of the arc is essentially different. Accelerator was the main antagonist for Toma’s version, but here in Railgun he’s actually relatively out of focus, having about as much screen time as he did in the Index version, but in a much longer arc. Instead, Mikoto recognizes that her real foe is, in a sense, the city itself, the impersonal machinery that set up and promoted the industrial-scale slaughter of her sisters. She doesn’t just direct her fury there because Accelerator is untouchable, she does it because that’s who’s really culpable in her mind and the context of A Certain Scientific Railgun.
In a sense, this is a point (the first one, really) where A Certain Scientific Railgun has and achieves aspirations higher than those of A Certain Magical Index. As I said in my review of it, Index is, for all its mythic explanations for spells and powers, more about action set pieces and having fun with them than it is about big ideas. This is still true of Railgun, to an extent: if the show is given a choice where it can get some high flying action or it can address some science fiction ideas, it will fairly reliably choose to serve up some good action. But, where they can coexist? Railgun, unlike its parent series, will actually do some work with both.
After that, while Mikoto is at her lowest, having trouble coping with the reality of the problem, she runs into Nunotaba again, who shares what she knows about Project Level 6 Shift, with Mikoto willing to do what she can to stop it. Of course, while she may be a Level 5, there are over 20 facilities involved in the project, and taking that all out isn’t going to be trivial, especially when more Sisters are being sent to their deaths every day. Mikoto, though, is all set to do whatever it takes. Unwilling to involve her friends, she drops off the radar and gets ready to tear down Level 6 Shift with her own two hands.
Mikoto starts out with, of course, electrical attacks, dialing into the facilities one by one and setting them ablaze with power surges. She manages to get about 70% of her targets before her line of attack is shut off, leaving a somewhat more manageable but still intimidating number of marks to go in and take down personally. Kuroko, in a more serious moment, takes her isolation from Mikoto fairly hard, and, as they realize who might responsible for pushing over their labs, the scientists behind Level 6 Shift decide to prepare their own aces in the hole to deal with Mikoto. The first of these preparations is hiring an elite group of mercenaries, called ITEM, to guard the remaining facilities. And this leads to an absolutely astounding three-episode running battle.
Sequences like this in shows can be very hit or miss. When they’re good, they’re great – a long, involved, high-detail conflict jam-packed with everything that makes action shows great. When they’re bad, they’re the absolute worst: endless reams of time wasted doing the same blasted thing and leaving you wondering why you aren’t being allowed to move on. Luckily, the Toaru series is good at action, and Railgun is probably the shining example of that even compared to the other entries.
The first foe that Mikoto runs into is a cute little blonde girl called Frenda. She’s a Level 0, but you’d be forgiven for not recognizing that as the traps and bombs she uses to fight have a distinct flair to them reminiscent of many Esper abilities. Frenda is quick, nimble, and has laced the entire buildings with explosive plush toys and nearly invisible lines that she can set ablaze to trigger bombs at unexpected angles or cut through steel. And Mikoto herself is far from 100%; she’s been running ragged pushing these labs over with great haste – she hasn’t slept and can’t even muster the power for her signature Railgun move, forcing her to do battle on a more even playing field.
Here is where we get to see a good deal of Mikoto’s versatility, and what that means for her ability. Frenda is no slouch, she has layer after layer of prepared weapons and tactics, constantly putting Mikoto on the back foot but, because Mikoto herself is both clever and powerful, she keeps shocking Frenda and moving onward, most surprisingly for Frenda when Frenda takes out a high catwalk and Mikoto uses her magnetic powers to levitate it back into place and keep approaching, practically flying for a moment when she was expected to fall.
Not a moment after Frenda concedes defeat, though, her support arrives, including her boss – Mugino Shizuri, aka Meltdowner, the fourth-ranked Level 5 Esper. In theory, she would be nearly a match for Mikoto at the best of times, but of course we now have some extenuating circumstances. Mikoto is, of course, no better rested than she was facing Frenda. In fact, Frenda kind of did a number on her. And, beyond that, while Mikoto is something of a badass she is still a schoolgirl whereas Meltdowner is a hardened killer as well as completely fresh. And, once she realizes that she’s up against Railgun, she turns particularly bloodthirsty, wanting to kill Mikoto in order to prove herself the better of the two.
