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Precure Day 189

Episode: Yes! Precure 5 40 - “Seek Out the Principal’s Identity!” Date watched: 24 May 2020 Original air date: 18 November 2007 Screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/7GSsNLa Transformation Gallery: https://imgur.com/a/6k6SzS0 Project info and master list of posts: http://tinyurl.com/PCDabout

Why principal, what bright hair you have!

How do you follow up an episode in which the main antagonist of the show appears to challenge the heroes? If you’re not going to continue that plot thread, then I think the only good way to do it is to go in the complete opposite direction and have a lighthearted episode (see the dichotomy of episodes 24 and 25). This episode does neither, instead choosing just to go back to the status quo, which makes an average episode somehow mildly disappointing.

The Plot

In the latest edition of the Cinq Lumieres Times, Masuko Mika has chosen the mystery of the principal’s identity as her headlining article, and includes an interview with Karen where the student council president says she’s dissatisfied with never seeing the principal and believes that this leads to distrust by the students. She reiterates that she’d like to sit down with the principal to discuss school matters face-to-face.

Extra extra, read all about it! The producer said we needed to resolve this plot thread!

Otaka the lunch lady (and unbeknownst to the characters, the principal) passes by and comments that the principal probably has her reasons for staying hidden. Over at Nightmare HQ, Bunbee decides to ask Hadenya if she’s ever seen Despariah’s face, which she denies. Kawarino appears and confesses that he’s never seen his boss’s face, nor does he have any interest in it. Hadenya remarks that people in authority like to stay hidden because it makes them seem more dignified, and she heads off to try to get the Dream Collet.

Back at school, the girls are eating lunch and Rin remarks that the brick wall by the old school building (last seen in episode 27, the ghost hunt) is falling apart. Otaka overhears this. Two students named Kanako and Mayu approach Karen with a lost shoe that was apparently found in the rear garden. Once again, Otaka can’t help but to overhear. The girls and Coco go to investigate, only to find.... the vice principal, holding a dog which had apparently been stealing personal items and leaving them in the garden. He says the principal advised him to look into the matter.

The next day, the girls are wandering by the old school building and see that the worn-down wall is being repaired. The VP tells them that the dog apparently got in through a hole in the wall, and the principal decided to have it repaired right away. Karen asks if he’s met the principal, and what kind of person she is, to which he simply responds that she’s “a wonderful person.” Karen starts to feel guilty about her negative words in the interview. That afternoon, they’re all hanging out at Natts House, and her sadness doesn’t go unnoticed, so she explains her guilt to the others. Coco remarks that he’s never even met the principal himself, despite being a teacher, so Nozomi decides that this settles it and they should all go see the principal first thing tomorrow, so that Karen can apologize.

Sure enough the following morning, they go to the office, but Hadenya has made it there first, somehow wise to their plan but having waited a few days to lay her trap. (The timeline of this episode makes no sense.) They don’t recognize her at first until she starts insulting them, and then she turns the room into a ruin before turning the brick wall into a kowaina, which takes the shape of a centipede.

it’s so weird I can’t even make a witty caption

The girls transform into Precure and take on the nonsensical creature. Rouge and Aqua do a combo kick that separates it into bricks, but it quickly reassembles. It surrounds the quintet and tries to squeeze the life out of them, but Rouge, Lemonade, Mint, and Aqua keep Dream in the middle of them as they each push the sides just enough to give her room to escape, and then she frees the rest of them. Aqua Tornado and Crystal Shoot make quick work of the kowaina as Hadenya flees, and the girls find themselves back in the principal’s office.

They discover the vice principal and principal unconscious behind the VP’s desk and they recognize Otaka, but they don’t all manage to put two and two together. As they come to, Otaka realizes her ruse is up, thanking the girls for coming to her rescue (if she only knew...). She invites them into her office where it finally sinks in for Nozomi and Urara that Otaka-san the lunch lady is, in fact, the school’s mysterious principal.

She explains how she used to be a teacher and students would come to her with their concerns, but when she became the principal, she lost her opportunities to be around students, and she wanted to always be on top of any troubles at the school, so she took on the guise of Otaka the kindly old lunch lady so she could get close to students to hear their concerns. Karen apologizes for being dissatisfied when the principal actually does so much to help the school, and the principal turns it around and says she has a wonderful student council president, with a good group of friends. Then she asks them to keep her identity a secret from the rest of the student body.

Later that day, or perhaps another day, Mika comes up to the circle of friends, exasperated and exhausted as she hasn’t been able to uncover any information about the principal’s identity. Nozomi starts to spill the beans but Rin stops her, and Karen suggests they stop pursing this subject. Mika knows Karen is right, but she doesn’t have another topic to write about, but that’s when Otaka brings over a bowl of her new sweetbread for them to try out, and Nozomi suggests that Mika write about Otaka’s new menu.

The Analysis

The pacing of this episode is a bit unusual compared to a normal one. Due to the extended conclusion, the conversation in the principal’s office, the fight is abbreviated and everything else before it is a little rushed. The flow of time isn’t conveyed very well through editing, with scenes flowing together that are implied to take place on separate days. Hadenya in particular seems to just disappear for a few days between leaving Nightmare and posing as the principal. It adds up to a somewhat confusing mish-mash of scenes and that reduces investment in the story.

