English Dub Review: Fairy gone “Pipe Blowing In Stage Wing”

The Dorothea team stops another assassination attempt on Ray Dawn.

Overview (Spoilers Below):

Pipe Blowing in Stage Wing opens with a pleasant surprise: Bitter Sweet didn’t betray Dorothea after all! It turns out to be all a part of her ingenious plan to bust into Gilbert Warlock’s mansion and retrieve the black fairy tome. Everything doesn’t go quite as planned, however, and Bitter Sweet ends up escaping without the black tome.

In the other half of the episode, Dorothea works to uncover the plot to take over control of the new artificial fairy soldiers. They take Hans in for questioning, but can’t uncover a motive… until they learn that he was merely covering up for his friend’s son, Livingston. They race to the anniversary celebration just in time to halt the man from assassinating Ray Dawn.

Our Take:

With only a few more days until the anniversary of the end of the war, things are coming down to the wire in the search for the potential saboteur of the artificial fairy soldiers. Neither the military or the ministry of fairies have any real solid leads. Most of the Dorothea agents are tied up in the search for the black fairy tome. Altogether, this episode felt very slow and monotonous, which is not what you want your eighth episode to feel like when it features the unveiling of the man behind the artificial fairy terrorism.

I was a little disappointed by how much Free and Marlya spent on the sidelines in this episode. They’re the main characters of the show, and even though I know that spending time with the other Dorothea agents is necessary from time to time for the development of the supporting cast, I can’t help but feel like we’ve spent too long away from our central duo. What’s more, we didn’t get too much time with them in the first place. What do we really know about Marlya aside from the fact that she’s a willing agent who’s on the hunt for her lost friend Veronica?

The hunt for the saboteur turns out to be a let down for me. They question a random guy, they go talk to another dude, then that leads them to a third man. And yet I don’t care about any of them? We haven’t been given enough time or reason to care about them. Why is Livingston angry at Ray Dawn? I don’t know for sure! Why should I even care about his motives when the show hasn’t really properly integrated him into the story in the first place? I’m hoping that he might somehow factor into Veronica and Marlya’s arc, but who knows with this show.

This week, Fairy gone had just as good an English dub as usual. Free and Marlya give strong performances as always, though I wish they had bigger roles in the main story arc. I really enjoyed the script adaption inserting some of their own humor into the proceedings, like when a member of Dorothea remarks: “Gilbert loves his corridors.” Free’s reaction to his comrade’s startled awakening is pretty funny, too: “God help us.” Lastly, I thought Livingston’s line about justifying his assassination attempt was thought-provoking: “He might use bureaucracy instead of a knife, but it’s still murder!”

The eighth episode of Fairy gone didn’t really deliver any major thrills or epic action sequences. (And that still panning shot of Dorothea storming Warlock’s mansion was just sad.) I was hoping for a more intense confrontation between Livingston and the military police that ended up never really coming to fruition. I also didn’t love how Free and Marlya were sidelined a bit in the hunt for the saboteur. At least their last-second save was fun to watch – especially Marlya’s kicking skills. Next week, I wish we could get a continuation of Marlya and Veronica’s story-line.