Episode 05: Starmine Rendezvous#
The IBN 5100 comes home to the lab, carried up eight flights of stairs by four people who have no idea they are carrying the season's fuse.
Synopsis#
Okabe's shrine lead pays off. Ruka Urushibara — gentle, soft-spoken, and endlessly patient with Okabe's Hououin Kyouma routine — retrieves the dusty IBN 5100 from the Yanabayashi Shrine storeroom with the blessing of Ruka's father, on the condition that Okabe stop teaching Ruka sword-fighting poses in the shrine yard.1
Getting a 25-kilogram vintage computer across Akihabara and up to the lab takes the whole episode's middle act and most of its comedy budget. Mr. Braun, the landlord, watches them haul it past his CRT shop and mutters that real machines have tubes.
With the machine installed, Daru and Kurisu begin decoding the stolen SERN archive from episode-03. The oldest records confirm the worst reading of the Jellyman's Report: SERN has been receiving — and disposing of — human test subjects since before the lab existed.
| Episode | 05 |
| Japanese title | 電荷衝突のランデヴー |
| Air date | 2010-05-04 |
| Arc | D-Mail arc |
| Worldline | Alpha $0.571015$ |
| Setting | Yanabayashi Shrine, lab |
| Focus | Ruka, Daru |
| Acquired | IBN 5100 |
| Landlord | Mr. Braun |
| Previous | Interpreter Rendezvous |
| Next | Butterfly Effect's Divergence |
| Record year | Subjects listed | Outcome | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1973 | 1 | Gelified | First "Jellyman" entry |
| 1975 | 2 | Gelified | Distance experiments |
| 1982 | 4 | Gelified | Mass threshold tests |
| 1991 | 3 | Gelified | LHC precursor era |
| 2000 | 6 | Gelified | Titor's year — noted by Okabe |
| 2008 | 5 | Gelified | Modern LHC runs |
Every row is a person. The episode plays the decode scene without music — one of two scenes in the season with no score at all. The other is in episode-12.
Ruka is introduced through patience: holding a pose Okabe assigned, hours after Okabe forgot assigning it. The episode trusts the audience to find this funny and quietly sad, which is the register Ruka's whole arc — the D-Mail in episode-10 and its undoing in episode-11 — will live in.
Fans mark this episode as the start of the series' habit of hiding its heaviest future beats inside its lightest episodes.2
- The IBN 5100's storeroom location matches Titor's post in episode-02 exactly — the first hard confirmation that "Titor" has local knowledge.
- Mr. Braun's CRT shop, below the lab, becomes significant in episode-12 — remember what he says about tubes.
- Mayuri's part-time job at May Queen Nyan-Nyan is shown for the first time; Faris cameos.
- The decode confirms the phrase human is dead, mismatch from the SERN hack.
The IBN 5100 was donated to the shrine by a time traveler. The donor's identity — and why the machine was placed there, findable by exactly this lab — is part of the loop closed in the finale. The shrine scenes reward a second viewing frame by frame.
#lore #episode