Review of A Certain Scientific Railgun S

A Certain Scientific Railgun Title card. J.C. Staff.

The second season A Certain Scientific Railgun has finished airing a few weeks back and now its time to review and recap what happened. The season dealt with two story lines.

A little recap of what the show is about, Scientific Railgun is a spin off series of the A Certain Magical Index. It takes place in Academy City where science has found ways to develop powers in people. In this city Mikoto Misaka is ranked the third most powerful with the ability to control electricity. Though by most means she's just a middle school student but she and her friends get into troubles that grip the city and the dark side of it. The City has a dark side with researchers willing to do anything for their experiments. 

Mikoto and "Sister"

The first half of the season dealt with the Sister Arc. After the end of the last season Mikoto and her friends have been living a normal lives but that is not to stay. After visiting friends they made at the end of the last rumors are spreading of finding money cards in back alleys. Mikoto stumbles onto a researcher, Shinobu Nunotaba, that knows her well but can't figure out why she leaving money for people to find. That is when Mikoto finds a girl that looks just like her. Either she has a long lost twin sister or she has a clone. It's a clone, it's a science based city so that's not much of a surprise. Mikoto realizes that she gave a sample of her DNA years ago for research to cure diseases but now it being used to clone thousands of clones. If that was not bad enough she soon discovers that all these girls are being lead to the slaughter. I'm not being grand here, they are literally being lead to battlefield solely to be killed at the hands of the most powerful esper in the city. The Number 1 in the city Is a scary and just down right chilling character that goes by Accelerator. Mikoto stumbles upon one of the back alley killing fields just in time to see Accelerator brutally kill the Sister clone. Mikoto in sheer horror goes all out and tries to actually stop him only to find out that he is far more powerful that she is and deflect her strongest attack like nothing. His ability allows him to redirect vectors, and to sound less complicated, it lets him redirect any attack or anything headed his way. During the battle she finds out that he has killed about 1000 clones already in labs and recently they have started to let him out into alleys to kill clones. The whole goal of the project is to make him even stronger, to Level 6 a yet unreached level of power. They're going with  RPG method of power up but instead of monsters they're using these girls. She finds Nunotaba and confronts her about the project realizing she put money cards in alleys to bring attention to the killing fields in hopes to stop the project. Nunotaba admits she's a child prodigy using her specialty to put  a mind and set up a network between the Clones. She explains over time she realized the clones weren't heartless dolls but real girls with emotions. Horrified by the realization she has been trying to stop it. She explains despite all the illegal cloning and various other broken laws the experiment is being sponsored by the city and they have no intention of stopping it and will silence anyone who tries to alert the world.

The Strongest Esper Accelerator

So things are bad. Okay, bad doesn't even begin to start it. Already a thousand girls have been killed and they are all obedient enough not to do anything to stop it. The storyline continues on with Mikoto going on a mission to destroy all the research facilities in an effort to stop the crazy experiment. She starts to neglect her health and her friends, her friends all offer her help with anything that might be troubling but she brushes them off just telling them she's been busy. Mikoto wants to solve her own mess and doesn't want to drag her friend in, the story does a good job in highlighting her ideas here.  This leads up to a fight between her and the group of mercenaries known as ITEM. ITEM is a group that comes from the light novels the anime is based on and who had yet to make an appearance in animation. Mikoto does a good job fighting them  but her body tired for not eating or sleep she barely manages to escape and more than a few times she nearly dies. All while Nunotaba tries to stop the project herself to be captured. A tired Mikoto thinks she's finally won only to find out the city will give the researchers anything they need to complete the project so it has become an endless battle. The Sister Arc was first covered in the light novel series and the A Certain Magical Index with Touma Kamijou's perceptive but as the storyline catches up and the stories intersect. In the first time around they only showed Touma's view point as he discovered the experiment but now we get to see Mikoto's view point.  There is a lot of that get's revisited with Touma discovering it but the main focus is on MIkoto. Mikoto discovers that the computer that planned out the experiment was destroyed weeks ago and her last hopes of stopping the experiment are gone. Feeling the weight of all those deaths of her sisters weighing on her she decides that if she can disprove a claim the computer made about her they'd have to recheck the data and would be unable to and that would stop the experiment. To do so she decides to fight Accelerator and die on the first move instead of the predicted outcome. The season does a great job to show how her exhaustion and guilt has pushed her to such an extreme and to show her hope being absolutely crushed to justify such actions. Touma catches up to her before she get's to go ahead with her plan. The Magical Index storyline and the Railgun match up to this point with little deviations to the end. Touma insists on finding another way and Mikoto tells him there is not. Touma has the ability to negate powers but refuses to fight her and Mikoto finally fed up with it lets loose her powers on him and appears to kill him.

