Ranma ½ Season 3

Episode 5

I know that there are likely to be detractors who complain that this is yet another episode focusing on Akane's inability to cook, and yes, that joke is wearing more than a little thin, but in this episode it serves as a launching pad for a level of glorious insanity that few other anime comedies can match. It escalates from a simple runaround with Akane demanding Ranma eat her misshapen death-cookies, to full-blown screwball madness in the Kuno household. I do have something of a soft spot for the Kuno siblings: they're both incurably stupid and relentlessly horny. Neither has come to the realization that Ranma's body changes from male to female and back again – a memo the rest of the cast got a long time ago.

It also helps that sister Kodachi is worryingly hot in her gymnastics gear, all smouldering gazes and whirlwinds of black rose petals. I say “worryingly” mainly for me, because it's clear I have terrible taste in horribly controlling women who use Rohypnol-laced cookies to incapacitate men. But hey, this was originally written in the 1980s; it was a different time then. Sadly, I don't appear to have grown up much in the interim.

Poor Ranma is in the eye of the storm here, caught between his fiancée, who is just desperate for him to love her cookies (not that she'd ever admit to this out loud), and Kodachi, who also wants him to love her cookies, then become paralyzed, and then presumably her eternal love slave. The blackmail aspect is pretty funny, especially as Ranma tries (unwisely) to devour every photograph copy of him and Kodachi in a seemingly compromising position. Is this because he wants to spare Akane's feelings, or because he knows he's likely in for a world of pain from her if she ever sees it? I wonder if he should give Akane the benefit of the doubt? She's not dumb, and she guesses that Kodachi is somehow blackmailing him almost immediately.

I do love the ridiculous slapstick resulting from Ranma's effort to retrieve the negatives-protecting necklace first from the Kuno family pet alligator, and secondly from Tatewaki Kuno himself. Of course Kodachi electrified it. We don't end with any resolution, and I'm sure all of this madness will be utterly forgotten next week, but that's fine. This episode was so silly, and it made me laugh a lot. That's exactly what I want from Ranma.

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Ranma ½ Season 3 is currently streaming on Netflix.