English Dub Review: Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid S “Premium Seat (No Extra Charge)”

Overview

Miss Kobayashi’s hips have seriously started hurting. She buys up a bunch of health products to try and improve it, but she hardly uses any of them… Even Tohru loses her patience and tries to get her to eat tail meat, but she sadly refuses. Tohru then begins her search for what Miss Kobayashi considers a “typical remedy.”


Our Take

This episode was pretty serious from start to finish this time. We still get the odd humorous moment here and there as exemplified with Ilulu giving Kobayashi a lovely massage, but for the most part, the better parts of the episode were in regards to the backstory from Tohru’s own father. One of the standouts of this episode would have to be the fluidity of its animation style. In particular, the falling water scene presented a surreal feeling with the narration. The storytelling gave this episode a strong feeling of classic fantasy storytelling.

The legend of the dragons and their never-ending war is an interesting story altogether between different factions where we get a pretty heavy and interesting exposition dump from both Tohru’s father and Tohru herself. The proceedings were really interesting and effective as we don’t get a biased perspective on what happens, we learn about what happened from both Tohru and her father’s points of view and why it happened.

Aside from the comical subplot of how Kobayashi fixes her hip problem, I really enjoyed hearing from his point of view about the state of the world he came from and how he raised Tohru during her youth. Along with the fact that he made the choice to let Tohru roam free to make her own decisions which gives me a new level of respect for the old guy despite his sometimes intimidating attitude. With one episode left, we can only hope this ends season 2 on a strong note.