Touma Kamijou and Mikoto Misaka

Touma just manages to survive and comes up with a solution, he's the weakest in the city and if he manages to beat the strongest the scientist will have to questions the computers results. The scene goes to show not only Touma as a hero but the fact that he is able to relight the spark of hope in Mikoto. What follows is rather intense beat down between Accelerator and Touma. Touma's negation ability allows him to actually land a blow on the number one to his surprise. If Touma hand't been hurt by Mikoto earlier the fight might have been more one sided. The fight scene was actually more intense and grabbing when it was first shown in the Magical Index series. They also cut a lot part and change things that a lot of bits ended up charing to those who had seen the Index fight, taking them out of the moment. The fight ends with the help of the sisters stopping Accelerator's final attack and Touma finishes it with a good punch.

The rest of the arc deals with Touma in the hospital and Mikoto visiting to thank him. The clones are now in better and more caring hands and Mikoto is glad to know that the sister don't hold her responsible and think of her as a sister. The clones are all happy to be alive and look forwards to what life holds. After all the darkness it is touching to see the girls once again having hope.

Uiharu, Saten and Febri.

The next arc is the Silent Party arc that deals with a girl with the name Febri. After the Sister's arc and Mikoto find a small girl and try to take care of her. They are trying to find her parents or at least get her into a school that will take care of her. The arc at the starts mostly feels like a slice of life. Eventually attacks from machines start popping around the group. Sadly it doesn't involved the robot uprising. As they starts to dig into the attack Febri is taken sick and goes to the hospital.At the hospital everyones favorite frog faced doctor explains to Mikoto that Febri is an artificially made human.Yeah, spoiler if you haven't seen it yet.  After diving back into the dark side and confronting the big bad from last season Mikoto finds out whose behind the mess. A group called STUDY wants to take down the espers to show their superiority. Infiltrating their base Mikoto find Nunotaba who was sold to them after she was captured. Nunotaba explains that she released Febri and gave hoped she'd find Mikoto. And finally that all the attacks are a result of Febri's twin sister's power. This all culminates to one final battles between the machines under STUDY's control and Judgement officers that Mikoto and her friend teamed up with. The battle is actually pretty awesome and gives various view points.  And it helps contrast the other arc to show Mikoto working with her friends instead of keeping them in the dark in the last arc. Mikoto even mimics Touma's words from the last arc to show STUDY that no one needs to die. It culminates with a giant robot being launched into the upper atmosphere and Mikoto using her signature railgun to stop a bomb. Farfetched as it was that scene was still pretty cool.

Yup, a railgun in space.

In the end Febri and her sister are saved and thanks to begging Nunotaba is spared. Nunotaba and twins leave the city to get treatment at another Academy City research center. Overall the second arc was much lighter than the first. It wasn't as plot driven which gave it more free rein to have light comedic parts and do more with the side characters. The pace was slow and that's why the fact that Febri being on a time limits didn't have much effect.

Overall this season did help explore more of the Sister's arc and gave us more time with characters that don't get a lot of screen time. The stories were pretty good but the pacing was a bit off. The second arc felt a little slow while the first one could be a little dense. Cameos were a nice treat for fans of the world. They writing could be over the top sometimes thought, they shot a giant robots into space! Still there were some great emotional moments for the characters and this season did great to highlight their core traits.  The first arc was a lot of retelling which had highs and lows. It really took people out of the story when something was drastically changed but it did give new view points of the story which added more to the overall story. Overall A Certain Railgun S  gets a 3.7 out of 5. Right now there is Japanese dub with subtitles available on funimation but it is likely an English dub will come out eventually.