English Dub Review: Ranma ½ “Abduction of…Akane?”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Mousse once again attempts to defeat Ranma in order to win over Shampoo…but is once again thwarted by his poor eyesight. However, he has a new ability from a familiar source…

OUR TAKE

We’re at the (probably) penultimate episode of this season of Ranma, and it looks like we’re actually getting a two part finale, which, after double checking what the last finale was about, is just like the last finale! And like that last finale, this involves Shampoo!…somewhat, in a different role. And it also has a cliffhanger involving Akane that anyone with a single brain cell knew would not be a permanent or even remotely lethal thing. Before, it was that Akane may have gotten amnesia about Ranma specifically, whereas here it’s that she may have turned into…a duck. For you see, just like several other aspiring suitors of our two leads, Mousse has himself trained near the cursed springs that Ranma, his dad, Ryoga, and Shampoo trained at, but instead of turning into a panda, a cat, or a pig, he becomes a duck. You’d think they would go with a mouse because his name looks like that or a goose since his name rhymes with that, but…here we are. So that explains who that duck with glasses in the ED was, which I honestly didn’t catch since those animals are only on girl Ranma for like a second. Anyway yeah, we’ve spun the wheel of romantic antagonists this week and the wheel landed on Mousse, who we haven’t seen much of since the first couple episodes of the season, so I suppose it makes sense for him to come back at the end of it and tie this all together.

Just like how Ryoga’s designated foible is that he has absurdly bad navigational skills, Mousse has absurdly bad near sighted vision, which drives a lot of the jokes with him. In this episode’s case, he kidnaps a stuffed toy thinking it was Akane, though somehow never noticed it was not the weight or shape of a human girl nor talked or felt like one either. So, his Plan B is apparently to infiltrate a nearby circus as his duck form and try to spray Akane with the water that turned him into a duck which will…accomplish something certainly. And then Shampoo joins in with him so that maybe he’ll take Akane so she can have Ranma, leading to an unfortunate moment where Akane may have become cursed…though I doubt it, and even if she is, I doubt it will be for long. And that just leaves with (probably) one more episode in this season, so we’ll see how all of that wraps up next week!