English Dub Review: Fairy gone “Greedy Fox and Lying Crow”

Fairy gone lags with an overstuffed heist episode.

Overview (Spoilers Below):

The Ministry of Fairies calls Free and Marlya in to meet with the head honcho. The Ministry needs the agents to retrieve the Black Fairy Tome – a sacred text containing information about fairy possession. But they aren’t the only ones after the book. A double-agent for the illegal fairy mafia has also been sent to steal it.

Our Take:

After a promising second episode, Fairy gone has lapsed into some of the more disappointing parts of the series again. With loads of confusing exposition, too many new characters, and a chase scene that drags on too long, Greedy Fox and Lying Crow didn’t manage to keep me on the edge of my seat like I was last week.

The beginning of the episode is probably one of the worst offenders so far. It jumps between locations and time like reading a history book on 5x speed. The parts about how terrible the fairy soldiers were are things we’ve heard or been given enough information to infer before, and I just don’t really care about Wolfran at this point. The pre-opening scene should be one that gets you eager to keep watching, not eager to skip past it.

Three new characters were introduced in this episode, and I don’t really love any of them. The head of the Ministry of Fairies is great at an exposition, but not much of an interesting guy in other aspects. I guess his connection to the author of one of the fairy tomes might come in handy later on? Bitter Sweet is okay in theory, but a little much in practice. She’s your run-of-the-mill femme fatale, complete with a penchant for flattery and a twitchy trigger finger. She’s probably my favorite of the bunch this week, just because she had some of the best-animated fight sequences. The double-crossing agent was sorta funny, especially with how the show spends time making sure we know he’s talking to himself about what a mess this all is. Mostly though, he’s just a not-very-threatening bad guy to chase down. (And it’s a wonder he lasts as long as he does!)

This week’s dub was okay, with solid performances by Ian Sinclair and Jill Harris as Free and Marlya. The actress playing Bitter Sweet, which Funimation hasn’t posted at the time of this writing, plays it a little too hammy for me, embracing the femme fatal voice 125%. Some of the dialogue about the different cities, the war, and the fairies get too heavy at times, but that’s probably not the dub’s fault so much as the original Japanese creators.

Greedy Fox and Lying Crow aren’t quite as monotonous as the premiere, but that doesn’t mean it was a good episode. Whereas the first episode of the series didn’t try hard enough, this episode tries way too hard, introducing new characters at the drop of a hat, prolonging the chase scene just a bit too long, and creating a lot of fairy lore that gets exposited to our main characters in such an uninteresting way that even the most dedicated viewer will struggle to remember the specific colors of the Fairy Tomes. Fairy gone is fairly good at this point, but it needs to get better – and quick!