Meltdowner’s signature power is to produce and fire what appear to be lasers, green beams that melt through whatever they hit. Her ability and Railgun’s interact, though – both being bound to the electromagnetic spectrum, Mugino can deflect Mikoto’s electric shocks while Mikoto can bend the path of Mugino’s lasers to protect herself from the deadly blasts. Even as Mikoto rightly decides that the appropriate response is to evade rather than engage, Mugino is able to fire on her with disturbing accuracy, thanks to the help of the third present item member, Takitsubo, who has the ability to pinpoint an Esper’s location by their AIM field. Once Mugino realizes who her foe is, though, the game is on to finish it one on one.
It’s an engagement that Mikoto only survives due to cleverness, using some of Frenda’s leftover bombs, magnetically levitated, and throwing them at Mugino. Meltdowner, of course, is able to blast them away, but at least one Mikoto prepared with a heavy chunk of metal, enabling her to swing it into Meltdowner’s head at a critical moment. Mikoto doesn’t kill her downed foe, but she does take the opportunity to complete her mission, destroying one of the last few facility main computers keeping Project Level 6 Shift going. Her kindness is repaid with Mugino assaulting her again on the way out in a rage, but Mikoto once again uses some of Frenda’s leftover preparation to shatter a bridge under Mugino. She tries to extend a hand to her foe, because she’s not a killer, but Mugino decides to let herself fall and fire her Meltdowner beams up at Mikoto, so Mikoto leaves her to stew in her rage and makes a hasty retreat.
Shortly after, it seems like the last lab has gone out of business and Project Level 6 Shift is over, but after an episode to catch her breath and do things like return to the school she’s been ditching at night, Mikoto encounters one of the Sisters and learns that the experiments are ongoing. She tries her best to track down the source only to find, to her horror, that the project data has been recreated and shared, and there are now hundreds of laboratories world wide that can continue to lead the project no matter how many more in Academy City Mikoto may push over.
This leads to Mikoto hunting down the control center for the orbiting supercomputer Tree Diagram, the machine that calculated what could enable Accelerator to reach Level 6. However, even as she breaks in, she learns the truth: Tree Diagram is already gone, meaning she can’t hack it to force it to provide a false prediction that her encounter with Accelerator ruined the math. She needs another plan, and if you’ve seen season 1 of Index, which has its version of the Sister arc going on right now (including getting a slightly different perspective of Toma’s encounters with 10032 and the death of 10031) you know where this is going: Mikoto figures, in sorrow and feeling responsible for her part in the Sisters being created only to die, decides that if she herself were to lose to Accelerator and wind up dead in a shockingly low number of moves, that would cast doubt on Tree Diagram’s predictions and the project – with Tree Diagram gone, possibly bringing it to an end. Of course, Toma gets in the way of that, supporting Mikoto at a critical moment, giving her a pretty good friendship-and-hope speech and then, with both her help and that of the Sisters (not for their own sake, but for his), taking on Accelerator to save Misaka 10032 and put a more definitive end to Project Level 6 Shift.
It’s the same material as in Index, even including most of Toma’s scenes essentially from his point of view, which means, from Mikoto’s discovery that the Project is still on to Accelerator’s fall (the time frame covered in Index), this part of the Sisters Arc in Railgun is actually a hair longer than the whole Sisters arc in Index. However, it’s a capstone rather than a compound story, with many of the same scenes having different meanings. We see Accelerator kill Misaka 10031, which gave Toma the tutorial on the whole mess, but in Railgun we’d already gotten that bit when 9982 died. 10031’s death here, rather than a horrifying revelation, is a matter of crushing inevitability. In Index we were, quite naturally, focused on Toma’s emotions, how he didn’t want to let innocents and friends (not that he could remember his former encounters with Mikoto) suffer at the hands of a psychotic villain. Here, we’re focused on Mikoto’s emotions, what brought her to the point where she was willing to give up her own life to stop what felt like an otherwise unstoppable horror, how someone so awe-inspiringly powerful could be made to seem powerless. That was the best stuff in the Index version and here it’s all magnified, and told better the whole way through. The Sisters arc is, ultimately, about the relationship between Mikoto and her clone sisters, the obligation she feels and the struggle to see them offered real lives rather than being used as sacrificial guinea pigs by the powers that be… and it’s stronger focusing on that than on the need to punch out an eccentric big-eyed maniac, even if said punching out is still really dramatic and well-executed.
It really is a matter of the struggle being right for the show, though. Toma, as a guy with little more than his fists and sense of justice, is properly challenged by having to punch out a pretty strong dude. Mikoto, with astounding power, is better challenged by the world, the system, and her own guilt.
