Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime.

For the Cinderella Gray column, new installments will be posted either on the Sunday each episode airs, or as soon as possible over the succeeding week. Expect spoilers!

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“Eclipse first, the rest nowhere.”

Tracen Academy is, to any Uma Musume fan who got onboard before Cinderella Gray, synonymous with the series itself. Tracen is the main setting for seasons 1-3, as well as Road To The Top and the New Era film. It is Uma Musume. So it’s unsurprising that, just past the halfway point of its first cour, Cinderella Gray is also shifting setting to the storied racing academy. I admit I only barely fall into the category of “Uma Musume fan who got into it before Cinderella Gray” myself, having started with the aforementioned Road To The Top OVA near the top of the year. Still, Tracen is an already immensely nostalgic setting for me, and it’s lovely to see it again. Also worth looking at are the contrasts between this episode and episode 1, instructive and fascinating as they are. We began this story in what is, comparatively speaking, a backwater for Uma Musume racing. (The “boonies,” as one character puts it.) We begin this second part of it here, in Japan’s racing capitol. Make sure to keep up, things don’t seem like they’re going to slow down any time soon.

It’s worth also briefly touching on the contrast between Tracen as depicted here and its own past appearances in Uma Musume anime. While always portrayed as a prestigious and sprawling school, here it somehow feels even more enormous, as though it’s been blown up to truly massive proportions. This feeling of massiveness serves to amplify the fish-out-of-water effect; Oguri Cap takes the sights and sounds of Tracen in stride (although Belno super doesn’t), but the point remains; they’re not in Kasamatsu anymore.

Their first few days also don’t go smoothly, why would they? In fact, quite a lot happens in this episode. Basically everything short of an actual race.

Firstly, there’s the school itself. As mentioned, sprawling, enormous, not what either Oguri nor Belno are used to. Helping them get adjusted is Roppei (it’s Musaka), subbing in as Oguri’s trainer while Kitahara gets his national license. The pair briefly meet, ad hoc, with Symboli Rudolf, who takes the time to explain the ostensible meaning behind their school’s motto.

We’ve already talked about “Eclipse first, the rest nowhere,” since it came up in episode four. Here, the phrase is framed as a command to aim for the ace, to never be content with second best, to stand alone at the top of the mountain. Interestingly, what I did not know at the time—and what you already know, if you clicked that link I put in the header—is that that’s not what it means. It actually refers to the dominance of a single, specific historical horse; that’s who Eclipse is, or rather was. This isn’t a criticism of course, Uma Musume has a long-standing habit of attempting to imbue artifacts of real horseracing with some additional meaning, (the example that comes to mind is Satono Diamond explicitly comparing her unbreakability to her namesake in season three) and the transmutation of “Eclipse” referring to a specific individual to meaning the verb “eclipse” is just another instance of that, and a pretty slick one. It’s also relevant to the episode on the whole. Oguri Cap being such a goofball can obscure the fact that she’s very, very good at what she does, and is about as strong-willed. She does not, and will not, settle for second place, literal or figurative, in anything.

This brings us to the topic of Oguri’s actual classroom. When Oguri attends her new homeroom for the first time, we meet an absolute smorgasbord of new faces. I assume each will be relevant in their turn as this arc goes on, but worth immediately mentioning are Yaeno Muteki [Hinohara Ayumi], who meets her as a new comrade and challenger with respect, and Black Ale [Mori Nanako], who absolutely does not do either of those things.

Black Ale is incredibly arrogant and is vocally unimpressed by Oguri. She has the race record to back that arrogance up, so one can kind of see where she’s coming from in not necessarily thinking Oguri is all that based on her wins back home. Still, she doesn’t actually have a good measure of who she’s messing with. And indeed this doesn’t really faze Oguri Cap at all, at first, and she responds to that little “sandboxes” insult with the kind of dry remark where you can tell she doesn’t even realize she’s just punked Ale in front of their entire class.

Much later, toward the end of the episode. Ale confronts Oguri Cap again, this time directly insulting Kasamatsu, its racers, and Oguri herself, and that Oguri does not stand for. As is tradition with this kind of thing, the two make a bet. When they meet in the upcoming Pegasus Stakes, if Black Ale wins, Oguri Cap will return home. If Cap wins, Ale has to watch her language. It’s true that Black Ale has probably the mouthiest lines of any Uma Musume in the anime so far, but implicitly what Oguri Cap is really saying is more along the lines of telling her to watch her mouth, a subtly different thing. Cap is a hometown hero in the making now, something she’s clearly aware of.

