So, Steins;Gate… I’ve talked about the Science Adventure series before, and brought up this show many other times. On one side, it’s amazing that I haven’t given it a proper review so far, but on the other hand it does feel something like a formality. So, in a sense I want to treat this almost as more of a tour: an introduction to this show for newcomers and an attempt to break down why it works so well.
So, for the start, we meet Rintaro Okabe, better known as Okarin. He’s a self-declared Mad Scientist, and unlike a lot of chuuni types he can, at least to a degree, back it up given that he’s a bright young man who’s made a few wacky inventions. Yeah, I said chuuni. It’s not obvious at first, though. “Mad Scientist fighting a global conspiracy” isn’t exactly the typical chuuni fantasy, Okarin is significantly older than you would usually see that sort of behavior (being a university student rather than a middle schooler or even high schooler) and his act is particularly insistent to begin with. In fact, even being aware of chuunibyou the first introduction to him can come off as schizophrenic, putting you in a kind of uncomfortable scenario where you’re not sure if you should trust the main character’s judgment or even his relationship with reality. This is most pronounced in the first few episodes, but it comes back as a notable element, of course, when reality starts to have a tenuous relationship with itself.
Okarin is joined, initially, by two friends. One is Shiina Mayuri (Mayushii, sometimes), his childhood friend. She seems a little weird, distant, and possibly a little childish, speaking in third person a good deal and having an established love of the mascot critter Oopa. She plays heavily into Okarin’s chuuni, calling herself his “hostage” like he really is an evil mad scientist, and eating up all his stories about the Organization and their agents, Okarin’s made-up foes. She’s charming, but also a little weird. The other is Itaru Hashida, more often known as Daru. While Okarin provides the wild inspiration for invention, Daru is the guy who actually gets machines and computers working. He can hack, he can build, he’s quite large yet isn’t usually used for fat jokes, and on the whole he’s kind of light on the screen time, being Okarin’s more sensible and less theatrical partner in crime type.
We’re also, relatively early on, introduced to a couple other friends of Okarin. They don’t stay around his “Future Gadget Laboratories” (Apartment above a CRT store whose owner/landlord, a man Okarin calls “Mr. Braun”, does not appreciate the noise or weirdness) as much as Daru or Mayuri, but they are part of Okarin’s circle. One is Rumiho Akiha, better known as Faris, a rich girl who owns and works at a cat maid cafe (where Mayuri is her coworker), plays top-level card games, and if you couldn’t guess from that has a sense of fun that’s very much in line with Okarin’s. The other is Ruka Urushibara and… Ruka is a little hard to talk about since he (and I’m going to write it that way for the sake of clarity later – that’s the hard part) lives as a shrine maiden at the local shrine. Ruka is close friends with Mayuri and seems to have a really good relationship with Okarin, as Okarin adapts his theatricality to help entertain Ruka and make him feel welcome and wanted, fully accepting his oddness.
So, this is quite the pack of fun, eccentric people… what do they do?
The matter starts when Okarin decides to attend a lecture on time travel. There, he runs into Kurisu Makise, a brash genius who in their first encounter insists she met him fifteen minutes earlier. Not long after that, Okarin is poking around and finds her face down in a pool of blood, sending a text message to Daru about the stabbing after he flees.
When the mail is sent, Okarin finds himself in an odd situation: the formerly crowded streets are clear, and there’s a crashed ‘satellite’ embedded in the roof of the building the seminar was at. A talk with Daru only makes the situation stranger, as the seminar that Okarin remembers attending was canceled and the message about Kurisu arrived five days earlier. The culprit is narrowed down to Okarin and Daru’s prototype Phone Microwave, which Daru was testing when Okarin sent his text and which evidently caused the message to travel back in time. And, one more change is discovered when Okarin attends another conference: Kurisu is now alive and well.
So, let’s take a minute to talk about Kurisu, since she’s going to go ahead and be a major character going forward. Kurisu is kind of a perfect foil for Okarin. She has a sense of humor and her own weirdness, but she’s also not the sort of person who gets swept along in Okarin’s presence like most of his other friends; she’s fiery, determined, and probably even smarter than he is. She forces Okarin to step up, and in turn he piques her curiosity. When they’re opposed, they both come out stronger through getting opposite view points. When they’re in synch, they’re kind of unstoppable. It’s not literally the best on-screen chemistry you’ll see in an anime, but it’s up there.