There is one other thing that’s quite different in this rendition of the Sisters arc, though: Accelerator. In Index, at least during the Sisters arc, we never really got his point of view; he was just a bad, crazy dude to get punched. In the Railgun version, though, some time is actually spent on his development. Not much, but enough. We see him flash back to his first battle with a Misaka clone and find out that he actually questioned the need to kill her. The scientists egged him on, but what really did it was the defeated clone firing one last shot and getting pegged by Accelerator’s reflection ability. Of course, after the first, everything else was probably easier. Multiple times, Accelerator protests that the clones are “just wind-up dolls”. Sometimes he seems to be mocking Mikoto or Toma and their insistence on protecting those girls, but as the final conflict goes on his protest sounds more… desperate, like he’s trying to convince himself at least as much as he’s talking to his opponent, probably because the idea of having murdered over ten thousand actual people doesn’t sit well even with somebody like Accelerator. Because of this, his eventual redemption and guilt over his part in Level 6 Shift is better set up here than it was in Index. This is only speculation, but I would guess that the original material didn’t know Accelerator would be reappearing after the Sisters the first time around, and that Railgun (as a spinoff) was written with the luxury of knowing where the character was going to go.
In any case, once Accelerator is bested and Project Level 6 Shift shut down with his unceremonious defeat at Level 0 hands, we move into the second and last arc of Railgun’s second season. Mikoto reconnects with her friends (and, in one funny scene, her enemies, running into Mugino in a restaurant which results in a bit of a cat fight between Frenda and Kuroko). Strange things start happening, though, when the gang meets a stray little girl called Febrie. Kongou ends up involved as well, this acting as the finalization of her status as a friend rather than a rival. A shadowy group (which has access to Nunotaba, who was captured and presumably pressed into their service in the Sisters arc). They seem interested in both getting combat data on powerful Espers, and in reclaiming Febrie.
Febrie, it turns out, is an artificial human, a “Design child” produced with technology similar to but more advanced than the cloning apparatus that produced the Sisters. She’s also on a strict timer: the stash of lollipops she kept with her (provided in her escape by Nunotaba) contain a medicine she needs to live, and the stockpile is rapidly running out. Some strange items found in hijacked robots are also discovered to be related to Febrie, as parts of Febrie’s still-held sister. Mikoto gets some clues out of an imprisoned Therestina and does her best to get the antidote formula, ending up paralyzed by a dart for her troubles. In a pretty cool moment she rescues herself and Nunotaba by using her power to send electrical impulses across her own nerves and puppet her own body despite the paralysis. The evil group tries to initiate their takeover of Academy City, but team hero has learned enough about their plans to put together an effective defense, uniting powerful Espers and powerless Anti-skill and Judgment forces to resist the robots controlled through the ability of Febrie’s sister, denying both their tactical objectives and their lame “everyone versus espers” philosophy. Even Mugino helps out (though more out of the villain group having offended her), taking out some of their elite mechs so Mikoto can storm their base
The leader of said group goes a little nutty at the end, launching a missile at Academy City that could cause a massive AIM Field meltdown. This has an impressive counter to cap off the season as Kongou uses her air manipulation to launch a big robot and Mikoto both high into the atmosphere, where she uses a whole robot as railgun ammo against the incoming missile, Kuroko teleporting up and down to catch Mikoto as she darn near deorbits from that stunt. It’s silly, in a sense, but it’s also immensely visually impressive, just like you want out of an action sequence.
On the other side, Febrie and her sister alike are rescued by Shinobu and, with the formula for the drug they need, are able to be taken in for medical care to stabilize their bodies, ending us on a fully happy note.
In a sense, this arc feels almost like a bit of a breather, so that we don’t end on the massive scope and tortured emotions of the Sisters arc. It’s not bad… but it also doesn’t exactly seem needed
Then, of course, we come to the third season, A Certain Scientific Railgun T.
The first of season three’s two arcs takes place surrounding the Daihasei Festival, the same big festival that formed the backdrop for the arc in Index season two where Toma had to take on Oriana Thompson and the attempt to forcibly convert Academy City to Catholic hallowed ground. Unlike with the Sisters Arc, though, there’s not really any overlap in content – we don’t even repeat the scenes with Mikoto and Toma’s families doing things together. Oddly enough, this is despite Toma ultimately having a part to play in this arc. The Daihasei Festival was, apparently, even more busy than we knew.
