English Dub Review: A Couple of Cuckoos: “Is my fate going to change?”

Overview: While Nagi (Nicholas Andrew Louie) tries to spend his field trip collecting shrine stamps with Hiro (Amanda Lee), he ends up getting distracted by Shion’s attempts to get close to Erika (Lindsay Sheppard). 

Our Take: Hiro’s further desire to change her fate and the potential that Nagi can do it sets the hopeful tone for Nagi and his giddy energy as he prepares for a field trip with her. It makes Hiro seem much too dependent on Nagi, which seems to especially clash with her headstrong personality. Hopefully, in the future, she is just as much of a catalyst in ‘changing her fate’ as Nagi is. Of course, every hero needs their foil and that presents itself in an energetically annoying fan of Erika’s, Shion, coming along on the trip to meet her. However, it is the type of problems that he causes that is the interesting part. 

Nagi’s jealousy over Shion’s desire to move in on Erika makes it an effective way to bring out his true latent feelings for Erika and his reluctance to admit that. Nagi’s pettiness, spending the entire trip as a worrywart and obsessing over whenever they are alone together nicely puts the love triangle drama on the fast track when Hiro makes him realize it in how distracted he has been. Also, Shion is such a dorky, enjoyable dude in his energetic and breeziness that I can not bring myself to dislike him, even if Nagi does with a passion. 

Erika reminds Nagi of how he neglected Hiro and that the whole point of her even coming along on the trip was to keep Shion away from him and Hiro nicely builds up to a private conversation between two. After snapping yet another nicely random photo showing how genuinely chaotic Nagi and Erika are, the person Erika is trying to reach through her social media posts is brought up once again. With Erika on the precipice of admitting how she feels, probably, in how much Nagi’s future will change, it leaves off on a momentous ending cliffhanger as both their beach day and the episode sunsets.