In any case, that conference has Kurisu doing her best to display how and why time travel should be impossible, over Okarin’s objections, systematically demolishing his arguments. But then, what about the phenomenon that Okarin actually experienced? Well, along the way we encounter two more characters: Suzuha Amane, a sporty girl hired by Mr. Braun for part-time work who seems to have her own chuuni-adjacent behavior, and Moeka Kiryu, a tight-lipped but text-message-happy woman searching for an old PC called the IBN 5100. And that brings us to the matter of John Titor.
Titor is actually a figure from real life, an internet persona that emerged in the early 2000s, claiming to be a time traveler. Titor provided a very detailed theory of time travel, based in the Many-Worlds hypothesis, which forms the backbone of and provides much of the technical jargon for the time travel in Steins;Gate. Titor also appears in the show. Steins;Gate is set in 2010, and Okarin is of course aware of the Titor manifestation that would be canon to us. However, in the World Line (to use the show’s and Titor’s term for alternate timelines) that Okarin now finds himself on, Titor did not appear in 2000, and instead appears during the course of the show. As the real Titor claimed to be searching for an IBM 5100, this Titor is looking for its lawyer-friendly cameo, the IBN 5100; the same computer that Moeka was after. Titor and Okarin converse over the internet, with Titor intrigued by Okarin’s possible awareness of other World Lines, but there’s not much that can be offered right away.
Instead, we can proceed to the tests of the Phone Microwave. They find that taking a banana from a bunch and applying the microwave with the same settings as were in place when the text went back in time reattaches it to the bunch and transmutes it to a weird slimy green jelly. Kurisu arrives at the lab in good time to poke at that (she’s even the one daring enough to taste the vile thing) but she doesn’t like the conclusion at first, and only comes around in a little more time.
Meanwhile, Titor leads Okarin down an investigation of SERN (CERN, obviously) resulting in Daru hacking into SERN’s servers and discovering that, contrary to their public image, they’ve done some serious time travel experiments using the LHC to create micro-black holes, even causing the deaths of several people sent back in time only to arrive as jelly, thanks in part to getting a hold of an IBN 5100 that was stored at Ruka’s shrine, using its unique capabilities to crack SERN’s code.
Despite the shock, Okarin and friends (properly including Kurisu) now have a questionably working version of a time machine themselves. With it they can send their text messages to the past, dubbed D-mails, and they send a few , shifting the World Line each time: one with (incomplete) lottery numbers that gives Ruka a minor prize, a mysterious one for Moeka that results in the rest of the lab not knowing her, and then some that start to get more impactful.
The first of those D-mails is sent on behalf of Ruka; having heard an urban legend that a pregnant woman’s diet can help determine an infant’s sex, he wants to send a message to his mother to eat more veggies, hoping to be born female. Shockingly, this actually works, and Okarin manages to severely embarrass himself by explaining to Kurisu that Ruka is just that girly, only to be proven dramatically wrong by the fact that he has always been she on this World Line.
Also of relevance is that some other facts have shifted around. The IBN 5100 is nowhere to be found (in fact, it was never at the lab, and wasn’t on the World Line where Moeka sent her message either), but everyone has actually met Moeka again. The search for the IBN 5100 tracks back to the shrine, where it seems that Girl Ruka is just a little clumsier than Guy Ruka had been, because she accidentally broke the stored computer while cleaning up some time before the events of the show.
So, where else to find a rare vintage PC? The gang visits Faris, who thinks she can acquire the PC in exchange for being allowed to send a D-Mail. She doesn’t disclose the contents, but after it’s sent it seems like even her family doesn’t have their hands on the precious machine… and what’s more, Akihabara is totally changed, being a rather drab electronics district rather than a hub of moe culture.
To some extent stymied on the IBN 5100 front, the team starts to work on improving their time machine. Along the way, we hear a good deal more from Suzuha. She doesn’t seem to trust Kurisu, but makes friends with everyone else before very suddenly departing. Her leaving with a sad note prompts Okarin to send himself a D-mail, convincing her to stick around for a while longer and once again changing the World Line.
