 What's up, and welcome to One Take. I'm Gil, and today we're talking about Dr. Stone Season 1, episode 5. This will be a full recap and review of the episode, which means there's going to be a bunch of spoilers. If you haven't seen the episode yet, check it out, and then come back for this review. With that, let's jump right into it. This episode picks up right where the last one left off on a pretty big cliffhanger, where Tukasa was threatening to kill Sanku, unless Sanku agreed to essentially give up science and give up his goal of rescuing civilization. Of course, Sanku does not agree to those terms and seemingly accepts his impending death. Astute viewers would have noticed here, Sanku was sort of cracking his neck and making motions like this, which comes into play later in the episode. Tukasa explains his plan how he's going to kill Sanka. He says that he's going to use his weapon to shatter Sanku's cervical nerve, which basically means he's going to break his neck, knock him unconscious, and here in the stone world where there's no medicine, that's pretty much a guaranteed death sentence for Sanku. Now, before Tukasa goes ahead and kills Sanku, he says that if they had met 3,700 years ago prior to the petrification of society, maybe they would have been friends and we see what that could have looked like. We see images of Tukasa protecting Sanku, Taiju, and Yuzuriha, our 3 main characters from bullies. We see Tukasa participating in some of our characters' experiments. We see them as friends in this kind of almost happy, swelling score behind this, which suddenly goes silent as we cut to black. We hear the sound of Tukasa attacking Sanku. We hear the shattering of Sanku's cervical nerve, and then we cut to Sanku silently falling to the ground. We see Yuzuriha crying out silently. The first sound we hear is Taiju yelling out to Sanku, and then we cut to the starting. Now, how well this scene works for you sort of depends on how willing you are to believe that Sanku's life is actually in danger. To me, I definitely bet on Sanku surviving this somehow, but to some degree, I was willing to buy that he might actually die. I started to wonder whether or not Dr. Stone would take a Game of Thrones-like move and kill a protagonist fairly early on in the series. Now, there are a couple of things working against this idea. Sanku seemed pretty okay with the idea of dying, which makes you think maybe he's got some kind of trick up his sleeve, but at the same time, Sanku has shown himself to be a very cold, clinical, logical character. So at least I thought if he did the math and found that his death was inevitable, he's the sort of character that would accept it in a sort of calm, nonchalant manner. So that's why part of me wondered maybe he is actually going to die here. Also, the previous episode introduced through those smoke signals the idea that there are other humans alive out there, which to me planted the seeds for how this show could continue if Sanku were to actually die. Because that tells us if Sanku were to actually die, then Taiju and Yuzuriha could go find some of those other people, and there is a potential path forward for this show without who we've come to see as the main character. Now, ultimately, like I said, I was betting on Sanku surviving. And the main reasons for that are Tsukasa, the bad guy, says that he wants to essentially show Sanku mercy by giving him a quick and painless death. Now, I don't know about you, but when I think quick and painless death, I definitely don't think breaking their neck, knocking them unconscious and basically hoping that they die. So that felt a little bit unbelievable to me as the chosen method of attack that Tsukasa would take. Now, we're sort of led to believe that Sanku, while cracking his neck and making those sorts of motions, was kind of trying to influence Tsukasa to take that method of attack, but that felt a little bit unbelievable to me and made it kind of clear that Sanku had some kind of trick up his sleeve. So this scene sort of worked for me, sort of didn't. From there, we see Taiju and Yuzuriha basically crying over Sanku's seemingly lifeless body. Tsukasa kind of coldly says to them, I suggest that, as his friends, you give him a proper farewell. Here we see something very interesting. Taiju, we always call him the big oaf. He's a character that doesn't think very well. He reacts to things. He yells a lot. Here he becomes very stoic. We see him grab a boulder and seething with rage. You see his hands shaking as he struggles to grip that boulder, pick it up. Yuzuriha's worried here. You can tell that she's concerned that Taiju is going to do his usual thing. He's going to react without thinking, and that would be a very bad thing. We see Tsukasa think to himself, if Taiju attacks me right now in a fit of rage, I'm going to be forced to kill him too. And I'm assuming that in this scene, that's what Yuzuriha is worried about. She's worried that Taiju is going to attack and get himself killed. But he looks at Yuzuriha and assures