English Dub Review: Goodbye, Lara “The Night of the Final Match”
Overview:
Lisa decides it’s time to have a conversation with Mari. She convinces Mari that it would be in Lara’s best interest to be with her to try to avoid turning into foam. Mari has to make a tough decision.
Our Take:
You might remember that when I first started reviewing this series, I wondered if it might be a yuri show. With the introduction of Luca, I started to think that maybe we were leaning more towards a traditional romance. The reason I thought that was because Mari showed no issues with Lara spending so much time with Luca. If I had a crush on someone, I wouldn’t necessarily say something, but I would probably be slightly visibly upset. Mari didn’t show any signs of that in the last episode, so I thought that maybe we were moving on from that and we were gonna get a traditional romance. But Lara doesn’t seem too interested in Luca as a romantic partner, and he doesn’t seem all that interested either.
In this episode, Mari does what she thinks is best by sending Lara back to her sister Lisa. When she does that, it’s clear that she misses her, and they’re closer than we’ve been led to believe. They could be really good friends now, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be romantic. The main thing I’m saying is that we are back to square one, where I could see it going either way.
Having said all that, I’m wondering if I’m going to lose some people here. Since we’ve more or less reset back to where we were, this felt a little bit like a waste of time. The only thing of note that happened is that Mari might have realized she cares about Lara a bit more than she thought. But even then, it’s not like we didn’t know that; I mean, she had Lara go be with Lisa because she cared about her.
It was a bit of a letdown because we only have twelve episodes according to MAL, so it feels like we don’t have a lot of time to waste. But if they do go the yuri route with this show, then I could see how this episode could lead to that having a resolution that makes sense. It was a rare miss from this show so far because I’ve loved most of the episodes so far. It is a bit weird that the best episode of Goodbye, Lara so far didn’t even involve Lara.
