Episodes 1-3 – Uma Musume Pretty Derby Season 3

In racing, it’s as important to keep an eye on what’s behind you as it is on what’s ahead. The premiere for Uma Musume Pretty Derby‘s third season showed an awareness of its place as an installment in this odd little franchise. So many fans had come out to cheer for Tokai Teio, Mejiro McQueen, and the others in Season 2 that the obvious question was how Season 3 would follow that up. Would this new story of Kitasan Black and Satono Diamond attempt to replicate that roller coaster of emotional intensity? Should it do so, or would it be possible considering the completely different slate of horse histories being adapted here?

There are compelling meta-questions at the start, and thankfully, this season has already shown it’s not going to be spending its entire run turning those over. No, just the first couple of episodes of Uma Musume Season 3 are spent acknowledging the expectations brought about by its predecessor before confidently bucking them in favor of branching out. At the start, the audience is told about Kita’s entire existence in the story. She was inspired by those like her father and Tokai Teio and compared herself to them in all her efforts. What happens when she not only can’t measure up but can’t even get the chance to? Even her opportunity for revenge against Duramente is scuttled by that horse girl mirroring Teio’s previous leg-breaking tribulations.

It showcases the emotional intensity associated with Uma Musume. The famed screaming stump makes its first appearance in this second episode. Except as opposed to a running gag, it’s utilized as a heartbreakingly earnest outlet for Kita’s frustrations swirling inside her. Her familiar friends and teammates can’t be the ones to talk her through this; it takes an outside element. That’s embodied cleverly in Nice Nature, who herself was but an ancillary player in the second season, which makes her use here all the more clever. Nature’s advice to Kita is a pretty typical narrative— Don’t try to be someone else; be true to yourself. We’ve all heard it before. But in this context, it rings well for Kita and the anime. It’s effectively blunt to hear Nature declare that it would be lame to copy what Teio did previously to try to hit those same highs in the same way. These are basic narrative tropes that still apply to Uma Musume‘s historical horse happenings and the meta-narrative it explores for itself in these introductory episodes.

With that established, what better way for Uma Musume Season 3 to distinguish its commitment to a new direction than by doing a serious episode about Gold Ship, of all horses? Okay, this is only as serious as any early-season episode of Uma Musume could allow itself to get; There are still multiple scenes of horse girls toasting with giant mugs of (non-alcoholic) beer, and even in wistful reminiscence of her glory days, Gold Ship’s famous funny faces are front and center. But just opening the third episode with intense training scenes of everyone’s favorite Rubik’s Cube-wielding weirdo clues the audience in that something is up.

It’s a wry acknowledgment of what Gold Ship’s actual place in the race participation must be in this series. Sure, she’s eccentrically funny all the way through and an earnestly supportive horse senpai. But an inability to get out of the gate properly is an amusing sight gag and a liability for a racer at her level. Three seasons deep, more than any number of injuries in other characters, Gold Ship deciding to shift to a lesser league is a sign that all these horse girls are running on limited time. Perhaps Kita and Dia can’t strive for the same level of success and fame as Teio, but even their more modest goals aren’t something they’ll be able to chase after forever.

The setup with Gold Ship also lets Uma Musume play with more of those meta elements to its sports narrative structure. There are echoes of Season 2‘s subplot with Rice Shower, as Kita grapples with the question of if racing against Gold Ship in her send-off competition could cause her to “spoil” the celebration that event is supposed to be. This jibes with her previous feeling of racing as a festival and codifies that maintaining that fun feeling might not always be as simple as she’d hoped. But even that sort of stress is defused by Gold Ship being Gold Ship, her advice, and the way things play out for her in the actual race, reinforcing the point arrived at with Nice Nature previously: The protagonists need not always be the winners.

It works in the moment of the race because even though Gold Ship hasn’t been shown to race or win a bunch in the actual show, she’s still been endeared to the audience as a presence over the past seasons. It’s embodied even in the silly gags, as the aside audience commentators from the previous episodes are one-upped by random new ones who pop in, indicative of how wide-reaching the fans of every other horse girl must be. Gold Ship comes in a mere eighth place in her finale race, but her surge and attempt at a pass is the most exciting part, and everyone is still cheering for her by the end. A good race is a good race, and a good story is a good story.

Where this will leave Uma Musume Season 3 for the rest of its run is thus a compelling question. The unique nature of ongoing sports seasons as stories, embodied in these tied-together plot concepts, is that there is always another storyline, another journey, right around the corner. Gold Ship retires from the Twinkle Series and even passes her Rubik’s Cube onto Kitasan, letting it graduate from a goofy visual gag to an embodiment of inherited horse race will. If that doesn’t signify an evolution of this franchise‘s brilliant balance between the sincere and the absurd, I don’t know what else does. But it confirms what its premiere episode started alluding to: This season will seek to go to places and races apart from where it’s been before.

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Uma Musume Pretty Derby Season 3 is currently streaming on
Crunchyroll.

Chris is excited to be back for the mane event, and is hoping he won’t have to be a neigh-sayer. You can catch him horsing around on his blog, as well as Twitter, though he doesn’t expect that to be around furlong.