I’m Watching “Futari wa Pretty Cure”, Episode 3

As I continue forward with these blogs, I’ve started putting them into a reading list. I figure I will eventually blog about some other topic someday, and I’ll want to keep those topics separated from the PreCure conversation. If you’re just here for PreCure, feel free to click on my username and check out my Lists tab to find a reading list solely for the I’m Watching “Futari wa Pretty Cure” blogs. Or, heck, I guess I could just link you straight to the list, huh?

Episode 3— “Beware of the Cute Student Teacher” — original airdate, February 15th, 2004

I mentioned the quality of the subtitles in the last two episodes, but I have to admit, this episodes subtitle quality was unfortunately fairly distracting. Just a whole lot of words being used incorrectly, words being misspelled, typos (e.g.; “two” being misspelled as “tow”), and at some points the writing was bad enough to somewhat cause confusion as to what exactly it was they were trying to say. It’s really unfortunate that this is what the subtitles look like in an official capacity. It makes it really hard to recommend the subtitled version. I would very nearly recommend that new viewers dig around the Internet to find the Ocean dub of this series instead (if they’re able to tolerate the localized character names).

As is to be expected, Jyaku-King is pretty upset that Pisard has failed at grabbing the two missing Prism Stones twice in a row now. Not only that, Pisard tried to get a vacuum cleaner monster to suck up a bunch of electricity as a gift to Jyaku-King and failed to do that, too, so that’s a double whammy. Obviously, just like a serialized villain often does, he assures his great leader that next time will be different.

Nagisa is doing that thing she often does, wandering around the train station to get to school and reminiscing about things that happened in the past episode. One of those things includes Fuji-P, the guy on the soccer team that nearly got her killed with a soccer ball and a bunch of shattered glass. But it’s okay, ’cause he’s hot. And conveniently, he’s here in the train station right now, meeting up with a friend to finish the walk to school together. He totally doesn’t even see she exists and walks right past her. Guess there’ll have to be time for boys later.

A big part of the plot this episode involves the fact that the school is bringing in a handful of new student teachers. The middle school girls are very excited because the student teachers are supposed to be hot men. Nagisa is unfortunately caught chatting with another girl on this subject during class and as punishment is assigned to do some kind of work for a field trip next month. But the teacher isn’t entirely too cruel, so she also assigns Honoka to pair up with her to get it done. Convenient! Those are our two main characters!

While leaving school, Mepple and Mipple once again start freaking out in their cell phone cases trying to get close to each other before leaving campus, threatening to get them discovered by their other classmates. Honoka quickly invites Nagisa over to her house to work on the field trip project, making their classmates wonder if they’ve been getting closer to each other lately.

Nagisa is shocked to see the size of Honoka’s house. Additionally, Mepple is freaked out by the size of Honoka’s dog Chutaro, who greets Mepple with big, wet, lovable dog kisses.

Honoka takes Nagisa to her room, and along the way says that her parents are away working overseas, leaving just Honoka and her grandmother at home. While in her room, Nagisa discovers a framed photo of a man named Dr. Breckston. Is it important, or just a nod to Albert Einstien, showing how smart and well-rounded Honoka is? I’m assuming it’s the latter for now.

Mipple and Mepple are thrilled to be out and about together. Honoka questions why sometimes they look like cell phones and why sometimes they look like weird mascot characters, to which they explain that back on their home world they always look like stuffed animals, but can’t manage to hold that form for long on Earth (or as they call Earth, “Field of Rainbows”.) I mention this because, rather than telling you about watching the dub at the end of this blog, I’ll just mention this now instead: For whatever reason, the English dub has decided that rather than looking like “cell phones”, they’re being asked why they look like compact. Like, makeup compacts. That’s so confusing. They’re clearly flip phones. This should have been obvious to anybody in the year 2009, and in fact Nagisa’s (or rather Natalie’s) brother in the first episode does mistake Mepple for a cell phone. So why make this change? Maybe to make it seem that much more feminine? I dunno, it’s very small and probably doesn’t much matter, but for that reason it feels all the more strange to make that change.

