Episode 11, "The Miracle at Rush Valley"
*****SPOILERS*****
Synopsis: On the way to Dublith, Edward, Alphonse, and Winry make a detour to Rush Valley, a town full of automail engineers. While engineers gather to admire his automail parts, Edward's State Alchemist watch is stolen by a pickpocket, Paninya, with two automail legs. The three follow her into the mountains, where her automail mechanic Dominic lives. Winry asks for an apprenticeship, but he denies her. While there, Dominic's daughter-in-law goes into labor, and Winry helps deliver the child while Ed and Al wait, powerless. Dominic reccomends Winry apprentice to an automail engineer he knows. Ed and Al continue onto Dublith.
Comments:
Ahaha, oh wow, this is the worst episode of the dub since the first episode. Shit-tastic.
First of all, Vic Mignogna's Edward Elric has taken a nosedive, something I thought impossible, given his already less-than-stellar performance as the character. He's worse in this episode than he's ever been. Just really, really awful and unlistenable. There are a couple of spots where he recovers momentarily, only to collapse again into some sickly sounding spazz. Really annoying.
Speaking of annoying, any progress Caitlin Glass has made as Winry in this series has been tossed out with her being as cringeworthy as before here, and since Winry has a lot of lines in this episode, it makes it all the worse. It's especially bad when she gets excited (which happens a lot). She sounds like a harpie. Again, like Vic's Ed, there are momentary recoveries, but my hopes are always dashed.
At least Maxey Whitehead continues to be an excellent Alphonse. Really, she was the real saving grace of the episode, even though she didn't get a lot of speaking lines.
Cythnia Cranz's Paninya is decent, I suppose, no worse than any of the other incidental characters in the episode. It sort of fits, but I didn't feel like it was the perfect voice, or anything. It just sort of suited its purpose. That's good enough, though, since Paninya is not an important character. I remember her Japanese voice selling her emotions a little better, though.
An amusing scene in the dub of this episode was when Ed is delivering the news to Winry that Dominic's daughter-in-law is going into labor, saying "Bay... bay..." (BABY), and Winry gets a picture of a horse over her head and says, "A bay is a horse."
Now, in the original, Edward says something along the lines of "Being born..." with the word "uma", meaning "horse" being spoken in what he's saying, thus the picture of a horse over Winry's head. Now, the English translation works, but it's weird, because when somebody says "bay", you're more likely to think of the area next to water, the most common use of the word "bay" and not a horse, so that Winry immediately lept to a bay horse, a reddish-brown horse, is a bit perplexing. Anyway, they did what they could, I'm not blaming them, but it is amusing. The episode has a lot of lousy voice acting, but the script was okay.
Really, Funimation, I know you guys can do better than this.
Overall Score: 2.5 out of 5