her I'm calm. Then he throws the boulder in the air. Tsukasa, the bad guy, believes that Taiju has thrown the boulder in the air as a diversion. So Tsukasa focuses on Taiju, which gives Yuzuriha an opportunity to pick up a container of gunpowder and throw it at Tsukasa. The boulder lands on Tsukasa, hits the gunpowder, and it creates an explosion, which doesn't hurt Tsukasa, but creates a diversion so Taiju and Yuzuriha can run away. As this goes on, Taiju and Yuzuriha in unison exclaim science levels the playing field for everyone in reference to the fact that they can use this gunpowder to defeat Tsukasa, even though he's much stronger than them. And the two of them, Yuzuriha and Taiju, say to themselves, the three of us made a promise to fight alongside each other, basically saying that they're not going to give up on Senku. Similar to the previous scene, there are some things that worked really well for me here, and then a couple of things that didn't work as well. The thing that worked fantastically was seeing Taiju act so out of character. Like I said before, usually he reacts violently to things, he doesn't think things through, he yells a lot. But here, seeing him so stoic, seeing him act so deliberately, and so out of character really sold the gravity of the situation. And I really felt the seriousness of Senku potentially being dead, of Taiju and Yuzuriha being in pretty grave danger here, so that character moment for Taiju worked really well. What didn't work as well is Yuzuriha's involvement in this scene. When Yuzuriha and Taiju say to themselves, the three of us made a promise to fight alongside each other, it really tries to sell us the idea that Yuzuriha is one of the trio. And I definitely buy that she's very close with Taiju, but personally I didn't feel that the three of these characters have become a unit. Now these flashbacks are meant to imply that Yuzuriha was part of this club. She hung out with Taiju and Senku, but to me the last four episodes of this show, they did a great job of selling to me that Taiju and Senku were friends. Taiju helped Senku out with these experiments. It really sold for me that Taiju and Yuzuriha were close. The whole crux of the show is Taiju wanting to confess his love to Yuzuriha. But personally, I didn't feel like we saw enough of Yuzuriha interacting with Senku for that line. The three of us made a promise to fight alongside each other. That line did not have a lot of impact for me because I don't think the relationship between Yuzuriha and Senku has been developed enough. So again, the scene worked pretty well for me, but that piece of it didn't quite work. I wish we saw more development of this trio becoming close together. All three of them. We then see Taiju and Yuzuriha on the run, carrying Senku's seemingly lifeless body. Taiju is saying to himself that he believes Senku is alive, but it really feels like just an emotional cry and an unwillingness to accept the reality of the situation. We then see Taiju attempting to administer CPR, giving chest compressions. There's a very cringeworthy moment where he goes to perform mouth to mouth on Senku and then decides not to. Then we see a flashback. We see Senku, Yuzuriha, and Taiju hanging out in class. When another classmate asks them a question from a psych book he's reading, if you had to pick between saving yourself, your friend, or your lover, but you can only pick one to save, who would you save? Senku butts in and says, I'd save everyone. I'd look for a fundamental rule that lets us all be saved. This makes Taiju in the present sitting over Senku's seemingly lifeless body. Taiju realizes Senku would never kill himself and he would never sacrifice himself. There must have been some plan here. And then Taiju remembers Senku adjusting his neck, cracking his neck, and realizes that he was deliberately trying to get Tsukasa to attack him with that specific method. And then he notices on the back of Senku's neck that it's still partially petrified. And he remembers that when you put that miracle liquid onto a petrified part of someone's body, when it unpetrified, it also fixes some of the small breaks that you have in your body. Which means that in theory, if they unpetrify Senku's neck, it may fix his broken neck and it may save him. They pour the liquid on his neck and Taiju yells out, wake up. I know you wouldn't die in a place like this. Senku, you're the star of hope for humanity, for civilization. And that is one of the parts of this scene that worked really well for me. Taiju pleading for Senku to wake up really makes you realize how much Taiju idolizes Senku. He literally looks up to him not just as a role model or somebody that's really strong, but he looks up to him as a literal savior for humanity. And I thought that was really effective and I felt some of the emotions that the show wanted us to feel in that scene. Again, I hate to say it, but every scene in this episode that worked for me had something that didn't work. And for me, it was the cringe-worthy moment where Taiju went to