English Dub Review: Strike Witches – Road to Berlin “Mina’s Sky”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

With their goals within reach, Mina offers to wear an experimental striker her unit, even while her the limit of her powers fast approaches.

OUR TAKE

Well well well, looks like the idea of focusing on Mina and her getting closer to the day she’ll use her powers WAS going to be worth focusing on at some point in the rest of the season! Except I expected it to be spread out among the remaining four episodes and take up a bit more time. Instead, I guess it was decided that only this episode really needed to touch on it, because (minor spoilers here) despite some nervous hinting at this and last week, Mina basically walks away from this whole season with her powers intact. Yeah, I guess it doesn’t necessarily have to end with her actually losing her powers like with Sakamoto, but it just seems really strange to put emphasis on it this close to the end and not go anywhere with it. I mean, sure, the episode itself is still a pretty good use of this character dilemma, but I don’t know why they wouldn’t just have her lose the magic, and if not here, then maybe the finale. It doesn’t sound like they’re making another proper season of this anytime soon, so why not, you know?

But I suppose we should talk about the episode’s strengths if we’re also going to discuss its missed opportunities. As I probably already mentioned, Mina’s role in the first two seasons of this series was as Sakamoto’s loyal right hand woman, being able to stand beside her on both the battlefield and during her emotional low points, such as Sakamoto’s slow and eventual loss of her own powers. Now we get to see Mina in that position while commanding the 501st and some interesting parallels arise, among them feeling a loss of grip on control and the one main way to be able to fight off the ever escalating Neuroi threat. And that’s all well and good, but I guess I’m just a sucker for more continuity acknowledgements with my character development, as I think it would have benefitted the episode to have Barkhorn ask Sakamoto to show up and support Mina in this moment, much like Mina did for her before at this point. And since it doesn’t end up mattering much, I feel like I should also mention that Mina probably could have lost her powers in the upcoming finale and tie things up there. But she doesn’t. Ah well, still probably one of the better episodes of this season.