English Dub Review: Bungo Stray Dogs WAN! Episode 3

OVERVIEW

Yasano gets Rampo to do her shopping, but Rampo pushes this off on person after person until they end up with a cow. Later Kyouka comes home with a lost cat.

OUR TAKE

Okay, these kinds of plots are a little easier to talk about without much knowledge of the show, mainly because they’re so general that they could be used for just about any story. In this case, one character telling another character an order, but that order being passed between person after person like a game of telephone until it’s way off from the original message. This is an easy form of comedy because it can both show how one character is shirking their responsibilities and how each new chain in the link interprets the message differently based on their own personalities. And then by the end, they end up with a cow, which is a terribly impractical thing to have compared to what was originally requested! Man, isn’t it SOOOOOOO much funnier now that I’ve explained the joke in great detail? The best jokes are the ones that require extensive explanation, everyone knows that. This is definitely not me trying to point out the inherent difficulties of reviewing a comedy series that is all gags and no character development! Certainly not!

The other parts of the episode are even harder to really go into much detail on, much like how it is very hard to cut a single grain of rice in two without REALLY staring closely, and even then you’re not going to find much that’s worth mentioning. Kyouka finds a cat and everyone gets to be cute and vulnerable around it until its original owners come back to get it. This is the kind of plot that you could actually take up at least the eleven minute runtime with to see how each character might treat the cat differently and what that says about them as people. But it’s barely a few minutes of this already abbreviated episode, so of course we’re not going to be getting into all of that. You know, somehow, I think that even if I did watch the first two seasons of this show for context, it really wouldn’t elevate this parody series for me. Like maybe this just isn’t meant to be really analyzed this closely. But hey, here I am. Nine more weeks of this to go. NINE MORE WEEKS. Perhaps as we keep moving along, we’ll reach an episode with a lot more meat to chew on, but at this point, it’s hard to really expect that realistically. Oh well!