But Mepple and Mipple also spend some more time reiterating how important this task to protect them is. A lot of it is ground we already covered in the previous episode. But some of it is slightly more enlightening. The seven stones were protecting their home world, the Field of Light. But then Dotsuku Zone took five of them and started wrecking shit. If he got hands on all seven of them, there’d be no getting the Field of Light back to what it once was. Not only that, but Dotsuku Zone could then start traveling to other places and demolishing them, too. For that reason, it’s very important that bad dudes don’t ever end up getting the last two stones, and so the Pretty Cure girls are actually protecting not only Mipple, Mepple, and their Field of Light world, but also their own world as well as possibly others we don’t even know about yet. It’s a pretty big task, actually.

Honoka’s grandma brings in some cookies and starts getting suspicious about how much they’re talking and the fact that they’re carrying matching cell phones. But regardless, she doesn’t bug them much about it, and leaves the room asking Nagisa to keep being good to Honoka. Seems she knows Honoka really needs a friend. Or she thinks the two of them are in a romantic relationship and is extremely supportive of their choices, who knows?

The next day, Pisard seems very much aware that the Pretty Cure girls are somewhere in the area of this middle school. He identifies one of the student teachers coming in for the first time today, and then decides to sneak into the school in place of one of those new teachers. It’s weird how easily he was able to do this, but I guess that’s magic for you.

Pisard is introduced to the school under the name of Ryuichi Kazama, once again looking “very normal”. Is nobody going to question the Visual Kei J-rock hair, or is that part of the magic, too? He’s introduced on stage in front of all the students, is asked to say a few words, but doesn’t. He simply stares at Nagisa, immediately recognizes her, and then leaves. Cool.

So, Nagisa’s cover is blown extremely early. Which is great, because as Cure Black, she’s not exactly doing a lot to hide her face and hairstyle. It’s something you take for granted in a lot of other shows in the same genre, but Pisard has figured this whole thing out very quickly in the grand scheme of things. Nagisa, however, is extremely oblivious. She just thinks this guy is hot. Once again, somehow his hair has not given away his identity.

Student Teacher Pisard walks through the campus with Nagisa and Honoka’s homeroom teacher, who’s also very taken by his looks. Pisard finds this advantageous and hypnotizes her, telling her to bring Nagisa to him at the gym. The teacher blindly agrees, and in a hypnotic stupor asks Nagisa to leave class and come with her to the gym. Honoka thinks this is weird and follows along not far behind. The rest of the class is just thrilled to not have to be doing anything.

Surprise, it’s Pisard waiting for her in the gym, and Nagisa was totally fooled by his student teacher get-up until he started demanding the Prism Stones from her, and now suddenly she’s all, “Wait a minute…!” Pisard says he’s gonna harm her teacher if she doesn’t hand the stones over, but Nagisa doesn’t have them. We all know it’s actually Mipple and Mepple that have them. But surely Nagisa has Mepple…?

No, for some reason she doesn’t! Honoka does! Why?

Don’t ask questions.

Anyway, Honoka’s here now, she’s seen everything, and she throws Mepple to Nagisa so that they can both transform into Pretty Cure.

Bad news, Pisard still controls that ghost-like thing named Zakenna, who is now proceeding to haunt the gym. Like, the entire gym. As in, the whole building. All the gym equipment is now haunted. An olympic vault gets haunted and the different sections get thrown around, some basket balls rocket through the air, etc. At one point Honoka gets hit in the gut with a basketball and she winces and nearly goes down. That just sort of makes me wonder how fast the basketball was going if that’s capable of at least mildly wounding Honoka, but not an elevator cable tied around Honoka’s waist as an elevator plummets dozens of stories to the ground, like in the past episode.

Don’t ask questions.

This gym also doubles as a stage (like for theatre productions and large presentations), and Zakenna haunts the curtain and wraps itself around Cure Black and Cure White, and starts choking the both of them out. In fact, he probably would have had them cold right there, had he not made the mistake of throwing both ladies and their teacher out of the curtain and into the wall. Had he just suffocated them in that moment, this would have all been over. But now, thankfully, the girls are able to do their Black Thunder and White Thunder thing (impressive, considering they’re inside a building) and finish the gym monster off with their signature Pretty Cure Marble Screw, which also rockets Pisard off into the air outside the gym.

Their teacher unfortunately wakes up remembering absolutely none of this, and is now mad at the girls for messing around in the gym during class. Bummer, and they’re the ones who saved her and everything. Seems kinda ungrateful to me.

It’s becoming obvious that Pisard can’t possibly keep this up forever. At some point, even Jyaku-King isn’t gonna tolerate this anymore. I’m wondering who’s gonna replace him, and how soon it’ll actually be.

Onto the next episode tomorrow!