apply mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to Senku. It was totally played for laughs and it made me wonder why is this show so afraid to take itself too seriously? I'm always okay with a little bit of silliness and this show definitely has plenty of comedic moments every episode, but when we're in a life or death moment like this one, when the show wants us to feel for these characters, that just feels like an inappropriate time for a joke along the lines of, oh my god, he's about to put his lips on his lips. The joke just took me out of the scene for that moment and it basically 100% convinced me that Senku is going to survive this ordeal. So any tension there around whether or not he was going to live was gone because you think that if there was actually a chance he was going to die, you wouldn't have over-the-top silly jokes like that in that moment. Before we see the outcome of the unpetrification of Senku's neck, before we see whether or not he actually lives, we get a flashback to just before Senku became unpetrified. As we've seen before, we hear him counting the seconds passing by in his mind. One of the interesting things here is we see some of the frustrating aspects of trying to count every second for almost 4,000 years. He mentions the concept of leap seconds and things like that, which I found interesting. As soon as he wakes up, we immediately see Senku get to work building weapons, finding shelter, making clothes, trying to make fire. Throughout this whole experience, we see a group of three monkeys watching him. At first, they think he's a dumb dumb, I think is what they call him. They call him a shiny monkey because he's not hairy like them. So they don't really know what they're looking at. At first, the monkeys think he's dumb because they don't know what the heck he's doing. But by the end, once they see fire, once they see clothes, they're terrified of him. And Senku standing in his makeshift house looks down at the monkeys and says, I guess I haven't introduced myself yet. Nice to meet you. I'm the only one of my kind on this planet, a human. I'm going to build a technological civilization from scratch. And this is where it starts. So on a visceral level, I enjoyed this whole roughly 8 to 10 minute sequence. One of the joys of this show is watching Senku cleverly find ways to use science to survive. And we basically get pure that stuff for 10 minutes. We watch him find a way to build fire. We watch him find a way to create shelter for himself. But this scene didn't really communicate anything we didn't already know. But we knew that Senku was counting the seconds while he was petrified. We knew that he learned how to survive. So I kind of found myself wondering why I was watching this scene. I also found it odd that there were monkeys hanging around because this implies that monkeys were there from the moment Senku woke up from his petrification. But as far as I recall in the last four episodes, I don't think we'd seen any monkeys, but I'll go with it. So like I said, I found myself sort of enjoying this scene just on a visceral level. It's cool to watch Senku figure out how to make fire, figure out how to make weapons, and that ending speech was pretty rousing. So it felt good to watch. But I still wasn't quite sure why they put the scene here. You could see it as a tragic scene because Senku is displaying all this optimism. He's planning to rebuild civilization, but he may have failed at that because in the present he might be dead. It didn't really feel very tragic to me though, because at this point I've pretty much accepted that Senku is guaranteed to survive. If we're supposed to be doubting that and wondering whether or not he's going to live, I don't feel the show is communicating that. To me at this point it seems pretty clear that he's going to survive. If he doesn't, I'll be very shocked and kudos to the show for lulling me into this false sense of security I have right now. So that's the end of the episode. And like I've been saying throughout this recap, there's a lot to like here. There's a lot that worked, but unfortunately that was all offset by just a sprinkling of things throughout that didn't work quite as well for me. Because of that, I think this is probably my least favorite of the five episodes so far, but I still liked it. And there's a 10 billion percent chance that I'm going to watch the next episode. I'm excited to see what's going on with the other humans that we know are out there because of those smoke signals. I'm super curious to see how Tsukasa will be handled. I'm wondering if they're going to find a way to permanently handle him, or if he's going to be a sort of ongoing villain character, or maybe there's going to be a sort of uncomfortable tense alliance with him just because he is such a valuable character. He's the best fighter of them all. So maybe they'll come to some sort of tense, uncomfortable understanding, and that'll be part of the ongoing tension of the show. When is that alliance going to break? So I can't wait