Hey! You, there! Remember Chaos;Head? Me neither. Not very well, at least. You see, it had a really good start with a mysterious-but-cool premise, nice presentation, passable character design, and I was initially quite excited to see where it was all going. Then everything fell apart. By the time I found out what was actually going on I was seriously disappointed and the show ground down into an inevitably lackluster ending.

Stein’s Gate just started up this past week, and is based on a visual novel by the same team that brought us Chaos;Head. Again we’ve got a mysterious premise: our protagonist, an under-funded mad scientist, goes to attend a lecture on time travel. A satellite falls from the sky. Some woman he knows from the academic world ends up getting stabbed. Upon returning to his lab, the mad scientist discovers that the lecture he attended had never happened, that he shouldn’t have witnessed the satellite crash, and maybe he’s a little more crazy than he thought he was. Or maybe there’s some time travel happening, after all.

Oh, and some bananas are put through a microwave. This is very important to the protagonist’s research, you see.

I’m generally opposed to time travel fiction. It encourages some of the worst narrative excesses and discussion of the topic nearly always involves ridiculous notions of the supposedly-necessary consequences of paradox and alternate timelines. Fie on all that nonsense.

One episode in, the main characters appear to be the aforementioned mad scientist, his absent-minded female assistant, and a stereotypical overweight computer geek. Their adversary appears to be the paranoia of their own leader, who believes The Organization is moving against them, attempting to stifle their important scientific work that will overthrow the social order of the world. A little more slapstick and we would see shades of Excel Saga.

Give it a shot. I fully expect this to be awesome for at least five episodes.