Kurisu and Okarin, working together, are able to decipher some of the inner workings of the Phone Microwave and work on improving it from sending text messages into the past to sending the user’s mind into their own past self, making it a Time Leap Machine if successful. Okarin gets some threatening texts along the way, though leaving him disturbed. On the night of the machine’s completion, Okarin, Daru, Kurisu, and Mayuri are having a low-key little celebration in the lab when Moeka breaks in with a pack of armed SERN goons. The three scientists are to be taken prisoner while Mayuri… is not necessary, and Okarin has to watch as, all too sudden, his dear childhood friend is shot dead.
Seconds later, Suzuha busts in, causing a distraction that’s just enough for the Time Leap machine to be triggered, sending Okarin’s mind back several hours. He scatters the group and finds Mayuri, trying to take her away to safety. However, Moeka catches up and runs over Mayuri in her car while attempting to get to Okarin. He gets away to manage another time leap, a little farther this time, and takes Mayuri by a totally different route, planning to escape the area by the subway. At the station, though, a surprise greeting from Mr. Braun’s little daughter provides the tragic accident that sends Mayuri tumbling into the path of an oncoming train.
Welcome to hell, Okarin.
One common trait of the Science Adventure series is that they’ll often take a sharp turn somewhere between half and two thirds of the way through, and that’s never more impressive than here in Steins;Gate. The first half of the show, until Mayuri’s first death, is overall calm and sedate. There is horror to it, what with the jelly men produced by SERN and the hints of an actual global conspiracy, along with the changes wrought by the D-mails, but it really was, at the worst, a sense of disquiet. And along with that, we got a good deal of the joy of discovery or the wonder of exploring this big mystery, along with plenty of interactions between likable characters who are either already friends, or who are getting to know each other as friends. It’s charming and, on the whole, bright.
Then, with a single stroke, we descend into a dark, twisted, and frightful conspiracy combined with a situation where time travel leads to massive suffering for our lead.
As Okarin fails again and again to save Mayuri, hope comes in a few forms. First, it’s from Kurisu, who realizes what Okarin is going through and gives him a phrase to tell her past self that will get her to believe and help out from the start of a loop rather than the end. The second big help comes from Suzuha, who reveals that she’s the real person behind the screen name John Titor, as well as a time traveler from the future who’s here to prevent SERN’s dystopian reign. This explains her animosity with Kurisu, who was a SERN collaborator on the time Suzuha came from, but more importantly it explains the rules of the worlds that we’ll be dealing with for the second half of the show.
The most critical of these is the divergence number, represented by a device that Suzuha has, but can’t use to greatest effect because she lacks Okarin’s ability to remember across timelines. What she does know, though, is that groups of World Lines can be grouped as “attractor fields” which have some fixed truths in common between the fields. The fact that Mayuri dies at some time around now is part of the Alpha Attractor Field, and that pushing the Divergence above 1% will bring Okarin to the Beta Attractor Field, where that outcome might be able to be changed. However, because Attractor Fields result in some degree of rubber banding to the course of events, it won’t be easy to dismantle this Bad End and save both Mayuri and the world.
Suzuha, however, has her own plans. She takes them to that “crashed satellite” from the first episode, which is actually her time machine. It needs repairs both from the hard landing and the time it’s been sitting out, but with those achieved she should be able to end her 2010 stopover (which was in part on a futile attempt to find her father, who she never knew and doesn’t even have a proper name for), head to 1975, and nip this whole thing in the bud with a fresh IBN 5100.
Of course, things aren’t that easy. While the group is able to find Suzuha’s father (it’s Daru, actually) and get a happy tearful meeting, Suzuha’s one-way trip to 1975 ends in failure, as a letter she left behind, delivered by Mr. Braun, reveals that her damaged machine crashed hard, leaving her with memory loss until 2000, when she couldn’t do anything about it. Indeed, she ultimately committed suicide out of guilt.
Okarin has his own guilt over the matter: he recalls how he altered time to keep her around, and how there was a storm the night after that likely did lots more damage to the Time Machine. He sends himself a D-mail to undo that meddling, and the World Line shifts. Suzuha is still unfortunately deceased by 2010, but passed peacefully and managed to give them a lead in the process, just not the IBN. What’s more, Mayuri’s death has been pushed back a full day on the new World Line, leading to the suspicion that if they undo all of the former D-mails, they’ll be able to both get the IBN 5100 (or get it back, if you prefer) and reach the Beta Attractor Field. As such, that becomes the next main mission: undoing all the D-mails, in the reverse of the order they were sent. That means the next one up is Faris, whose message turned Akihabara into an entirely different town for unknown reasons.