Additionally, one of Karen’s big regrets in this episode is that she said unkind things about the principal, but it’s not explicitly shown what she said. I had to pause the video and manually translate the newspaper article to get a sense of her comments, because all her spoken remarks are along the lines of “I wish I could meet the principal in person to discuss school and student matters, and thank her for all that she does,” and from that perspective it looks like she’s beating herself up a bit too much. Here is my painstaking edit of the newspaper that was on screen for 3 seconds.

I think they should have made Karen’s negative sentiment a bit more clear in the dialog of the episode, perhaps by having one of the girls read that section of the interview aloud for the audience, and then her internal conflict would have made MUCH more sense, because in the text of the episode she essentially transitions from “I’d like to meet the principal,” to “I’m so sorry for what I said, I’d like to meet the principal and apologize.” It just doesn’t track without reading the paper, which would be impossible in real time.

Hadenya’s plot also makes very little sense (not that that’s unusual). She knocks out the principal and vice principal, and then threatens the precures that she won’t tell them where they are unless they give her the Dream Collet. But, it turns out, they were just laying unconscious behind the VP’s desk the whole time, not a hard place to find. Also you’d think by this point the villains would realize that extortion doesn’t work on these girls, but I guess not. The kowaina she creates doesn’t really make much sense to me either. I would have expected a pretty literal wall monster, and we’ll see something similar to that in a few episodes, but no it takes the form of a centipede for some reason. The only benefit that being made of brick gave it was that it could rebuild when Rouge and Aqua kicked it. I did like how it tried to constrict the team, and the supporting cures each pushed on a side to give Dream enough wiggle room to squeeze out, though. That’s about the only interesting part of the battle. There is cross-talk about how Hadenya thinks the principal is useless and the girls are angry because of how much she does for the school but that’s par for the course, it doesn’t elevate this episode or anything.

I do appreciate the girls finally learning the principal’s true identity at least. It’s not really a mystery that they’ve focused on, but ever since they revealed her dual life in episode 14 it’s been fun for the audience to be in on the secret, and watch how she continues to offer sage advice from her seemingly humble station. Now the girls are implicitly rewarded for their efforts of helping out the school both as students and as heroines by learning its best-kept secret. Otaka’s reasons for being secretive are pretty much exactly as I speculated the first time around, trying to keep her ear to the ground but being somewhat prohibited by her position. Unfortunately I don’t believe she shows up much for the rest of this season, as they’re moving into Christmas time and then the endgame, so there’s not a lot of school shenanigans left to cover. We’ll see what GoGo has in store for us.

There’s some nice comedy moments and callbacks in this episode, aside from the implicit ones I’ve mentioned above. The biggest one is that the girls remember that the old school building is where they visited in episode 27, and Rin seems to fondly recall her meeting with Count Rosen.

Rin is a little embarrassed that she’s been figured out, which is cute.

Another fun gag is when they finally uncover the truth that Otaka is actually the principal, Nozomi takes a while to catch on, and she tells Otaka not to sit in the principal’s chair or she’ll get in trouble. Rin has to explain that Otaka IS the principal and both Nozomi AND Urara are surprised.

Rin is questioning her friendship real hard.

And another Rin-centric gag is her reaction to the puppy in the woods. She goes back and forth between trying to pet it and being afraid of it and this goes completely unacknowledged by the dialog of the episode, you have to actually be watching to see it.

She’s so cute when she’s nervous. (as always, better copies are in the gallery)

The sudden introduction of Kanako and Mayu, who we have never seen before and never see again, may seem jarring if you don’t get the joke. They seem a little over-designed for one-off characters, after all.

If you look at the credits, you’ll see that they are played by... themselves.

So yes, Kudou Mayu (right) and Miyamoto Kanako (left) are real people. Respectively, they are the singers of the opening and ending themes of this very show, and this is their cameo. Kudou Mayu will also do songs for GoGo, Heartcatch, Suite, and every All Stars movie from DX1 to New Stage 3, as well as voicing another cameo in Heartcatch and playing the Fairy Tones in Suite Precure. Kanako Miyamoto will do themes for GoGo, Kirakira, HUGtto, DX3, Super Stars, and Miracle Universe, as well as playing Makoto/Cure Sword in Dokidoki Precure. This is them in real life, from about this point in time.

source: Miaymoto Kanako’s blog https://miyamotokanako.exblog.jp/d2007-09-20/

I noticed they gave them different color crests on their uniforms: Mayu has a second year badge while Kanako has a first year badge, reflective of their real-life age difference of about a year, and I think that’s a clever detail they didn’t have to do.

The art in this episode is fine. It never gets above fine. There’s some bad art, but it’s mostly fine. Except this coloring error on Karen’s sleeve.

And really, that sums up the whole episode. It’s mostly fine, with some bad thrown in. It’s not a good episode, it’s just alright, kind of forgettable in the scheme of things. And that made it harder to write about than if it were actually good or bad, so if this is a bit nonsensical and rambling, that’s why.

Next episode, Komachi and Urara bond. Look forward to it!

Pink Precure Catchphrase Count: 1 kettei!