Episode 8: Curry High Trip

Nanami tampers with the curry, Utena and Himemiya swap personalities, and hilarity ensues.

This is a summary of episode 8 of the anime series Revolutionary Girl Utena.  You are welcome to link to it, but not to repost it elsewhere.  For more information, and other episode summaries, see the index.

Utena and Himemiya attend cooking class, while Nanami and her friends spy on them.  One of Nanami's friends reports that she has, as planned, substituted "special super-spicy Indian hundred-fold curry" for Himemiya's curry powder; but then they realise that they made a mistake and instead used "secret Pa-Ohn ultra-spicy nine billion-fold curry," claimed to be "So spicy it'll blow you to smithereens!" Just then, a violent explosion rocks the campus, and Himemiya and Utena are rushed to hospital.  Fortunately, they are soon released, apparently unharmed.

But both girls are behaving oddly, and Nanami's spies figure out what has happened:  Utena's and Himemiya's personalities have been swapped.  We briefly explore the cuteness of this situation - Himemiya-Utena standing up to the bullies, Utena-Himemiya fainting, Himemiya-Utena playing basketball, Utena-Himemiya tending the rose garden, and so on.  Nanami's friends snap lots of candid photographs of both and do a brisk business selling them to boys and girls alike.

When Touga, Utena-Himemiya, and Himemiya-Utena track down Nanami, Touga tells her she has to go to India to get more of the spice, so off she goes, with her friends.  We see brief clips of them throughout the rest of the episode, as they search the subcontinent for more curry powder.  They keep getting trampled by elephants, even in improbable locations such as the snowy peaks of the Himalayas.

Meanwhile, back at the school, Saionji drags Himemiya-Utena into the gym storage room and starts removing his clothing; she draws the obvious conclusion about his intentions, but it turns out that actually, he just wants to give her the exchange diary he's apparently been keeping with Himemiya.  After bringing it home, Himemiya-Utena is angstful about whether to read it or not, but Utena-Himemiya encourages her to go ahead because "You happen to be Himemiya Anthy at the moment." Himemiya-Utena reads Saionji's declaration of love in the diary, and his unflattering comments about Utena, and writes in a firm rejection.

Just as she's returning it and he's freaking out, Nanami returns, with the curry powder.  It's the last in the world.  No more will be available for 200 years.  She spills it.  And then it's discovered that Himemiya hadn't used it in the first place anyway; it was just the magic of Himemiya's cooking.  So they switch back, and trick Saionji into eating the curry and switching with Chu-Chu.

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