Naturally, Okarin pays Faris a visit to attempt to figure out how to undo her D-mail. This ends up with them on the run from a group of rival card game players like we’re back in last week’s show, but dramatically more important than the reason is where they end up running: the lot that, on the World Lines without her D-mail, would hold her maid cafe. Okarin does his best to talk to her about what Akihabara was like in the other timeline, and between the conviction of someone she considers an important friend on one side and the experience of being places she feels like she should remember on the other, Faris begins to actually put together that Okarin is right, and retrieve her own memories of the prior World Line – not on the same level as Okarin’s ability (dubbed Reading Steiner in a fit of chuuni) but enough for her to tell what D-Mail she sent: a fake kidnapping threat, which kept her father busy enough on a critical day that he didn’t get on a plane that was ultimately doomed to crash.
If that wasn’t bad enough, we actually spend a little time with dear dad, and find that he’s a pretty good person who cares a whole awful lot. Of course, while Mayuri might be what matters to Okarin in this quest to fix time itself, there is also the bigger matter of the SERN dystopia crushing the souls of all mankind, so while, when Faris comes to terms with what needs to be done and decides to accept that her father is properly dead (allowing Okarin to undo her message with a relatively clean conscience), it hurts… but not too much. At least, not for the audience.
With that, the IBN 5100 goes from “Sold off by Faris’s father to pay her fake ransom” to “Was stored at the shrine, until Ruka broke it”. Which means it’s time to address her D-mail.
This one hurts in a very different way. Theoretically, Okarin knows what Ruka’s D-Mail was and could just ‘fix’ it to save Mayuri, but it’s quite legitimate that he doesn’t want to strip a friend of that person’s dearest wish without at least getting some sort of leave from that person. And Ruka… is very reasonably upset at what Okarin has to say. True, in theory this is for both Mayuri’s life and the fate off the world are at stake, but Ruka has her own priorities both obvious and… poorly hidden, but hidden until now all the same. She agrees to have the D-mail undone, but on one condition: she wants Okarin to take her on a date first, since that’s something she could never have once the timeline was ‘fixed’, and dearly wants.
Though feeling awkward about it, in part I’m sure because of the pathos of the situation as well as the looming knowledge of the situation’s impossibilities and impermanence, Okarin agrees, and even gets live advice from Kurisu and Mayuri on how to make it a proper date, most of which involves Okarin not being his normal weird self.
It’s awkward as heck. Okarin is stiffly playing a role, and Ruka is overall sad about how this is all going down and thus not enjoying herself as much as one would hope. This comes to a head when, late on in the day’s affairs, Okarin asks why Ruka feels about him the way she does, and Ruka experiences bleedover from her other self, recalling when he met Okarin, who protected him from some bullies and gave him the confidence to believe in himself. In shock over receiving this other memory, Ruka calls an end to the date and says that Okarin can do what he must.
Okarin, however, realizes there’s something else he has to do first. Before sending the countermanding D-mail to undo the changes, Okarin visits Ruka at the shrine, and indulges in a full evening of ‘training’ and other Chuuni nonsense, reasoning that Ruka didn’t enjoy her date because she was having it with the wrong person, a fake serious Okarin who existed only because of the advice on how to do things ‘properly’. Going their own way, interacting as friends and themselves with all the goofiness that entails? That allows both Ruka and Okarin some honest joy and catharsis, and unlike a romantic date is something that wouldn’t necessarily go away just because the timeline shifts back as, after all, that was how they interacted back when we first met Ruka in episode 2.
In any case, the previous message is countered and time shifts again, bringing us back to the World Line where the IBN 5100 is missing and nobody at Future Gadget Laboratories knows Moeka, thanks to a D-mail she sent.
