Uma Musume Pretty Derby Season 3

Episode 6

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After plenty of teases and false starts, this week's episode of Uma Musume Pretty Derby Season 3 finally fully focuses on Satono Diamond. It turns out to be the right time after all this build-up. The series has thus far artfully articulated how, for the horse girls at the center of any given story, winning need not be everything. But what if it was? What if it felt like mere happenstance had convinced so many around you that your time was over before it even began? That is where Dia finds herself at the beginning of this episode: destined not to succeed. She's not worth following for more than a few minutes as a depressing prelude to someone else's story.

It's under the palpable weight of these heavy expectations that Uma Musume, naturally, jumps straight into half an episode's worth of goofy character bits. Rest assured, it's coming from a very sound, sincere place, narratively. Dia has come to accept that the Satono Jinx might not be as dismissable as she'd previously insisted and resolves to face that bad mojo head-on. The antics that follow are absolutely in line with any "character deals with bad luck" episode of a cartoon from the past two decades but dialed up to the levels of absurdity the audience expects of these erstwhile equestrians. It's not just that Dia disregards the safety of her fellow horse girls in her pursuit of unpleasant situations (including a crashing cameo by my favorite minor character, Sakura Bakushin-O). She actively seeks out additional supernatural situations to juice up the power of her jinx so she can practice dispelling it.

It's not an approach that's without precedent. Superstition has had its place in sports for as long as organized competitions have been around (horseshoes are symbols of luck). Players and fans have relied on rituals to calm intangible internal issues and give themselves whatever last edge they need to perform consistently. However, as reassuring as these elements can be, they also can't be considered seriously relevant to the competitors' results. As Mejiro McQueen points out to Dia, if that were true, the horse girls who won their races would also be credited as benefitting from a self-fulfilling prophecy as opposed to their own hard-earned skills, like the destined losers.

At this apex, Uma Musume steps back to analyze another facet of the sports-story main-character conundrum. The fact is, regardless of their win-loss record, mishaps and bad luck befall everyone. It's simply too easy to focus on them as a factor when you're fixated on your shortcomings and seeming inability to perform. On the one hand, this plays into the inherent narrative tragedy embodied by Satono Diamond at this point: Sometimes, no matter how badly the designated hero of a story wants to win, they try their best to do so…but they can't. It simply isn't in the cards. But McQueen's other key point here feeds into that "Winning isn't everything" aspect of Season 3—How even with the acts of unfortunate happenstance that have held her back, Dia has still gotten damn close to victory. She's demonstrably perfect, and that must be something worth believing in.

It's a powerful use of Uma Musume's signature structure, which codifies the idea on both sides of its tonal divide. Yes, Dia's goofy sketch comedy in combating the jinx was silly, but that's because making supernatural excuses is inherently silly. Shifting into a serious mode to train to be better than perfect to account for any incidental issues, the show becomes earnest. The symbolism is as evident as it is impactful; With Dia out of her own head, the perspective can rotate around to family members observing her. She's running not just to vindicate the older generation but to instill hope in the younger generation.

But damn if her racing performance doesn't hold her up as a hero all the same. Uma Musume Season 3 must have heard me talking smack last week regarding the running sequences since this episode steps up its game considerably. It's still not the high point of the franchise in that regard, to be sure. However, the raw emotion on Dia's grimacing face bears the weight of this scene even before she unleashes a primal scream. It's an all-out expression aligned with her family's heartfelt cries, making it genuinely feel like they're all in this together. And it's the exact sauce they needed to put on a sequence like this to make it feel like both the characters and the show did it at the end. The chills accompanying Uma Musume's best moments come through for this episode's race. Satono Diamond's victory, like this episode focusing on her and how she got there, was worth the wait.

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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.