Dr. Stone Episode 16

Dr. Stone Episode 16

A Tale for the Ages

Alright, so can I start off by saying that this was a bad episode of Dr. Stone? Is that fair? I think that’s pretty fair. Yes, we got a bunch of information in this episode, but no, that alone does not make an episode good. Also, a lot of the information we received was already fairly obvious.

I guess we should start off with why the village is named after Senku. His father is the one who founded the village, so it’s really named after his father. But you also may recall that I predicted the village was founded by someone related to Senku weeks before we knew it was even named after him.

So no, that’s not exactly exciting information.

But there is one thing that’s still not quite clear. We know that Senku’s father founded Ishigami Village, but we don’t actually know if anyone who lives in it are his descendants. For example, I predicted the line of priestesses may be related to Senku, but we don’t know if that’s the case just yet.

Byakuya Ishigami

Byakuya Ishigami was Senku’s father — he’s long dead now. But before he died he set up Ishigami Village so that his son could one day bring humanity back into the technological age. Now, what’s interesting about this is that Byakuya was never actually petrified in the first place.

He had just recently achieved his dream of becoming an astronaut and was aboard the International Space Station when the petrification event occurred. Because of this, he and his fellow crew mates were spared. I’ll get to the rest of the crew in a little bit.

Byakuya Ishigami from the anime series Dr. Stone
Byakuya Ishigami

But the fact that Byakuya was an astronaut is sort of a big deal. I mean, that in itself isn’t a big deal, but the fact that he was never petrified is because we now have an origin for Ishigami Village. The village was not founded by someone who awoke from the petrification, it was around from the start.

And since we know there are direct descendants of the original six village founders currently alive, that means their lineages have successfully lived on for 3,700 years. That’s very possible, but is that the case for the entire village? Is everyone currently in the village a direct ancestor of the founders?

Or, did some other people who were previously petrified awaken and join the village? In earlier episode reviews I considered that something along those lines could have happened. After all, we have no reason to believe that Senku was the first person to awaken, even in just that region of Japan.

The Gang’s All Here

From what we see of the six crew members aboard the ISS, it seems pretty obvious that most, if not all, of them have living descendants. Let’s also not forget that there are three men and three women aboard the space station, so they pair up rather nicely for repopulation purposes.

I don’t remember all of their names, but two of them are already husband and wife, so obviously they would be a pair. The next pair is the angry guy and the brunette. They seem like they’re probably the ancestors of Kinro and Ginro.

We’re then left with Byakuya and the pop idol who’s obviously Ruri and Kohaku’s ancestor. It’s obvious that the idol had children, and Byakuya is the only one left. Though it’s still possible that perhaps she paired up with the angry guy instead. I just don’t see that being the case.

In the next episode we’ll probably see the actual founding of Ishigami Village, how the crew decided to go with Byakuya’s family name, and how the repopulation of the world began. I would think that the next episode would also be the end of this flash back and that after that we’d be back in the present timeline.

And can I just mention that although I hate all of the present timeline characters aside from Chrome, somehow these flashback characters are all worse.

Petrification Event

Aside from learning that Ishigami Village was founded 3,700 years ago and not at a later date, the other big piece of information we got had to do with the petrification event’s origin. As shown in the picture below, it appears to have originated in North America.

In this picture we can see South America, with the petrification spreading outward from its epicenter to the North. It looks like it could have potentially began somewhere in Texas, but it could turn out to be anywhere else in the United States. Who knows, maybe it originated from Area 51 in Nevada? Or even Roswell, New Mexico.

The petrification event spreading over the world from the anime series Dr. Stone
The petrification event spreading over the world

I am interested to learn more about the origin of the petrification event in the future. I doubt the series is going to leave it as a mystery which Senku fixes without learning anything about it. Was it man made? And if so, why did they make it?

It doesn’t appear to be a virus. It doesn’t appear to have been an accident. And it doesn’t make much sense in how it only affected swallows and humans. Those first and last points go together. If it was a virus then that final point would make more sense.

But how is Senku going to learn how this whole thing started? Is he going to travel to the US? Did the founders of Ishigami Village figure it out and pass down that knowledge? Or is someone else who has knowledge of the initial event going to wind up in Japan?

Conclusion

What are your thoughts about Dr. Stone episode 16? Did you enjoy the bad storytelling and worse characters? Was the new information we learned about the world worth it? Were you shocked by any of these mundane revelations? Let me know in the comments.

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My review of the next episode is available here.

2 Replies to “Dr. Stone Episode 16”

  1. This episode was purely and utterly stupid, in the ISS space station there’re 5 of them that were official astronauts and one singer. What doesn’t make sense is that when they landed back to earth, why didn’t they just make the unpetrification liquid to restore the human race? Also keep in mind that 5 of them were smart NASA space astronauts.

    1. While I agree with you in some respects, I also think that’s a bit of an unfair stance. Yes, five of these people were NASA astronauts (AKA scientists), so sure, they probably should have been working to figure out how to unpetrify the people of the world. However, they also have no idea how the world got petrified, so they don’t even know where to begin figuring out a cure. Senku only figured it out due to luck — he was revived and so he put Taiju in the same spot where he was revived. If the NASA scientists just made the petrification liquid right off the bat, that would have been some extremely bad writing because it would make no sense.

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