This arc also introduces (properly) two more of the Level 5 Espers. One of them is the fifth-ranked Shokuhou Misaki – Mental Out – who is a classmate of Mikoto’s briefly seen before. Her power, as one might guess, is a Level 5 mind control and mind/memory alteration ability, which is pretty creepy to start out with. Mikoto, however, is immune as her electric field basically jams Mental Out’s influence. The other is the seventh-ranked, Sogiita, who has the power of… um… it was never exactly made clear. I checked secondary sources, and apparently they don’t know exactly what his ability is either. I’d call it “Being a shonen protagonist” since it seems to mostly manifest as super-strength, super-speed, and punches that cause elemental explosions. This is a fairly remarkably odd omission for Academy City, which is normally obsessed with spelling out the details of what its powers and spells are and why they work, only to not explain anything about this guy, one of the vaunted Level 5 Espers. I’m just going to say he’s using Spiral Energy and leave it at that.
We see Mikoto participating in many of her school’s sporting events (in which she does have to take some handicap as far as how much power she can use) and it’s pretty good fun. Kuroko, of course, is rather sour – she’s still recovering from her injuries received in the Tree Diagram Remnant arc of Index 2, and thus Kongou is Mikoto’s partner in all the doubles events she signed up for. The fun, to an extent, stops when Misaka 10032 is mistaken for Mikoto and roped into one of the games (which is similar to paintball, only with thrown beanbags as the weapon of choice). Not because of her performance, but because a new eccentric villain uses a robot mosquito to inject her with paralytic nanomachines, only to see her kidnapped by Mental Out and her puppets/assistants.
Mikoto, of course, tries to track down her missing Sister, and starts to get wise to the fact that Mental Out may be involved. At the same time, the Judgment team is tracking down an urban legend that doesn’t seem like it would amount to much. However, this also seems to catch Mental Out’s attention, and she ends up erasing their memories – of the urban legend website they were on the trail of, and also of Mikoto. Saten, Uiharu, and Kuroko are all made to treat Mikoto as a total stranger. As Mikoto herself gets closer to the truth, Mental Out starts messing with her as well. Unable to directly control and program Mikoto, she instead turns the school administration and her school clique monitor and attempt to contain Misaka.
Shokuhou, however, accounted neither for Kongou (who is sympathetic to Mikoto’s plight regarding her sister and pledges to help a friend out), nor for how wrathful Mikoto would be at having her friends screwed with or how resourceful Mikoto can be when her back is up against the wall. Before Mental Out can be dealt with, though, there are a couple matters. The first is Baba, they guy who controlled the robot bee before trying to take down Mikoto. Kongou’s search for Mikoto’s sister causes her to find some clues and, eventually, Baba, who’s looking for some details on said sister himself, as he evidently doesn’t actually work for Mental Out. He lures Kongou to a moderately secluded area and tries to challenge her with his robot dogs, but she’s a little more potent than he planned for. Between his mosquito drone and threatening Misaka 10032’s cat that Kongou found in order to force Kongou to make a tactical mistake, he manages to put her out of the fight, but not before her friends show up to support her. Baba has an encyclopedic knowledge of Esper powers and their limitation, a bunch of fairly durable robots, as well as a pretty disgustingly creepy demeanor (Going so far as to make rape threats when enraged, which is rather dark for the tone of A Certain Scientific Railgun). After losing anyway he retreats just far enough to bust out a car-sized mantis robot, only to have it immediately dismantled by the arrival of Mikoto, who has spent these episodes getting away from Mental Out’s clique. She pretty totally obliterates his setup and successfully intimidates him (sparing worse as she doesn’t know that Mental Out isn’t responsible). This alerts Baba’s real masters that another move must be made.
This results in a girl, Kouzaku Mitori, who has taken Uiharu and Misaka’s mother hostage. Kuroko (who still can’t remember Mikoto), just out of her wheelchair and starting to question her own mental state comes to the defense, as does Mikoto in good time. The hostages are fairly easily saved, though Kouzaku gets away due to her ability of controlling a liquid metal double of her self, allowing the real Kouzaku to escape. Mikoto starts to build some rapport with Kuroko despite the latter’s default standoffish nature, resulting in them (along with some information pulled via power from the cat) investigating Shokuhou and discovering the very details that she tried to force them off the track of earlier, along with some tantalizing rumors. With photographs, it’s enough to locate Shokuhou’s lair, which is of course where Mikoto is bound next.
When Mikoto makes her way there, though, it seems Mental Out is not actually malicious: she’s trying to care for the downed 10032, suspecting that the intent of their real enemy is to hijack the Misaka Network (the group intellect of all the Sisters) for nefarious ends. Mikoto is still not amused by Shokuhou’s behavior, but gives the girl a chance to explain herself, learning that most of her interference to keep Mikoto out was because she doesn’t trust anyone whose mind she hasn’t read to guarantee their allegiance. But, now that the jig is up, having some extra firepower could be good.
