Recap: Gou stumbles upon an old training camp guide that sparks her and Nagisa on a campaign to make a training camp of their own. Rei, still the beginner, struggles to keep up, causing him to take an unnecessary risk.

Free! sure is taking a lot of liberties this week. Coincidentally, Gou finds the ancient training guide. Apparently, janitors never clean the swimming area even before it closed. Coincidentally, their former coach somehow inherited a fishing boat. Apparently, instead of, Idno selling the boat, he still just has it lying around. Coincidentally, Rin and his team happen to be at the same island. Apparently, having a world class swimming pool at their own school isn’t good enough. That last part was the most egregious. It basically seemed to exist to have a reason for keeping Rin in the plot when for all intents and purposes he shouldn’t be in the spotlight again until race day.

Makoto’s problems are a big underlying focus in the episode, but it’s really hard to tell what exactly is the trauma that would make him apprehensive about swimming in the ocean. We see his entire immediate family, so it’s not like one of his parents or siblings died in the ocean. I suppose it could be an extended relative, but we have little to go on. In a show where a big point of drama between two characters is that one got beat in a race when they were in elementary school, I’m worried that this might end up being something totally unimportant. However, with Makoto being the dependable one of the group, I’m hoping it’s something a bit more serious.

I couldn’t even imagine what trying to swim 4 kilometers would be like. It’s no surprise that Rei would have the hardest time in this training, but watching him suffer through his pride was hard. The idea of someone who can’t learn how to swim any way but one style is still anime-kinds of ridiculous, but as the novice he’s definitely the most relatable character amongst the army of fishmen. I have problems with the idea that he’d really be stupid enough to go out into the ocean alone, but for story’s sake I’ll buy it as long as the next episode pans out well.

Going back to liberties, I wasn’t just talking about the story, either. While KyoAni took a week break after the last episode, it certainly doesn’t seem like it was to give time to touch up this one. It isn’t the worst thing I’ve ever seen (trust me, I reviewed SNAFU), but the animation was definitely not up to snuff compared to the quality we’ve come to expect. There were also many pregnant pauses on stills. They quickly broke up the flow of the episode and didn’t seem to serve any purpose other than to save time and money. For a show like Free!, the main draw is that KyoAni quality. If it doesn’t even have that, it’s going to loose my attention pretty quickly.