Steins;Gate did not do a good job with the science-fiction aspect of the show. I felt that not enough respect was given to time travel; and I'm not being pedantic. It doesn't have to be factually accurate, it just has to be somewhat plausible (I mean, the Da Vinci Code is completely fiction, but it feels 'right' as in this could actually happen). The 'science-fiction' in Steins;Gate was a really disappointing aspect. The concept of time travel was watered down and did not feel 'plausible' enough, so much so that in the first occurrence of time travel, I really thought when the characters where explaining how the message had gone back in time, they were having an inside joke that was lost in translation.
Time travel. It has drawn the attention of the greatest minds of our times - Einstein, Novikov, Friedman, Hawking, Thorne, Nahin etc. It forms the bridge between time and present. In that everyone has shared a moment in which we think about time, and how we need more, or we wished that we could do it all again, is absolute. Time travel is so alluring because it makes one the master of time. And to master time is to master the poison that must take us all. To master time, to conquer the final, known, dimension. And we always need time. We need more time with our loved ones. Less at work. We need to correct mistakes. Go back in time. Wish we could. And all this is against the age old adage that time is the one thing that man cannot master. It is the one, intangible, thing, concept, that binds, everyone. And to whom everyone obeys. And that's why we always accept time's rules and yet we are infinitely interested in what if's, in time travel.
The simple truth is that to travel back in time is impossible. It is impossible in that it breaks the fundamental law of our constructed universe - that nothing, without exception, travels faster than light. We have already built man made chambers that accelerate charged particles to very near the speed of light, however the hopes of our greatest scientists in developing these gargantuan machines was never to travel faster than light, but, in the case of synchrotron, study the radiation given off by the particles as they accelerate, or recreate particles such as the Higgs boson particle, and answer the fundamental questions in physics. The only form of time travel that humans can conceptualise at the moment is time dilation, or travelling through time. To do this? The most reasonable ideas put forth are travelling through a worm hole or orbiting a black hole. To understand why these are the most reasonable ideas, is to understand that to travel in time is to approach the speed of light. Approaching the speed of light is a frightening concept - the physics formulas you encountered in high school: E=MC^2 and Ek=1/2mv^2 break down as mass itself, which we assume to be constant, actually changes at such velocities. Believe it or not, we have already time travelled on Earth. As the charged particles in particle accelerators near light speed, they are actually travelling in time. The equivalent for a human would need a lot of energy. Hence the 'reasonable theories.' If we could, like a satellite, fall into orbit around a black hole, and therefore harness the incredible energies of a black hole, by constantly falling towards the black hole at a rate that equals our rotation around it (this is how the moon, a satellite, works) than we could approach the speed of light. At this point, time dilation occurs. Time dilation is the idea that relative to another coordinate in space, time is moving at a greater rate. The humans orbiting the black hole in a space ship, are moving through time, at a relatively faster rate, than an observer away from the space ship. Time travel is a relative process. It requires energies that we cannot supply, in quantities that we cannot comprehend. 10 years on board the space ship, and, if they broke away from the black holes orbit and met with the observer, to the observer, 13 years might have passed. The people on board would have travelled in time.
All this is speculation off course, and this is what I recall from various sources [and being a science fiction doco geek]. I hope this explains why I found the time travel in Steins;Gate so disappointing - the concept is dealt with too easily. I found it a little cheap that they could call this a science fiction series, and then explain time travel as a random occurrence with a wannabe scientist and computer hacker who modded microwave, and the lights going out. The time travel in Steins;Gate is only there as a plot device, a crux. It is not treated as a science fiction element. This in itself is fine (I guess...), except for the pot-holed plot. Cue next section:
Not going to go into many details of the story/plot, as per the guidelines. The story is not paced well. There are about six episodes at the beginning where there is no story progression. However, after these episodes there is a definite increase in pace. One of my dislikes in using time travel as a plot device where the leaps of faith the show asked you to take. How many 'timelines' are there? How can you change the past (send a message) and then undo the messages. Would not the existence of the messages themselves have some type of ripple effect? If you go back in time, are you rewriting a timeline, or creating a new timeline from that point. How did that machine work across timelines - would it not have been reset when they went back in time.
*Spoilers*Also, a lot of the second half takes place within an extremely short time frame. Off course with the help of the time machine, this short time frame is stretched to, well, half the season. So, how can there be any character development when the only character with knowledge of his past experiences is Okabe. Other character's can't develop as they are constantly reset, again and again. If they do remember a different timeline, than this is not science fiction, this is just another crux/plot device that is being used to allow character development to happen when there is none. I guess that's why I found the love story between the leads really unnecessary and just not believable. If you look at the actual time frame, and not just how many times Okabe's travelled to the past, there's like, what, a couple days max for Kurisu and Okabe to form this 'you are the one' love. Yeah, no. Also the ending, it's another deus ex machina - and an extremely anti-climatic one. We already know what needs to happen. And therefore, we already know how Okabe will save Kurisu. Even before the actual thing. So when it actually plays out, you already have the knowledge, like someone gave you a spoiler, that Kurisu survives somehow. You may not know how exactly, but you know what ultimately happens. This leads to a very anticlimatic ending where we already know what happens.
Steins;Gate was an interesting watch. For me, this anime let me down with how it dealt its science fiction elements, and its plot which I found weak (the deus ex machina, and the sudden romance). While I don't necessarily think Steins;Gate is bad, I do think it's over rated. In my review, I didn't mention the positives. These where that the concept was interesting, and the story, albeit a few gripes, is good, and refreshing from the usual anime genres. The idea of what a 'Steins;Gate' was, was good, and left a good 'you can do anything!' feeling. While I definitely think it's worth a watch, I can only rate it a 6/10 due to my own unfounded expectations, and gripes which I feel really detract from the whole experience.