Okarin’s first attempt to check in on Moeka doesn’t go well – not because, as you might think, she’s a SERN agent actually opposed to him, but because by the time Okarin gets there, Moeka has committed suicide. A time leap back brings Okarin into conflict with Moeka when she’s a nervous wreck in her apartment instead, going insane over a lack of contact from someone she knows as “FB” – her SERN handler, whose presence, if only in the form of text messages, gave her life purpose. However, wresting her phone from her hands and learning what her D-mail really was (the location of the IBN 5100, which FB had ordered her to acquire) doesn’t change the World Line – Moeka trusts FB’s orders more than a mysterious message from her future self, so the countering orders have to come from FB’s phone. Of course, that means finding the real identity of FB, which Moeka hasn’t done.
In order to discover FB, Okarin time leaps to when the IBN 5100 was taken and stalks the handoff in order to track down who it ends up with. And who is the mysterious FB? None other than Okarin’s landlord, Mr. Braun. Confronted by Okarin, he reveals that he’s doing SERN’s bidding mostly because his daughter is threatened with some horrible fate or other should he fail to cooperate, indicating that SERN’s evil side operates very much on layers of relative innocents like Braun and Moeka, called the Rounders. Capping the scene off, Braun kills both Moeka and himself, following the code given to the Rounders for those who fail and hoping that his daughter will be spared. That, of course, leaves his cell phone in Okarin’s hands, giving him the ability to send a D-mail that will actually take Moeka off the case.
There’s just one D-mail left that needs to be undone to push the World Line past 1% divergence – the very first one that was sent. Remember what it is, because part of Okarin has forgotten.
“I think someone just killed Makise Kurisu.”
Complicating the matter beyond even losing someone in abstract (a barrier that was, essentially, crossed with Faris’s father), there’s the fact that Okarin and Kurisu have been, slowly but surely, been spiraling towards couple status. Okarin clearly holds romantic feelings for Kurisu, and that pushes him to do his damnedest to seek another way to save Mayuri (and the world, but mostly Mayuri) without undoing the D-mail that changed that fate.
And here Okarin really starts to feel something of the horror of time travel. He can do things over. And over. And over. Repeating the same action constantly and praying for a different result, bleeding humanity along the way. There’s even a point where he confesses that he feels himself losing touch. This has started and continued, for Okarin, to save Mayuri… and yet he’s spent loops with the Time Leap Machine just determining the exact time of her death, and how much that can be altered, until the point where he realizes how detached he’s become, viewing Mayuri as something to be studied.
Almost like a mad scientist, when you think about it.
Okarin confesses his fears to Kurisu, especially after a loop where he tries to sacrifice his own life for Mayuri (and fails, watching her die again) and on the subsequent go around finds that she’s starting to remember her deaths, and the sorrow that causes Okarin to see. Kurisu, it seems, is also having seeping memories, including of her stabbing, and tells Okarin to save Mayuri over her. After, as much as it hurts, accepting her choice, Okarin confesses his feelings to Kurisu as well, and she gives him a kiss. If that weren’t enough, at the last critical moment, she finds she can’t just quietly slink off into oblivion, and runs to the lab to tell Okarin she loves him… which is the last thing before the hacking efforts delete the D-mail from SERN’s servers, changing the critical element and sending the world like past 1%. There, Okarin, in a Future Gadgets Laboratory where nothing particularly interesting ever happened, declares that the great final battle is over in the most pained and broken way possible, to a Daru and Mayuri who are ignorant of that being anything other than another Chuuni outburst. The Phone Microwave is disassembled, and Okarin, sadder but wiser, finds himself putting away the things he found in his time outside of time, leaving us with that as a bittersweet end… Just kidding, there are two more episodes, led into when Suzuha returns in a post-credits stinger, saying she needs his help to save Kurisu and stop World War III.
The next two episodes are quick to sum up, because I haven’t been going into gratuitous detail, but represent one of my favorite sequences in anime. This Suzuha, unlike her previous incarnation, has a time machine that can go backwards and forwards, has met her father, and is looking to fix a slightly different problem than the previous one. She takes Okarin back to the day of Kurisu’s stabbing with a mission to change things. He fails the first time, seeing in the process that she gets stabbed in an altercation with her father, who steals her time machine theories and makes for Russia, which eventually precipitates World War III. In fact, Okarin’s attempts to prevent it only end up causing it, and at least in this go ’round he’s the one holding the knife in the end, causing her death as a tragic accident. Though all seems lost when he watches Kurisu die, it’s revealed that this was itself part of the plan, as a video message from Okarin’s own future self proclaims – in all his chuuni glory – explaining exactly what it will take, and how Okarin has to change the outcome without altering ‘established’ events and causing a paradox the way things like the D-mails do.