At this point, I’ll take a moment to talk about Mental Out. A little like Kongou, Shokuhou initially comes off as a bully, well positioned (having a large clique compared to Mikoto’s small circle of friends) but cruel. Unlike Kongou, who at her absolute worst was a little catty and haughty, Shokuhou came off as nasty and threatening even before she started making these big villain moves like wiping the memory of Mikoto’s friends. It would have been absolutely trivial to have her function as a fairly heinous villain. I suppose that’s essentially true of how mind controllers usually come off.
So, in a sense, the remainder of the Daihasei acts as a redemption arc for Shokuhou. We’ve seen her taking the initiative and doing creepy and/or questionable things. In order to accept her as more of a friend, we also have to see her struggle and understand why she does the things she does. This is something to keep in mind as the story continues.
Aside from that, it does help that she’s immediately shown to have her foibles. She’s a knockout and vain about it (wasting no opportunity to taunt Mikoto) but she’s also problematically unathletic, prideful to a fault, and easily flustered. And that’s before getting more into her history.
What is she striving against, though? The answer is Gensei Kihara, mastermind of Project Level 6 Shift and other evil mad science, who appears to have an antagonistic background with Shokuhou as well. They go to where he should be holding a conference, with Shokuhou intending to capture him there, only to find their move has been anticipated, receiving a message left by Kihara (in one of his goon’s memory, just for Shokuhou) that suggests he knows the location of what she’s been trying her hardest to keep from him, both Misaka 10032 and something called Exterior
Meanwhile Judgment (plus Saten) look into Kouzaku, who is working with Kihara. She’s supposed to be dead (being officially recorded as such) but her ability is still known, and there’s not a lot of places she could be getting her liquid metal. Saten decides to check one out, running into Toma (and helping him with a scavenger hunt) on the way, though she gets into trouble sticking her nose into the situation, escaping only thanks to some infighting among the enemy.
We learn the nature of Exterior, and also its history. With regards to what it is, it’s a biocomputer (essentially looking like a giant brain in a massive floor-to-ceiling tank), cultured from Shokuhou’s own brain matter. Exterior can, therefore, act as a massive booster to her abilities (allowing her to clear an entire highway with her mental powers), but it could also allow anyone else registered to it to use the Mental Out power themselves.
As to the history it seems that, like so many Espers other than Mikoto, Shokuhou grew up in a lab environment. The researchers used special helmets to block her control, but she subverted that before they realized, learning that they were planning to dispose of her as soon as her ability was matured enough to complete Exterior. Along the way, though, the researchers introduced her to another test subject: Dolly, a prototype Misaka clone. Though initially grumpy about having to be Dolly’s friend, especially since she had to use her ability to make Dolly believe she was a former friend who disappeared (strongly implied to be Kouzaku), she over time came to actually become friends with Dolly… only for Dolly to reach the end of her time and expire as her body fails, Shokuhou unable to do anything to help her.
Shokuhou and Mikoto also seem to be unable to help themselves, as Gensei Kihara is one step ahead, seizing control of Exterior and using it to infect the Misaka network… because his true target is Mikoto, and his goal is to force her to become a Level 6. With feedback from the Misaka Network overwhelming her mind, Mikoto will basically spend the rest of this arc brainwashed, crazy, and slowly mutating into more and more alien forms as her growing power is directed against the core of Academy City by Kouzaku (out for revenge) and Gensei Kihara… pretty much watches just to see what will happen. Actually, he gives us a pretty decent mad scientist rant about the fact that while only Accelerator can become a stable Level 6, he’s hoping to use Mikoto’s forced ascension and inevitable burnout to gain a glimpse of an other or even divine world behind common reality, not really caring that her end would probably level the city.
Tracking Kouzaku, Kuroko arrives on scene, backed up with mission control in the form of Uiharu and Saten. Separate from that, Toma shows up (tipped off that Mikoto is in trouble) and gets given more of the story by Shokuhou. Sogiita also shows up to fight corrupted Mikoto because he pretty much does what he does, and teams up with Toma in a rather amusing and also very active battle to slow down Mikoto’s potential rampage. Slow down and not stop because, it turns out, even the Imagine Breaker can’t totally hold off the building power.