to see how all that resolves itself. And with that, I think we can wrap up. So thanks for watching. And if you enjoyed this video, please subscribe to our channel and hit that little bell icon to make sure you get notifications whenever we release more videos like this one. I've just dialed in my brother Adam, who has experience in the medical field, and we're going to get his medical expertise here. So Adam, I'm watching an anime right now, and one character is trying to kill another character, but he wants to do it in a merciful way where it's a quick and painless death. And I want to run kind of his plan of attack by you and just see the medical reality of it if it would actually work. Okay, are you ready? Okay, yeah. So his plan is to shatter this character's cervical nerve. And he says that this is going to knock him unconscious and then he'll die painlessly. Does that make sense? Cervical nerve. So first of all, there's nothing called a cervical nerve. Did he get more specific than that? Well, they showed an image of his neck. So basically, he's basically breaking his neck, I think. Right. So they probably mean his cervical spinal cord. No, so that wouldn't kill him right away. In fact, I actually just talked to a surgeon like a week ago who was telling me about a patient he had. Which is when the spinal cord gets severed at the level of the neck. So your brain is kept alive and everything. Except that your head is basically cut off from your body. Your brain is cut off from your body. And you're still alive? Yeah. I mean, you probably would stop breathing and stuff. So you could be kept alive through artificial means and even have consciousness. But otherwise, you would basically stop breathing and die. But no, it would not be an instantaneous death. And you're conscious of this the whole time, potentially? Well, as your breathing stops, eventually you would go unconscious. But in this case, it would be much more merciful to just destroy the brain directly. Yeah. Or do instead of doing an internal decapitation, do a regular decapitation? Well, I mean, yes, I think that's almost instantaneous. But you probably still have like a half second of awareness as you and I have discussed and googled many times. Lucid decapitation. Yeah. Don't look it up like back in the during the French Revolution, when they were cutting off on people's heads. I think actually there was some doctor or something you wanted to he like made an agreement with one of the contempt to and he was like just like try to blink a couple of times after your head is cut off for me. And I think the results were inconclusive. Okay. All right. So I think bottom line here, my my judgment based on that is that if you are going to administer a merciful death, this is not the way to do it. Yeah. Like cutting the head off would be even better. But ideally, why wouldn't you just like knock them? Like, did he did he have strategic reasons why like he couldn't take his time or something a little bit more elaborate? It's sort of so so the character who is being targeted to be killed, he doesn't want to die. And he has a secret plan where if the other guy tries to kill him by hitting him in the neck, he has a secret way of potentially surviving. So he was kind of like, all right, go ahead and kill me and start sort of cracking his neck and drawing attention to it to sort of subtly give him the idea of, yeah, I'm going to crack his cervical nerve. All right. So the neck, the whole neck thing was built up from the beginning. Right. Right. I was going to say, like, you should just put them on. Like if you wanted to grant them a merciful death, like put them to sleep first and then Adam, Adam, this is the stone world. They don't have anesthesia. Yeah. Too bad. Yeah. All right. All right. I'll let you get back to fall asleep. Take a big heavy boulder, drop it right on the skull. That's better than an internal decapitation. Well, it's just kind of heat of the moment. So you couldn't be like, all right, just take a quick nap for me. And there's worse ways, there's worse ways to die. But okay. So that one, the last thing I'll say, that one would still be distressing and the person would be kind of conscious, but at least they can't receive any pain signals from the body. You know? Okay. Okay. So it's not the worst. It's not the worst way to go, but not necessarily the best. It's basically like being, it's kind of just like suffocating because like your breathing will just stop and your brain will be like, I need air. But you might also not even be able to perceive that your lungs are like craving oxygen. Yeah. So yeah, I can't think exactly what it would feel like, but I think it would be pretty distressing and uncomfortable, but at least it wouldn't be physically painful. Well, next time we hang out, maybe we do some in-person experimentation on this and we'll report back. Absolutely. Yeah. All right. Adam, thanks for dialing in. I'll let you get back to the Bachelorette. Thank you. All right. Have a good night. Far more important. You too. Bye.