#PCD166

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Precure Day 166

Episode: Yes! Precure 5 18 - “Bombarded! Karen’s Private Life” Date watched: 23 December 2019 Original air date: 3 June 2007 Screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/ZG2NYcH Transformation Gallery: https://imgur.com/a/6k6SzS0 Project info and master list of posts: http://tinyurl.com/PCDabout

ah yes the perfect disguise

Mika wants to interview Karen at home for the paper, and ends up learning a lot more about both of them than she probably anticipated. Shenanigans ensue! Let’s take a look!

The Plot

Masuko Mika approaches Karen at lunch, showing her a huge pile of requests that the Cinq Lumieres Times has received requesting to know more about the Student Council President’s home life. Karen wants to do it at the school, but Mika insists that the interview be done at Karen’s house, to get a better sense of how she spends her free time.

Meanwhile at Nightmare HQ, Bunbee gaslights Arachnea’s lackluster performance and she mutters something about using her full power the next time. You know, the usual banter. I only include these interactions in the summaries because sometimes they advance the plot.

That Sunday, Mika shows up at Karen’s mansion and is blown away by its size. 

The appropriate reaction, honestly

Karen greets her in casual clothes and assures her that her home life isn’t that different from anybody else’s, which Mika doubts. Jiiya, the butler, asks if Mika will be the only representative from the paper that day, to which she nervously responds that the paper has a lot going on. She takes in the sights of the mansion as Karen leads her to the back patio, where they sit down at a tea table for the interview. Mika begins to ask Karen how she likes to relax when she’s not doing student council work, but their solitude is interrupted by a series of butlers carrying tea, treats, and condiments. Karen quickly recognizes these butlers in their identical bad wigs as being her friends, who have come to see how the interview goes.

She grows increasingly flustered and excuses herself from the table to go chew out the other girls for interrupting and distracting her, but they say they just want to make sure she doesn’t blab about Precure. (Let’s be real she’s about the least likely of them all to spill that secret). Karen escorts Mika to the greenhouse to continue the interview, where she remarks that maintaining the plants is a lot of work but if she doesn’t do it, nobody else will. (Hmm, that sounds familiar) Notably, MIka’s glasses fog up from the humidity, and as she takes them off to clean them she mistakes a nearby plant for Karen.

the resemblance is truly uncanny

Unfortunately, Nozomi and co decide to hide out in various spots of the greenhouse wearing goofy disguises to mess with Karen. Mika comments to herself on how surprisingly discomposed she is, not seeing the other girls, as they leave the greenhouse. Meanwhile, Arachnea shows up, looking for trouble.

Out in the garden gazebo, the interview continues. Mika asks when Karen feels relaxed, and as the other girls pop up from behind a hedge with signs cheering her on, she says that she feels relaxed when she’s finally alone. At that moment, Jiiya shows up with some cream puffs for everybody, and Nozomi, Rin, Urara, and Komachi quickly come out of hiding to chow down, surprising Mika. At this point, Karen snaps at them, chewing them out for coming over uninvited and interrupting her private interview.

Mika is surprised to see this side of her, and mulls it over while Karen escorts the other four off her property. Jiiya confides in Mika that Karen has gotten a lot more lively since meeting those four, and she feels she can be open and honest with them. Mika admits to herself that she’s a little jealous of Karen’s friendships.

Arachnea manages to lure Mika back to the greenhouse, and the girls notice her heading in there after they catch a pinky, so they follow her in to find that Arachnea has transformed it into a steamy, overgrown bog and has the journalist trapped in a giant pitcher plant. The villainess turns a decorative jar into a Kowaina, which jumps towards the girls and just happens to bump Mika on the way, knocking her glasses off. Nozomi leads the group in transforming, not caring that they may be seen. They try to attack the monster, but it is extremely nimble, jumping around on frog-like legs, and it avoids their attacks. Some quick thinking by Lemonade frees Mika from her trap, and Aqua carries her to safety, telling her to run away. Instead, she takes pictures of the battle unfolding behind her as best she can. While this was going on, Arachnea managed to get the other four girls into a puddle of quicksand or really thick mud, where they start drowning and can’t escape. Aqua punches Arachnea out of the way and performs Aqua Stream on the mud pit, turning it into water that the girls can float in. She then turns her rage to the spider woman, berating her for putting her friends in danger, and that despite their tendency to impose on people, they are her precious friends! Lemonade realizes they need to slow the Kowaina’s movements to defeat it, so once again Aqua comes through with a plan. She again charges at Arachnea, baiting her into using her webs, and then dodges out of the way so the webs latch onto the kowaina’s leg, stopping it from moving around. Dream performs her attack and Arachnea retreats, not wanting to fight a pissed off Aqua. The greenhouse returns to normal, and Cure Aqua returns Mika’s glasses to her, but by the time she puts them on and turns to face her saviors, they have disappeared.

The five friends walk back to the front entrance of the mansion, worried about the contents of the next day’s newspaper, sure that their secret will be spilled.  Mika returns to school, fully prepared to write about this fantastic encounter. However, she runs into Otaka, who is getting some exterior work done on her stand, and when she shows her the pictures, Otaka asks if she got permission from these girls to write about them, which Mika obviously didn’t. The lunch lady and secret school principal reminds her that, as a good journalist, she should keep her subjects’ feelings in mind.