After helping Shokuhou out of a jam, Kuroko goes after Kouzaku while Shokuhou engages in a cat-and-mouse game with Gensei Kihara, who is hunting after her in order to get the limiter release code for Exterior. And, in addition to the fact that Shokukou has some trouble physically running away from a frail old man with liver spots, Kihara is a little more imposing than he first seems. He doesn’t just have Shokuhou’s own Mental Out power from Exterior; he’s used an enhanced version of the Level Upper in order to, like Dr. Kiyama in the Level Upper Arc’s finale, gain the powers of dozens of Espers despite not naturally being one himself. He’s also a cyborg, describing his body, mangled by countless mad experiments and rebuilt, as a trade fair for prosthetics and cybernetics. Eventually, he manages to run Shokuhou out of all the traps she tried to set for him before using air powers to pull the breath from her lungs and leave her semiconscious and vulnerable to his version of Mental Out.
It turns out, though, that Shokuhou had one last trick – she’d taken a moment during the chase, when she was away, to use her power on herself, switching the limiter release code Gensei wanted with the self-destruct code for Exterior. She erased her own memory of having done it as well, and thus there’s no evidence left for when Gensei goes sifting through her mind, getting himself caught in the backlash and losing Exterior. This also leaves him vulnerable to Shokuhou’s probing, getting the information necessary to reverse the mind virus he implanted in the Misaka Network.
On the other side, Kuroko faces down against Kouzaku. This is an even more involved game of cat and mouse than Shokuhou versus Gensei, with Kuroko chasing her foe through multiple buildings, swatting at liquid metal shadows and pushing her not-completely-healed body to the limits, eventually taking a dagger to the hand (rather than teleporting away) in order to tackle and handcuff the real girl. In and out of character, it’s a pretty intense moment.
Meanwhile, in the streets, Mikoto’s super-powered madness is stopped by Sogiita and Toma. Mostly Toma, of course. The fight costs him his arm temporarily, but that seems to work out, as a host of colorful dragon heads emerge from the stump and tear apart the unnatural field, returning Mikoto to normal before the dragons vanish and Toma’s arm regenerates itself. I’m sure that slice of WTF won’t come up in any (chronologically) later seasons.
It seems like everything’s wrapped up, with denouement like a longer version of Toma’s bonfire dance with Mikoto (set up by Saten and broken up by a Kuroko drop kick), and the cover-up for the day’s events (orchestrated by Shokuhou, who didn’t miss her chance to horribly embarrass Mikoto, explaining her absence in everyone else’s memories by making them believe she was trapped on the toilet with severe indigestion)… but there’s one more loose end. Kouzaku may have been stopped and cuffed by Kuroko, but it’s Shokuhou who picks her up. We get Kouzaku’s past with Dolly, including how she turned against the institute and ended up imprisoned trying to save Dolly… and Shokuhou is of course sympathetic to that cause. Having presumably learned of it in Gensei Kihara’s memories, Shokuhou takes Kouzaku to a hidden facility, where another Misaka clone waits in a growth tank – this one a copy of Dolly who, thanks to the networking effects of the Sisters, will have inherited Dolly 1.0’s memories. They wake her up and presumably get her the treatments the Sisters need to live normal lives, and the three of them are essentially reunited.
That brings us to the second and final arc of the third season, which actually starts itself off as more of a mystery. As is often the case, we start with something of a mystery: a new craze sweeping through Academy City called “Indian Poker”, a mechanism that allows people to create cards which record their dreams, and then share those dreams with other people. While this is used for some harmless fun (and some not-quite-so-harmless, at least to certain parties when Mikoto and Shokuhou overhear someone promising to deal cards containing naughty dreams of the two of them) it can also be quite useful, for good or for ill, as it’s discovered that skills can be transferred fairly quickly and accurately through Indian Poker dreams, while at the same time incautious card creation could leak sensitive information.
While this is going on, we also deal with something of a lower-deck mini-arc where a boy with precognitive abilities enlists the aid of Kuroko (whose teleportation allows her to foil predictions) in order to save both people and a stray dog he cares about. It’s a nice sequence, with a lot of growth both for the boy and for Kuroko, who this season is determined to prove is a consummate badass when she’s not busy drooling over Mikoto. That is also welcome, especially after she spent the vast majority of the Sisters arc distracting dorm authorities at most.
There’s another small arc with more side characters where Saten actually befriends Frenda (from ITEM) without either girl knowing the other’s involvement. However, the fact that there is something comes out in a crisis, when an assassin appears and tries to hunt down and kill Frenda. Saten proves an oddly great help, and the two of them escape the assassin (doing a number to her in the process) and promise to meet up again some time. However, it seems like Frenda stands Saten up… if you’ve seen Index season 3 (which the show doesn’t assume, but is clearly reaching the point where it runs parallel with the early parts), then there might be a reason for that.
