Episode 01: Turning Point#
Prologue of the Beginning and the End — the series premiere. A lecture on time travel, a rooftop satellite, and a pool of blood on the eighth floor of the Radio Kaikan building. Everything that follows begins here.
Synopsis#
Rintaro Okabe — self-styled mad scientist Hououin Kyouma — drags Mayuri Shiina to Dr. Nakabachi's press conference on time machine theory at the Radio Kaikan. Okabe interrupts the lecture to accuse Dr. Nakabachi of plagiarizing John Titor, and is pulled out of the hall by a red-haired girl he has never met — who insists he tried to tell her something fifteen minutes ago.
Minutes later, Okabe finds the same girl, Kurisu Makise, collapsed in a pool of blood in an upstairs corridor. Shaken, he texts Daru from the street outside — and the world lurches. The crowds vanish. Radio Kaikan now has a crashed satellite embedded in its roof, and according to everyone else, it has been there since the morning.
This is the first on-screen worldline shift of the series. Okabe's ability to retain memories across shifts is later named Reading Steiner — see the Alpha worldline article.
Back at the Future Gadget Laboratory, nobody remembers the press conference — it was cancelled a week ago. Okabe's phone shows the message to Daru was sent a week before he wrote it. And at a later lecture, Kurisu Makise walks up to him: alive, unstabbed, and very annoyed.
| Episode | 01 |
| Japanese title | 始まりと終わりのプロローグ |
| Air date | 2010-04-06 |
| Arc | D-Mail arc |
| Worldline | Alpha $0.571024$ |
| Shift to | Alpha $0.571015$ |
| Setting | Akihabara |
| Focus | Okabe, Kurisu |
| Gadget debut | Phone Microwave |
| Previous | — |
| Next | Time Travel Paranoia |
| Time | Event | Worldline reading |
|---|---|---|
| 12:00 | Nakabachi conference begins | 0.571024 |
| 12:30 | Okabe confronted by Kurisu | 0.571024 |
| 12:45 | Kurisu found stabbed, 8F corridor | 0.571024 |
| 12:55 | Okabe texts Daru — first accidental D-Mail | 0.571024 |
| 12:55 | Worldline shift | 0.571015 |
| 18:00 | Satellite reported "since morning" | 0.571015 |
The table above is sortable — click a header. The divergence column shows why this episode is the series' turning point: the shift is tiny ($\Delta d = 0.000009$) but it is the first one Okabe consciously survives.
graph LR; A[Alpha 0.571024] -->|accidental D-Mail| B[Alpha 0.571015]
The text Okabe sends from outside Radio Kaikan reads, in full:
Something you should know. Makise Kurisu has been stabbed. I found her body on the 8th floor.
Because the Phone Microwave (name subject to change) was running at the moment of transmission, the message arrived on Daru's phone a week in the past — the lab's first D-Mail, sent before anyone knew D-Mail was possible.1 SERN's involvement is not yet visible, but the IBN 5100 that will dominate the mid-season is already sitting, forgotten, in the storeroom of the Yanabayashi Shrine.
- First appearance of okabe, mayuri, daru, kurisu, and Dr. Nakabachi.
- First appearance of the Future Gadget Lab and FG gadget No. 8, the Phone Microwave.
- The metal Upa Mayuri finds at the conference becomes decisive in the finale arc — a classic Chekhov's gun.
- Okabe's catchphrase el-psy-kongroo is spoken four times.
The stabbing Okabe witnesses is the event the entire series orbits. The blood belongs to Kurisu, the assailant is revealed only in the final episodes, and the "satellite" is Suzuha's time machine. The shift from $0.571024$ to $0.571015$ happens because Okabe's text — relayed by SERN's echelon logging — changed which worldline the Alpha attractor field converged on. See Deceiving the past.
- The episode's cold open plays out of chronological order; on first viewing the significance of the rooftop object is invisible.2
- Production drafts titled this episode simply "Prologue".
- The @channel threads Okabe reads reference John Titor's posts — in this worldline, Titor posted in 2000, a fact that quietly changes in the next episode.
#lore #episode
Footnotes#
-
The lab does not coin the term "D-Mail" until episode-03. Mayuri suggests "DeLorean mail"; the abbreviation sticks. ↩
-
The staff commentary calls the satellite "the series' biggest lie told in plain sight." ↩