The next day, the girls are all surprised to find that the headline in the paper is exactly what was promised: the expose on Karen. It details how her friends came over and caused a fuss, and her own shocked expression, and a quote from Jiiya about how she’s brightened up thanks to them. At the very bottom is a request for an interview with Precure 5, but no pictures or anything are included. While Nozomi and Urara try to figure out what to wear for this interview, Karen just looks over and smiles at her goofy friends as the episode fades to black.

The Analysis

There are two big takeaways from this episode. The first, most obvious one, is that Karen’s mild-mannered, reserved appearance belies someone who is easily frustrated when things don’t go her way. We kinda knew this already, but now her real self is being seen by more people. She loses her composure pretty easily, and squabbles with her friends, but it’s because they are friends that she’s able to let down her guard and act like this with them. They’re a bunch of goofs and she loves them, as much as they may drive her crazy. It really sheds light on how Karen has grown since we met her.

To be fair to her, the other girls are being abnormally goofy. It’s almost like they’re intentionally trying to sabotage her interview, or a similar phenomenon to when you’re on an important phone call and your friends make a ruckus in the background to make it sound like things are out of control wherever you are. We get some great moments of comedy out of them, starting with the butler disguises with bad wigs and their hair sticking out, to the animal outfits in the greenhouse (see the gallery), culminating in these signs they make right before the cream puffs come out. It’s like they egg each other on into more and more extreme gags to try to get Karen to mess up. It reminds you that these are still children.

Nozomi’s sign is on-brand

The other, more subtle but more interesting, observation is something I have suspected for a while now: Masuko Mika seems to be the only member of the Newspaper Club. We’ve never seen anybody else, the paper seems to exclusively publish stories of personal interest to her, by her, and today she dodged the matter of being alone by saying the paper was busy. She implies but doesn’t outright state that there are other people who are on other projects, which appears to be a misleading lie. Later, when she reflects on what Jiiya told her about Karen’s friendship, she says she’s jealous, implying she has no friends of her own, certainly none that she can be as close with as Karen is with Nozomi and co. It’s been so long since I watched this series that i honestly don’t remember how this plays out, and I’m eager to refresh my memory. Come to think of it, I don’t remember her appearing in GoGo at all, but we’ll cross that bridge next year.

Her choice to respect the cures’ identities was a good one and it shows how she has also developed since we first met her. Mika, originally, was only kept from writing about the Precures because she ran into a hot guy (Nuts) which instantly distracted her. She gave no consideration to their thoughts on the matter, even when they requested to not be written about. It took some prodding from Otaka, but this time she chose simply to ask for a formal interview. They will almost certainly not grant her that, but it’s mature of her to do that and it shows that she’s improving as a journalist.

This does raise the question of whether Otaka knows about the girls, at least that there is something going on in the school, because she seems nonplussed by the notion of superheroes in the city. However, she could just be dismissing them as cosplayers or local heroes or something to that effect. I wouldn’t mind a little more insight into this matter.

This episode has a couple other little details that I like. It gives Mika an occasion to take off her glasses for a moment, and we see through her eyes just how weak her vision really is. This is a setup for later in the episode, when she loses her glasses while kidnapped, and can’t clearly see the girls transform into Precure or the ensuing fight, which inadvertently protects their identities. It’s convenient but they did establish her poor eyesight in advance, which I thought was clever.

And speaking of Mika again, she gets a lovely reference in this one that I don’t believe I noticed before. When she’s doing her introduction, she does the original Kamen Rider transformation pose.

She did the whole arm sweep so it’s not just a coincidence. It’s not the first and certainly not the last Kamen Rider reference in Precure, but it was funny because the scene otherwise has nothing to do with tokusatsu.

Another minor point of note: We get see Karen use her Pinky Catch for its so-named purpose, and by extension, we finally know what her instrument is: a violin. To recap: Nozomi: triangle. Rin: horn, Urara: harp, Komachi: flute, Karen: violin. Together they make up the world’s strangest band.

The last subject I want to touch on is less to do with the show itself, and more the translation. I..... kinda don’t like it. It helps to understand the troubled history of getting Yes 5 fully subtitled in order to really understand my complaint, so if you want to learn more, check out my post on the status blog, but you don’t have to.

So what’s my complaint? The meme subs.

The term “alternative fact�� didn’t enter the general lexicon until 2017, it should not exist in a show from 2007. I can tolerate meme subs to an extent, but anachronistic translations of period dialog just drive me up the wall. Her statement, “Sonna koto nai desho ga!” is a pretty straightforward denial which could be written as “No I’m not” or “That’s not true”, and the purposeful inclusion of a meme from 10 years after this show aired annoys me and takes me out of the experience.

In a more positive note, this episode has some excellent facial expressions and you should check them out in the gallery.

EDIT: Whoops I forgot to write about the summer uniforms.

It’s almost a color inversion of the winter uniform. The socks are now white (they were black), the dress is dark purple with white stripes on the hem of the skirt, compared to the pale lavender with dark purple stripes, and the jacket is white instead of dark purple, with a lavender collar (winter is white). The cuffs are now the same color as the rest of the jacket instead of being the color of the dress, and therefore the stripes have to be a third color (in this case they match the collar instead of the jacket) so that’s a change. I’m honestly underwhelmed by it. The summer uniform is usually a short-sleeved blouse with no overcoat because of the warmer weather, whereas this is essentially a pallet swap. It looks fine but it doesn’t make me think “oh, it’s summer and the weather is warmer now.”

Next time, Urara is being stalked.... by her family? Look forward to it!

Pink Precure Catchphrase Count: 0 Kettei!