Tuesday, December 25, 2018

Free: Dive to the Future-The Complete Third Season


A new day dawns for the boys of Iwatobi and Sumezeka High Schools.  Haru, Makoto and Rin are all off to college, continuing their new life courses in their own way while Rei and Nagisa try to bring new blood to the Iwatobi High School Swim Team.  But the road to the world stage for Haru and Rin just got a whole lot tougher.  For Haru, it’s dealing with the sudden return of a friend from Middle School and the possibility that he might have caused him the greatest pain in his life.  For Rin, it’s learning the existence of a new breed of swimmers whos skills dwarf both his and even Haru’s.  New players step onto the starting blocks as the next heat of the next chapter of the lives of five young men gets ready to begin.

Free is a series I never thought I would find myself admiring so much.  When I put it on my First Impression Friday cue a few years back, I expected to joke about it a lot…and ended up blowing through the first season in one weekend and giving it a pretty glowing review (you can find it right here: http://gundamanimeblog.blogspot.com/2016/03/free-complete-first-season.html).  And then, lightning managed to strike twice and even better than before when Season One was followed up with arguably one of the best sequel seasons to any Anime ive ever seen: Free Eternal Summer (reviews right here too if you want to read that as well: http://gundamanimeblog.blogspot.com/2016/06/free-eternal-summer-complete-second.html).  I never thought I would find reasons to love the boys of Iwatobi and Sumezeka or get so invested in their eternal bonds of brotherhood and friendship, mixed in with a pretty visual and auditory package of awesome.  So yeah, I was always ready for more Free.  And Season Three-Dive to the Future gave us more…but did it give us too much more?

The biggest thing made apparent by the new Opening Sequence is that the cast has suddenly ballooned from about 15 central characters to close to (or more than 30).  There’s our core five characters: Haru, Rin, Mako, Nagisa and Rei; Momo and Ai and their newest team at Sumezeka; Gou and the new members of Iwatobi; and a heaping helping of new (sort of but we’ll get there) faces at Haru and Mako’s respective colleges.  The second I saw this, I knew there were going to be some problems.  I don’t mind splitting the core five up and sending them to see new places.  However, this does mean that not everyone is going to be around every episode and if they are it’s gonna feel forced a lot.  I feel like Rin, Nagisa, Rei and Sousuke get the harsher end of this approach.  While they do get their own episodes to further their stories, I didn’t really feel invested in Nagisa and Rei’s quest to keep the Iwatobi Swim Team going and I wanted to see more of Rins interactions with other swimmers in Australia.  The other thing that kind of irked me was that some new characters brought in this season have been seen already in the   plethora of Free movies that have come out in between Season Two and Season Three (it’s been what, three years since Eternal Summer?).  Personally I haven’t had a chance to see High Speed! Free! Starting Days, Free! Timeless Medley, and Free! Take Your Marks (not for lack of trying mind you).  Still, I didn’t expect to feel so lost seeing footage from those films spliced into the earliest episodes of Dive to the Future and I kind of felt left out of a few plot developments as such.  Factor in some scarily superior swimmers introduced towards the end of the season, a couple of rival coaches with a history and I feel Free reached too far, even if this didn’t intend to be a stand alone season like the others (more on that later).

This season of Free was surprisingly the darkest so far.  There were numerous times where I felt my stomach in knots by the end of an episode, more so than ever before.  Don’t get me wrong, Free is still one of the best feel good Anime out there.  But going for the general sequel rule of darker tone and stakes was adhered here in a rare fashion.  Most of this came from two particular stories, one that dominated the season and another that will likely be followed up later in Season 4.  Even if we’re sort of retreading ground with someone having beef with Haru cause of something in his past (Haru’s becoming a real Kenshin Himura the Battosai isn’t he?), Ikuyas story was still fun to watch.  Ikuya is Haru swimming every stroke to get better and its kind of rare to see anyone swimming more than a single stroke, or even two.  And the funny thing is, Ikuya wanted to see his friends again.  The main thing keeping them apart: Ikuyas psycho bestie from America, Hiyori.  Every interaction Hiyori had with Haru, Mako and Asahi made me think continuously that Hiyori was going to push them into traffic if they didn’t stop trying to reunite with Ikuya.  It was definitely a menace that I had never felt in any character from Free thus far.  One problem with this story arc though is that it takes up 3/4ths of the season.  Its only in the last three or so episodes that we get introduced to swimmers whos abilities flat out dwarf Haru and Rin…by like a super vast margin.  Albert Wahlander, whos swimming skill was built up like the legend of Rambo all throughout the season by Rin and Haru’s new coaches, certainly lived up to the hype…all the while he turned out to be a super nice guy.  I wonder how far Haru and Rin will have to push themselves to overcome this mountain of a swimmer in Season 4…cause it sucks to say but theyre nowhere near ready to take him on yet.

Actually lets’ talk about Season 4.  Yeah, Free: Dive to the Future ends on a pretty big cliffhanger, kind of in the style of Rocky III where we don’t see the outcome of a match (and learn about it much later).  The season then posts text of a promise: See You in 2020.  I don’t know if that should get me excited or upset me.  On the one hand, the 2020 release window pretty much garuntees that the 4th Season will coincide with the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo (AKIRA WAS RIGHT!!!)  On the other hand, waiting two years for more Free after such a bookmarking epic event is going to make me antsy, maybe others as well.  That said, the cliffhanger ending and the raised stakes that leave even Haru of all people shaken to his core is a thrilling prospect.  If nothing else, Dive to the Future takes a lot of the drama that popped up in Eternal Summer and amplifies it, testing the bonds and lessons developed in the past to their limits…and it makes the heartfelt moments all the more worth it, like one of the seasons key set pieces, Haru vs Ikuya…MEDLY!!!

While I do feel that Dive to the Future does have the more glaring problems of any season yet, it’s still Free and if you loved the first two seasons, there isn’t any reason you wouldn’t enjoy this one too.  Everything that made the story work so far is still here: the bromance between Haru and Rin, Rin and Sousuke; the animation that has only gotten better with age; the kick ass synth soundtrack that plays during every riveting race; the humor is still gut bustingly funny; and the stories as a whole for every character feel genuine and unique in their own way (theyre just way to damn many of them for one season).  I often wondered how fans would feel about splitting the season evenly between Haru and Mako in college and Rei and Nagisa back at Iwatobi with Rin’s Australia adventures cutting in throughout both.  It might’ve cleaned things up better but at the end of the day im just happy to have more Free in my life.  It might not have hit the stellar highlights of another long awaited Anime sequel: Full Metal Panic: Invisible Victory or those of its predecessor seasons.  However, new strides are made to challenge Haru, Rin, Mako, Nagisa and Rei and there the promise of more to come (in 2020 or sooner, we’ll know at some point next year im sure).  Free is still a series near and dear to my heart and even if the weight of the added epic changes threatened to collapse on Season Three more than once, I will always look forward to more awesome swimming week after week.

And wow, that end sequence with all the characters doing a dance number on stage, that almost made the huge new additions to the roster worth it.  I could watch that end on loop all day to get in a good mood.

8/10

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