Steins;Gate, the time travel show everyone's right about
A mad-scientist sci-fi about a hacked microwave that texts the past, an old IBM clone, and one guy trying to save his friend across timelines. It earns its spot on everyone's top 10.
Spoilers ahead.
I love time travel. Love, love, love it. So Steins;Gate was always going to land for me, and it still surprised me with how good it is. This is the one anime where the community consensus and my own gut agree completely. It shows up on everyone’s top 10, and it deserves to.
What it’s actually about
Okabe is a self-styled mad scientist who calls himself Hououin Kyouma and mostly putters around a cramped lab with his friends. They discover, half by accident, that their hacked-together “Phone Microwave,” a microwave wired up to a cell phone, can send text messages into the past. They call them D-Mails, short for DeLorean mail, which is a perfect little Back to the Future wink.
The discovery scene is the one I always think of. They throw a banana in the microwave, and instead of cooking it, it comes back as green gel, sitting in the past and the present at once. They have no idea what they’ve done. That is the whole show in miniature: a couple of nerds messing with something way bigger than they understand, and then spending the rest of the series cleaning up the mess.
The stuff I love
The little one in the lab, Mayuri, the one who greets everyone with “Tuturu,” is the heart of it. At the very start Okabe stumbles onto a bloody scene involving Kurisu, the genius girl, and she turns up alive and fine right after. That whiplash is the hook. But the real engine of the show is darker: no matter what Okabe does, his friend keeps dying, and he has to live the same stretch of time over and over trying to stop it.
That’s the part that wrecks me, the idea that some things are already fixed. The timeline resists him. Events reconverge no matter how he nudges them, like the past has already decided how it ends and is just waiting for the future to catch up. And yet, through enough pain and enough tries, he does manage to change things for the better. Both of those things being true at once is the trick the show pulls off.
Then there’s the IBN 5100. They need an old retro computer to undo what they’ve done, and it’s a barely-disguised version of the real IBM 5100. I happen to know that machine, why it’s rare, why it mattered, the conspiracy lore around it, so watching them hunt down exactly the right one at exactly the right moment in the past was a private little delight. Throw in a shadowy organization building real time machines and other people rewriting the timeline, and you’ve got a stack of interlocking problems Okabe has to solve all at once.
The visuals are great, the sound design is great, the character work is great. It’s all great. I don’t have much of a contrarian take here, which is rare for me. Steins;Gate is just as good as everyone says.