Soon enough, though, we pick back up with the Level 5s and Indian Poker. Shokuhou has suspicions that Indian Poker may be related to Dolly and the Sisters (with how it shares mental information) and has been looking into it, discovering an experiment where a researcher girl (Kuriba Ryouko, a new character who comes off as a somewhat softer version of Nunotaba) had half her body replaced with cybernetic parts… for both halves, and lived as two separate people for a year before being reassembled. The mechanical parts were also put together into a complete body… which, against expectation still had unique cognition and a belief that it was Kuriba Ryouko, resulting in a theory that the process had somehow generated a soul.
Mikoto is sent to snoop around the facility, but on her way up the outside wall, robot Kuriba passes her headed down in freefall, having, it seems, finally realized her mechanical nature. Mikoto checks in with flesh-and-blood Kuriba, and finds out more about the experiment, Kuriba’s part in it, and Kuriba’s predictions regarding the doppelganger, while at the same time another one of those eccentric Dark Side organizations is called in to deal with the escaped robot.
This organization is called Scavenger. They’re coming off their appearance in Accelerator’s show… which didn’t go so well for them. As you might expect when a routine mission caused them to run into an unexpected Level 5 Esper – specifically Accelerator who they can thank their lucky stars is trying to cut down on the rate at which he adds to his kill counter.
They’ve got some good skills, at that – excellent teamwork and a suite of impressive powers including their leader, with a broad-area searching power, paper manipulation that creates durable constructs (including, basically, power armor), friction control, and super-chemistry. All the same, with an embarrassing loss on their record, they’re in a bad way and desperate to pull off their contract.
Mikoto, Kuriba, and Scavenger all reach a location with Doppelganger at similar times. Scavenger largely engages Doppelganger, while Kuriba runs (pursued by the friction controller) and is rescued by Mikoto, who takes down the first member of Scavenger before really learning who they are. The fight between the other three and Doppelganger doesn’t exactly go well for them either: the robot is able to subvert the paper bonds and gives and takes some major injuries before escaping the scene, which is when Mikoto runs into them.
The ability of Doppelganger to absorb foreign matter and that possibly being extended when it’s broken is something that was predicted by Kuriba, who theorized that if it’s in possession of a soul, that soul could disperse wider and wider to take more material as its “body” over time, a process that would be easier if its core body is compromised. It was Kuriba’s fear of this that caused her to create Indian Poker, banking on the fact that the massive parallel processing of all the users would turn up a way to safely dispose of Doppelganger eventually.
Before that can really be addressed, though, Scavenger has to deal with Mikoto. The leader, panicking, desperately tries to put together what she has to say, as though Mikoto were a lethal danger. I suppose it’s not entirely inaccurate, given the stakes Scavenger is facing, but the degree to which she’s sweating bullets over every word she says is still somewhat humorous. All the same, she manages to shut up her team idiot and convince Mikoto that she and the other two are with Judgment, rather than being a dark side organization, effectively enlisting Mikoto’s aid in taking in Doppelganger rather than having to yet again stand against an unexpected Level 5.
With Scavenger’s help, Mikoto tracks down Doppelganger. However, the “Soul dispersion” has actually progressed pretty far, allowing the robot to manipulate large structures basically at will, using massive fuel tanks as bombs and, when that’s not enough to really handle Mikoto, she goes a step farther.
For that step, recall how the Toaru/Academy City stories have this odd relationship with high concepts. Index mostly name drops folklore and religion without doing much to actually address it. Railgun and Accelerator, particularly Railgun, come a little closer – they’ll actually raise some interesting science fiction or fantasy concepts and deal with them… after a fashion. But, those concepts are still usually used as more of a grounding for action set pieces, since ultimately these shows really do aim to be fun action anime rather than intense and thought-provoking dramas. Doppelganger, here, is a perfect example. The question of what she is or can be is a good one, along with discussions of the nature of the mind and soul. Two cyborgs were made out of one human body, and when the parts were reassembled into a human and a machine, what became of the difference between the two? The questions raised here could form the backbone of a serious drama, a thinky cyberpunk story. There are a tons of ways to address it, and the question of what makes someone real or human.
Instead of any of that, we get a kaiju fight. And you know what? That’s fine by me. The ideas behind Doppelganger are used as more than just “techno-babble”, giving a good deal of pathos to the final movements of the arc (as we’ll be getting into), and in a show like Railgun we don’t really want more than good action with a solid emotional grounding. Could you do more with some of these parts? Sure, but you’d kind of be betraying what makes Railgun good to take a swing at what would make some other show good. Let Serial Experiments Lain or Beatless take on some of these topics, and let Railgun do her thing.
