Summary: The girls examine the Cure Lovies to see if they can figure out how they work. After Rikka doubts her ability to become a Precure, she and Mana bump into the mysterious man who gave Mana her Lovie. After he gives Rikka a Lovie as well, a postage-eating goat-monster appears. As Cure Heart quickly becomes overwhelmed, Rikka must join the fight and transform into Cure Diamond! 

Usny: The opening scene for this week’s episode has Rikka examining Mana’s Cure Lovie under a microscope and elucidating that it is the source the Precure’s power. That’s right, science can be used to examine magic. I expect that subsequent examinations will involve Rikka breaking out the student council’s scanning electron microscope as well as using X-ray diffraction to determine the Lovie’s exact crystalline structure. They might even make an episode out of taking a field trip to Tsukuba so Rikka can use the KEK’s particle accelerator to break the Lovies down into their constituent particles.

I already have mad love for Rikka thanks to her affinity for science and a plethora of similarities with my favorite Precure girl, Honoka Yukishiro. They both are the brainier half the their corresponding Precure teams. Likewise, Rikka doesn’t get to see her parents much. Her father is always abroad to take pictures for work, like Honoka’s parents, and Rikka’s mother works long days as a doctor.

The similarities to Futari wa Precure extend to the red oni/blue oni dynamic between Mana and Rikka. This dynamic has shown up time and time again, namely in Futari wa Precure, with Nagisa and Honoka, and in Heartcatch Precure, with Erika and Tsubomi. The main difference in Dokidoki! Precure is that Mana and Rikka are childhood friends, whereas the other pairs have virtually no history together. It will be interesting to see how Dokidoki! explores this relationship given their history and roles in the student council.

kevo: Dokidoki! Precure really showed off its self-awareness this week when Rikka called out the mysterious man who supplied Mana with her Cure Lovie out for being a pedo-creeper. Her sharp, intelligent persona is a great foil to Mana’s easy-going and air-headed antics.

A four-Cure Precure show lives and dies on the character dynamics between the lead cure and the second. Erika with Tsubomi, Hibiki and Kanade, Nagisa and Honoka, just to name a few. That’s why I am so relieved that Rikka is such a likeable character straight off the bat. Makoto needs a good humping or two before her case of the bitches wears off, but in Rikka you have a badass, no-shits-given character that balances the cast beautifully. I almost damn-near cried during Cure Diamond’s transformation. So good.

The moral of this episode: