English Dub Review: Strike Witches: 501st JOINT FIGHTER WING Take Off! “501st, Time to Save Lives?”

Witches, witches, witches, they made them out of clay.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Hartmann is secretly studying to become a doctor, so she’d been practicing on a dummy she bought. Barkhorn enters her room to wake her up one morning but spies its limbs underneath her garbage. She mistakes this for a real body and hurries away, debating whether to call the police or not. After theorizing that she killed Eila, Barkhorn goes back into her room to reluctantly help her bury the body. After Hartmann explains that it’s just a mannequin, she suggests that she teach a class on emergency healing (in the case Miyafuji isn’t there.)

Hartmann demonstrates what to do with an injured comrade. She asks Eila and Perrine to perform CPR, but they refuse — not wanting to “waste their first kiss” on a dummy. They (and Barkhorn) begin sculpting faces of their prospective crushes/loved ones so that they can project onto the dummy and take it seriously. They all do, but when it’s Perrine’s turn, she gets the whole squad involved in her CPR play on her dummy of Mio. The dummy is shot, causing theatrical mourning. The real Mio walks over, but everyone is too in-character to notice. This causes Mio to think she’s a ghost, and that she really died. Minna sees and speaks to her, convincing her that she didn’t die — but then spies the girls burying the Mio dummy. She immediately pulls a gun on the girls, who panic and blame Hartmann.

Our Take

There were certain pleasant surprises in this episode that sets it apart from the rest of the season. For one thing — there were no fan-service shots. Sure, there was one comment made by Miyafuji about groping, but compared to the rest of the show, that was pretty tame. The bar has never been lower!

The whole idea of the girls not wanting to waste their first kiss on a dummy was genuinely cute and funny. Even if it leads to them crafting replicas of the ones they love, it was (mostly) wholesome in spirit, and the small theatrical scenes the characters would act out were not only funny, but also stylistically fun. The even played around with the audio to make sure it sounded like an old, Casablanca-esque film.

They did a style change while Barkhorn was theorizing what Hartmann did to Eila, too, which was fun to see. Even though new artistic approaches were experimented within this episode, though, the inconsistent chibi designs of the cast is still not the greatest thing to sit through.

As a final (and rare) compliment, it’s nice to finally get an episode that features one, singular plot-line. It was much more satisfying to watch, instead of randomly jumping to an entirely different plot that had nothing to do with the first one. Now that we’ve seen that 501st can do this, though, it’s a little grating to know that they could have been making episodes like this the entire time. It’s clearly possible that the show can do all these wacky things it wants to do with the characters without switching gears so often.

Too bad they waited until the end to show us that.