Dr. Stone

Overview

Dr. Stone (ドクターストーン) isn’t one of my favorite anime. I’m sorry to everyone who loved this series, but I need to mention that right from the start so you don’t get your hopes up. And from what I’ve experienced, those of you who love this series are extremely opposed to evidence of its shortcomings.

But, hopefully you’ll take the time to actually understand what I’m saying in this review. And if you disagree with anything I say, or have questions about why I said the things I did, I’m more than happy to have a discussion with you in the comments or over on Discord.

And with that said, it’s not like I hate Dr. Stone. This series had a good premise, but unfortunately wasn’t able to live up to that premise for a number of reasons. I also recognize the fact that this is a shounen series, which means I’m not the target demographic.

So, for everyone who hasn’t seen Dr. Stone, what is it about? Basically everyone on Earth gets turned to stone during some sort of petrification event. Then, 3,700 years later, our protagonist breaks free from the petrification and sets off on his plan to rebuild the world.

And one major part of this plan is to “revive” everyone else who was petrified. Senku is similar to most shounen protagonists in that regard. He doesn’t just want to rebuild the world — he wants to save everyone.

Like I said, it’s a good premise for an anime, and it would allow for a lot of historical topics I’m personally interested in to be explored, but the series falls short. Instead, what we get is a series which at some parts feels like it’s ripping of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, and at other times is teaching children semi-correct science.

Characters

Rather than going through individual characters, let’s go through them in groups. The first group is Senku (the protagonist) and his friends from school, Taiju and Yuzuriha. While Senku is the brains of the operation, Taiju is the brawn. Together they make the perfect team.

But then we throw Yuzuriha into the mix, and even after watching the entire first season I’m still not sure what she brings to the table. As far as I can tell she’s just the token female character of the main trio.

The Tsukasa empire is the next group, which is the antagonistic group of the series so far. I’m guessing at some point the Tsukasa empire has to be defeated and the series won’t end there, but I’m not entirely sure. This group is dedicated to being “anti-science,” and no, there’s not a good reason for this to be the case.

Basically, they don’t want the entire world to be revived from petrification. And since Senku does want that, and is also very much into science, the Tsukasa empire takes an anti-science stance simply because it’s the opposite of Senku’s stance.

The final I’ll just refer to as the stone village, because the name of the village isn’t actually revealed until later in the series. This is a village made up of people who were born and raised post-petrification event. They don’t really know anything about the world of 3,700 years ago.

This village is also where we spend the majority of the series, and some of the notable characters are Kohaku, Chrome, Kinro, Ginro, and Suika (I guess). The most important is Chrome, because although he doesn’t know what science is, he’s a scientist at heart.

Science

I’ve discussed the issues with the science in this series at length in my episode reviews. So instead, let’s discuss how the “science” of this series actually diverted the series from the premise it laid out at the start: which is to rebuild and save humanity. And yes, this section will include spoilers.

Dr. Stone sort of advertised itself as this science x history series which was going to go through all the major scientific developments throughout human history. However, it quickly became apparent that this wasn’t actually going to happen, which is a shame because it seems a lot of people, myself included, were looking forward to that.

But that in itself isn’t really an issue. Just because a series isn’t how I wanted it to be doesn’t make it a failure.

It didn’t take long for Senku to reinvent gunpowder, which would make taking down Tsukasa relatively easy. However, that would also eliminate the major conflict of the series, so that obviously can’t happen. To prevent this, we get some mental gymnastics on the part of the author.

It goes like this: Tsukasa figures out that Senku is making gunpowder (because apparently he’s also a super genius). Then there’s a weak excuse for why Senku can no longer make gunpowder. And then Senku decides to build a whole bunch of other inventions to take down Tsukasa in a roundabout way.

However, none of his new inventions will actually take down Tsukasa. He still needs either gunpowder, or the talk-no-jutsu. And since this is a shounen series, I have a feeling the latter is what we’re going to see in the end.

Conclusion

Overall, Dr. Stone is a 5/10 from me. It’s almost a 6, but not quite. There were just way too many flaws with the logic of the series for my liking. And that’s especially egregious considering this series advertises itself as a science series.

If you really want a more in-depth look at this series, I did weekly reviews for every episode. In those reviews I discussed the specific issues I had with the science of each episode, so they’ll give you a much better understanding of why I have this series rated as I do.

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My review of the second season: Stone Wars is available.