English Dub Review: Free! Dive to the Future “First Swim in Another Country!”

Natsuya is worried that Ikuya might plateau. I think this show has, too.

Overview

Haunted by his middle school accident, Ikuya is having nightmares about drowning alone, with no one to save him this time. At practice, another member of his team asks Ikuya to consider swimming a relay, but he insists that he swims better on his own.

In Australia, Rin has been training with Mikhail, a coach as eccentric as he is talented. But Rin’s routine in Sydney is overturned by the arrival of Natsuya, Ikuya’s charismatic older brother who demands that Mikhail coach him. Although Natsuya outswims everyone at the pool (with the exception of Rin), Mikhail refuses to teach him because his muscles aren’t the “right type.”

Natsuya insists that Rin accompany him on a series of nights out on the town, and the two discuss their ambitions: Natsuya travels the world in search of swimming competition prize money, whereas Rin wants to swim on a professional team. One night, Natsuya receives a text and discovers that Ikuya has been struggling.

Rin and Natsuya finally decide to race each other with a bet in place: if Natsuya wins, he will be able to stay in Rin’s apartment in Sydney. Although rain interrupts their race before they can finish it, Rin offers Natsuya a place on his couch; instead, Natsuya says that he will be returning home.

Back in Japan, Haru, Makoto, Asahi, and Kisumi consider how best to approach Ikuya. Now a dedicated member of several college clubs, Kisumi informs his friends that he’s too busy and they’ll have to visit Ikuya without him.

Our Take

Boy, this episode is full of people talking.

And not talking that’s full of interesting emotional developments, either. Although the episode features Free!’s first swim in another country, it’s still very similar to the rest of the season so far: heavy with exposition-filled dialogue. Sure, it’s fun to watch Natsuya goof off and demand favors from Rin, but I didn’t gain any new insights into Rin, or into his relationship with Haru, or even into Ikuya. Instead, I watched Rin and Natsuya relay a bunch of information back and forth that viewers already know. Natsuya is a likable free spirit, but Dive to the Future is already chock-full of great personalities. I want plot developments, please.

These Australian interactions don’t add much to the rest of the story, and it feels like they’re mostly thrown in to give Rin a reason to be onscreen. Also, a plotline where an athlete flies to another country and demands that a coach takes him on if he out-performs that coach’s student? It’s almost identical to the third episode of Yuri!!! on Ice, another highly popular sports anime that the creators of Free! must be aware of.

Mikhail offers some comic relief—partially due to Phil Parsons’s hilarious Russian accent—but at the same time, I don’t know how I feel about his muscle obsession. I like the running gag about Kou’s passion for muscles, but it’s a little uncomfortable when the joke is about Mikhail, an older teacher who routinely checks out his students’ bodies. And I’m not fond of the fact that the first real gay attraction on this show is portrayed as silly and kind of creepy.

Although he occupies a small fraction of this episode’s runtime, I’m actually most interested in Ikuya here. After feeling abandoned by his entire swim team in middle school, it’s understandable that Ikuya would be hesitant to swim in events that rely on others—and yet isolating himself and focusing only on swimming has taken a huge toll on his mental health. Poor guy. The episode does a good job of making me empathize with him, and I’m really looking forward to his eventual reunion with his old teammates. I just wish they would pick up the pace on it—at the moment, watching those teammates slowly uncover what days Ikuya has off from swim practice just isn’t all that compelling.

Of course, the animation is incredible yet again. I appreciate one scene that comes before Natsuya’s arrival when we get to watch Rin go through his morning routine. He washes his face. He cooks eggs. He eats a sandwich (and it looks absolutely delicious). It’s a quiet moment, a serene one. Although simple, it’s animated beautifully. I’m confused by a later shot, though, that occurs while Rin and Natsuya discuss their bet at Sydney Harbor. There’s a closeup on the water, and it’s animated to look incredibly photorealistic, with an equally photorealistic soda can floating in it. While the moment is definitely aesthetically pleasing, the style is so different from the rest of the show that it really took me out of the moment.

Overall, this episode is solidly fine. I like the characters and the animation enough to keep watching, but I’m disappointed that the beginning of Dive to the Future has been focused on conversations that rehash stuff we already know. I don’t care about new countries—I want new stories.

Score
6.0/10