In any case, Doppelganger assembles a huge mass of rubble into the towering form of a gigantic monster. Mikoto and Scavenger herd her towards a largely abandoned area (with Scavenger managing to evacuate the local Skill-Out gangers, and also browbeat their employer into signing off on the “delivery” of the Doppelganger). Once the stage is clear, Mikoto pulls iron sand from the surroundings and manipulates it with her magnetic powers… to form it into her own artificial giant monster to do battle with Doppelganger. Mikoto’s iron sand giant allows her to fire off railgun-style “bullets” consuming masses of iron sand as the slugs, doing massive damage to Doppelganger’s shell. Her foe pulls up even more fuel tanks, threatening broad destruction in the city, but Mikoto manages to shoot them out of the sky. However, the swirling smoke and airborne iron sand reveals Doppelganger’s true target: a stealth airship that serves as the remote back-up server for her creators’ efforts.
It’s also at about this time that a couple things happen. Kuriba re-involves herself, offering her life and body to quell Doppelganger, but gets rejected and has to be rescued by Scavenger (who stick around to help Mikoto with efforts like that despite their normally hostile approach to ‘teacher’s pet’ normal students). The team also figures out (between Mikoto, Shokuhou, and Scavenger) that the “Soul” effects are smoke and mirrors – the Doppelganger has really been manipulating matter with self-replicating artificial muscles, which were able to accomplish this due to being based on slime molds. Now knowing how Doppelganger is hijacking matter, Mikoto rushes to follow her up to the airship for a real confrontation.
Mikoto battles Doppelganger (human form again) atop the airship, with the leader of Scavenger using her searching power to gain a birds’ eye view of all the threats present and warn Mikoto of them, while the Doppelganger’s actual motive is revealed: knowing she exists without a soul, she wants to die rather than going on as a fake, but she wants to take the tools that could recreate her – Kuriba, and the files from the experiment that produced her the first time – out as well, lest this all start again. Mikoto, though sorrowful, essentially agrees to grant most of Doppelganger’s wish, bringing down the airship with a massive lightning strike.
At the crash site, Doppelganger lays dying when both Kuriba and the chief scientist behind the experiment arrive. Kuriba makes it clear that she’ll not be repairing or recreating Doppelganger, pulling out of the project as her double slips away. The frustrated researcher ends up shooting her for her trouble, only to get caught by Shokuhou (who rewrites his mind to forget all about the idea of recreating the experiment with Child Errors) while Scavenger rushes everyone else to the hospital where (with a bit of a material donation from the remains of Doppelganger) Kuriba is able to be saved. The epilogue comes, Mikoto spends time with her friends, Kongou makes friends with 10032 (whose number she takes in relative stride, giving her the nickname of Icchan). Shokuhou hangs out with Kouzaku and Dolly, so they’re doing fine, and even Doppelganger it seems has some sort of continuance, appearing in Kuriba’s dreams now that part of her (evidently with processors, since, you know, we rather confirmed that there was nothing mystical going on) has once again been incorporated in her original. Seemingly, she’s much happier that way, and is eager to rather aggressively ‘help’ Kuriba analyze her theories.
And with that, we’ve reached the end of A Certain Scientific Railgun. I have to say, of all the Toaru shows, Railgun is by far my favorite. It starts out with strong action, decently developed characters, a fun-to-watch lead, and a deeply excellent understanding of how to keep the tension and drama high without losing a sense of fun. And, from there, it just gets better and better. True, the Sisters arc is the high point for Mikoto’s particular emotional drama, but the Daihasei Festival and Doppelganger arcs in the third season have their own powerful drama and charm, and it would cheapen things to just keep putting Mikoto directly through the wringer, so I can’t really say it loses anything moving on from the Sisters.
While there is marked improvement over the seasons, I do think it’s fair to rate A Certain Scientific Railgun as a whole. And, as a whole? This one is an A. It’s not just more than what A Certain Magical Index achieves, it’s above anything Index aspired to be, doing far and away better than its parent story in basically every way. While I think, on the whole, it’s worth tearing into all of the Academy City shows if you like that sort of thing (since you’re liable to enjoy them all if you enjoy one), if you’re going to limit your viewing? Limit it to Railgun. Mikoto and her friends don’t disappoint, and I’d recommend any season of their show pretty highly.