We need to back up, though. Because Black Ale is not the only horse girl Oguri tells off in this episode, and she is by far not the most prominent one.

To rewind a bit, it’s mentioned, not long after the classroom scene, that in order to enter the G1 classics and attempt to obtain the Triple Crown—that’s the Satsuki Sho, the Japanese Derby, and the Kikuka Sho—you have to, you know, register to do that. Kitahara seemingly never considered that Oguri Cap would want to do this immediately (or just didn’t know about all this paperwork in the first place), and as such Oguri has none of the relevant forms. If it’s possible, seeing Oguri Cap live one of my recurring nightmares that’s haunted me since middle school has made me love the character even more.

Still, it’s hard not to feel for her, here, and it says a lot about Cinderella Gray‘s range that it can capture both this extremely relatable exasperation and confusion and the fiery feelings of a competition stoked in the same episode. In fact, it draws a connection between the two. Because Oguri Cap, who really wants to win the Japanese Derby for Kitahara (since she can’t win the Tokai Derby now, but since they’re both called the Something Derby they must be basically the same, right?), gets it in her head that surely, there’s at least one person she can talk to to work out some kind of exception.

She’s wrong about this, or at least, wrong for the time being (it seems odd to me that the Triple Crown would be brought up at all if Oguri isn’t going to somehow at least attempt it eventually), but you really have to give her credit for trying, because the person she has in mind is Symboli Rudolf.

Symboli Rudolf is a fascinating character in the history of Uma Musume. Throughout the previous episodes of Cinderella Gray and, indeed, throughout most of the history of the franchise, she’s been largely a background presence. Season 2’s protagonist, Tokai Teoi, admired her deeply, and Rudolf has been present, usually as a somewhat remote voice of reason, throughout all three of the Uma Musume TV seasons. She’s a franchise-wide bedrock, and her immaculate race record backs up the often-made claim that she’s the strongest Uma Musume ever, but we know surprisingly little about her as a character.

What this episode suggests is that Symboli Rudolf’s air of authority is derived not only from her strength—although certainly that, too—but also the deadly seriousness with which she takes the sport. Oguri Cap explains her predicament, and for what is to my recollection the first time ever, we see Symboli Rudolf get angry about something.

^{The show is clearly very proud of this shot, because there’s a flash back to it not long later.}

If anything, Rudolf is offended that Oguri Cap thinks she can waltz in and simply upend the proper order of things because she wants to. I really can only give it up for the character visuals here once again, that is a mean-looking horse right up there. In fact, her anger is overwhelming enough that Belno, also there while Oguri is asking about all this, actually falls to her knees in fear. I do get it! It’s not just Rudolf herself, it’s the gravity with which she treats this subject. There is no better illustration than this, the visual of a nameless Triple Crown winner standing atop a mountain of broken bodies, which fades into view with a grim grandiosity.

But of course, Oguri Cap is Oguri Cap. This is where we come back to that competitive mindset, typified by the motto which, remember, Rudolf herself expounded on earlier in this same episode. Oguri Cap will take these rules and traditions, and she will break them with her legs; her words, not mine. Arrogant! Arrogant, but really fucking cool! How does that even work? Is she going to just win so much that they’ll have no choice but to bump her up? I don’t know! I’m excited to find out!

^{One gets the sense from this single exchange that Rudolf is so used to most other people buckling in her presence that someone actively defying her is a bit of a shock. Am I reading too much into it? Maybe. But I’ve never met an anime I couldn’t over-analyze.}

This article has already gotten super long, so I won’t go over every other little detail of the episode. But Oguri does meet her teammates, the other girls in Roppei’s stable; the preppy Meikun Tsukasa [Kazama Mayuko], the somber and shy Kraft Univer [Tanaka Takako], and–

[Kaiden Michiko]

It’s hard to say if these characters will be super relevant going forward or if they’ll mostly serve to help Oguri out with her training. Still, God Hannibal. What a name. I’m speechless.

In any case, the last scene of the episode cuts to the Pegasus Stakes, Oguri’s race against Black Ale. The race itself is territory for next episode, but one of the last scenes here is Oguri standing beneath the huge, open sky, drinking in the roar of the crowd, and being absolutely stoked out of her mind. It’s maybe the best possible way to tee up this particular cliffhanger; a reminder of why we love this absolute freak in the first place.

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….Oh, and there’s a really cute post-credits scene where we check back in on Fujimasa March and company while they’re at what’s essentially a Denny’s. Norn gets called down bad, which I’m taking as validation of my ship, and Fujimarch ponders cutting her hair. It’s brief, but I’m very glad to see those characters even in passing.

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