English Dub Review: Wonder Egg Priority “My Priority”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

Ai has completed her quest in the egg world. Koito is back and everything is back to normal… or is it? Koito doesn’t seem to remember her, and Neiru is acting weird, too. She leaves her rat with Ai and tells her she’s going to go away for a while.

The remaining gang members meet up and sing some karaoke while discussing what to do next. Rika wants to go look for Neiru in the egg world, but Momoe is having none of it. Ai seems stuck in indecision until she receives a mysterious phone call from Neiru’s assistant who tells the girls that the Neiru in this world is actually Airu, Neiru’s sister. The real Neiru is back in the egg world. Oh, and she’s an AI like Frill.

Time passes and Ai transfers schools. She’s tried to move on from the past, but she still reminisces sometimes and misses the times she spent with her friends. Finally, she has a minor breakthrough and realizes she can’t leave things this way. She runs back to the egg world where she intends to search for Neiru until she finds her.

Our Take:

After a back half of episodes racked with production issues and internal strife, Wonder Egg Priority is back with a special 13th episode that purports to put a true ending to the saga of Ai and her friends. With so much going on in the show and less than an hour to wrap things up, one might think that this would be an impossible task, even for such a talented crew… and you’d be absolutely right.

Pretty much the entire first half of the special is spent recapping things that have happened previously. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; it had been several months since episode 12 was released and with so much plot, it’s nice to have a reminder for more casual viewers. But it’s only okay if the rest of the time is enough to properly do everything the show wants to do. And it clearly isn’t.

New stuff starts around the halfway mark of the episode, but everything feels a little too rushed and a little too disconnected. It feels like we’re jumping between key moments of multiple episodes rather than watching a single cohesive ending take place. There are flashes of fun still, like the karaoke meetup between Ai, Rika, and Momoe. (Funimation even dubbed Ai’s brief song, which is very much appreciated.) But there’s much more content that’s just head scratching. Neiru being a robot this whole time might be one of the weirdest things. I could see a path where it would feel right, but the abrupt last-second way it plays out just felt like the writers were picking things out of a hat.

Even with the twenty minutes of fresh animation, hardly anything got tied up. The biggest questions for many of us involved the Accas and Frill, their rogue creation. What is their part in the egg world? Was Frill causing everyone’s demise? How? What’s her endgame? These questions are basically completely untouched by the show. It’s frustrating, but I suppose in a weird way I’d rather it completely ignore these than try and squeeze everything into a rushed ending.

One of the most offensive things to me was how it gives us an answer to the Koito question, even if it’s only one person’s interpretation of it. The last episode left Ai in a good place with Koito’s fate, content to not dwell on her death and remember her for what she was when alive. So to just go and say ‘she was shitty and accidentally slipped on the ledge’ struck me as being particularly uncalled for as an explanation. Ai didn’t need one, and after the last episode, we shouldn’t either. Of all the plot lines Wonder Egg could’ve spent time on, why did it have to be one it had already finished?

The end of the end seems to be setting up a sequel of sorts, at least in the minds of viewers. Ai decides to go back to the egg world alone and try to see Neiru despite the risks. I took it almost like the staff saying, ‘we know this won’t satisfy you, so we’re ending on a note where you can just imagine Ai living out a better, actual ending’. So while there were some high notes like seeing Ai bond with Rika and Momoe again, and having this episode dubbed nicely and quickly, in the end it just felt sad. The episode might be called My Priority, but I wish that letting this show have a better ending would’ve been a higher priority.