We also get some answers, like Okarin’s code to himself: What does Steins Gate mean? It doesn’t mean anything at all!
Okarin heads back a second time armed with a comprehensive knowledge of the day and things like fake blood and a taser. He makes a few swaps so Kurisu’s dad won’t be able to keep the stolen papers. In the room where the stabbing takes place, Okarin finds his fake blood is all congealed, but he has a solution, goading the man into stabbing him instead of Kurisu. Okarin takes the knife, her father flees, and as Kurisu panics and tries to call an ambulance, Okarin tases her, leaving her unconscious in a pool of blood for his past self to find as he shambles back to the time machine and, via it, some medical aid, from a distance seeing his past self embark on the events of the show. Suzuha vanishes, but she’ll be back the normal way in about seven years, and Okarin goes about putting things in this timeline as right as he can, like getting Moeka a job working as Mr. Braun’s assistant, and having lab badges made for all his friends. At the end, he even happens to run into Kurisu, who in addition to probably having lots of questions from her meetings with both versions of Okarin that day, seems to have a hint of memory from the other World Lines, suggesting that they’ll be quite alright going forward.
And that is, in the end, Steins;Gate. Summary and analysis doesn’t really do it justice. This is one of the most watched and most beloved shows out there for good reason. It’s got good bright parts and impressive dark bits, with some good intrigue, mystery, and thriller elements wrapped up in a package with an appealing theme in time travel and classic conspiracy theories. The characters are unforgettable, the scenario is engaging. Steins;Gate has several great heights and few if any weaknesses. It really is an A+ impressive show.
And that’s where I normally end my reviews, but there’s one last thing, one post-script I wanted to discuss relative to Steins;Gate, and I saved it for the end because it kind of needs the full overview. And that is the question: is Steins;Gate a Harem show? And what does it mean if it is or isn’t?
When you get down to it, Steins;Gate is an adaptation of a Visual Novel game, which has multiple endings in which Okarin (you) can get out on a consistent timeline with, essentially, the girl of your choice. The Kurisu route is the longest, most difficult, and most engaged, as well as the one that other parts of the Science Adventure Series (such as Robotics;Notes) consider canon when there’s crossover, but it’s not the only one that could be seen as legitimate.
Because of that, we have the setup where a male main character is largely surrounded by female characters, and all these female characters are largely considered available and interested matches. That is, when you get down to it, the more core and basic definition of the Harem structure.
And it’s true that Steins;Gate doesn’t indulge in typical Harem antics… or does it? There’s not cheap falling into boobs, but Okarin certainly does make an ass of himself and have questionably romantic misunderstandings with the girls, especially Kurisu, in a way that you would expect from Harem jockeying. He even manages to walk in on girls bathing at one point (rushing home due to a horrifying text only to find Kurisu and Mayuri taking a shower).
Even if you don’t count that, though, that’s what Harem shows often use, not what properly defines Harem. In my mind the core is there and the trappings are there enough. It’s a harem show. Much like Rising of the Shield Hero plays its genre straight rather than subverting anything, Steins;Gate, I feel, is properly defined as a harem, and the fact that its quality is far and away above what you would expect out of a Harem show doesn’t negate that in the least.
In a sense, Steins;Gate shows you what needs to be done to handle a harem in a more serious piece of media, and why that shouldn’t be automatically considered a bad thing. Because, when you get down to it, the romantic tension adds drama to the scenario. It doesn’t have to appeal to the typical cheese, have the girls playing jealous shrew, the lead be dense as a brick, or throw fanservice at us, it just has to have a tangled and engaging web of potential relations between our lead and his supporting cast. The classic love triangle, but with more lines.
And don’t get me wrong; while Harem and even the stereotypical Harem can be entertaining, Sturgeon’s Law does apply. But it’s evidence that Harem elements, like most elements, can be good or even great if you use them well rather than poorly.
And that, at last, is what there is to say. El Psy Congroo.