Dirty Pair

What a strange episode to go out on.

The flipside of faking its audience out with four separate episodes that could have served perfectly as a season finale but manifestly and decidedly weren’t is that the episode with which the original broadcast run of Sunrise’s first Dirty Pair does actually sign off on comes across as more than a little underwhelming. It’s an off-week and, annoyingly, it’s a week that’s off in pretty much all the ways we’ve already talked ad nauseum about. The closest analogue is “Nostalgic Blues Makes a Killer Soundtrack” (and it’s about a murderer to boot) in that it has a handful of really great ideas mixed in with a few too many sour notes to elevate it above mediocrity. My biggest complaint is, as usual, Kei, whose characterization has by this point shot entirely past “less competent than Yuri” and landed square in “lowbrow comic relief, nothing more”. Literally nothing Kei does in this episode either advances the plot or hints at a potential meta-reading: Yuri does all the legwork, figures out the whole case all by herself and her attitude towards her partner can be summed up as “Aw, look! She thinks she’s a Trouble Consultant! How cute!”. And then there’s Gooley, who’s back to patronizing his top agents. And who I am by now beyond sick to death of.

The case itself, on the other hand, is somewhat interesting and the episode has a decent sense of humour, at least towards everything that isn’t Kei. There’s a serial killer who poses as a salesman going about murdering young woman and carving weird symbols into their forehead. The murders seem to follow a pattern, and the Angels are staked out in a condo that’s the next likely target. As they pass the time, they’re visited by not one, not two, but three salesmen, plus a police officer, all of whom have stupefyingly obvious motives and means. The first guy is a middle aged pervert who sells lightsaber kitchen knives (yes), the second is a “ladykiller”-type who sells novelty electrified bras and moonlights as a petty thief, and the third is a twelve-year old boy who has a blind hatred of all women because his mother was a bad person. Meanwhile, the police officer comes in midway through the episode to round up the suspects and generally disagree with Yuri’s deductions, so he obviously turns out to be the killer. Or rather one of them, as it turns out it’s really two twin brothers playing chess with each other and the murder weapon looks like Freddie Kruegger’s glove, so there’s that. Yeah, whaddya want from me? I have little sympathy for the generic and formulaic whodunnit structure.

Neither does Kei, actually: She name-drops Agatha Christie in the teaser for this episode that ran after “Something’s Amiss…?! Our Elegant Revenge”, even going into a campfire scary story voice to tell us “Now you can be Agatha too!”.…

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“Something’s Amiss…?! Our Elegant Revenge” suffers from nothing so much as it does from following the 463 two-parter. Anything coming in the wake of that story is somewhat doomed to pale in the inevitable comparison, which is a shame because this one is actually really good. Dirty Pair breaks its frustrating ping-ponging quality curse…just in time to see it through its final two episodes. Which is unfortunate (though an argument could be made the pattern was broken, for the worse, with “Come Out, Come Out, Assassin”). But while this episode may not quite stand up to its immediate predecessors and it might have been nice to see it seven or eight weeks earlier in place of a couple of those others, the fact remains this is still an excellent outing and one to enthusiastically recommend.

Judging from the title alone, you’d be forgiven for figuring this might be a sequel to “The Chase Smells Like Cheesecake and Death”, with the Lovely Angels perhaps returning to exact justice on Lan and Jerry for betraying their trust. But no, as is typically the case on this show, this story has nothing to do with the older one. Barring that, the obvious comparisons seem to be to The Godfather: Mahogany is immediately reminiscent of Don Vito Corleone, not only in appearance but in characterization as he runs a sprawling criminal syndicate based on the drug trade that seems to have much of United Galactica in its grasp. Mahogany is even an actual “father”, as in a religious leader, which certainly adds to the series’ tally of anti-authoritarian points. Mahogany’s empire is so vast and threatening it actually raises the stakes of the entire Dirty Pair franchise: Shockingly, Mahogany is powerful enough to sway influence over the 3WA, and gets Gooley himself to call off Kei and Yuri’s siege on his stronghold right when they were perfectly poised to take him down once and for all.

This is a game changer. I’ve been of the mind Gooley and the 3WA have been irredeemable since “Gotta Do It! Love is What Makes a Woman Explode”, and this does nothing but reinforce my opinion. Like all organisations based around capitalistic authority, the so-called World Welfare Works Association is nothing but a corrupt sham designed around no other purpose then lining its own pockets and protecting its cronies (though I wonder what Haruka Takachiho made of this reconceptualization). Which is maybe telling, because while this episode didn’t turn out to be a sequel to “The Chase Smells Like Cheesecake and Death”, it is very easy to read it as a spiritual successor to “Gotta Do It! Love is What Makes a Woman Explode”. It’s once again about Kei and Yuri’s relationship and, following last week, it’s about how nothing can truly come between them. Furthermore, it’s about what happens when you underestimate their capabilities, their dedication to material social progress through revolutionary change…or to each other.…

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So let me set the stage. We’re sitting alone in our room trying to figure out what that vision meant. You remember the vision I told you about, right? It was like a ship that was there and then not, and then there again. A ship, unless its a shipwreck (which this wasn’t), has to have people onboard. On something as big as this one seemed to be, there were surely lots and lots of people. We took it as an allegory: Try to imagine all those people living and working together and going about their lives and what you could learn from that, and that’s the basic premise we start from. The ship is its people and the people are their ship. The story, like most stories do, comes to us as we try to parse out some semblance of meaning and resonance from the images we saw. The story is written because it needed to be written, because it is important and necessary, almost like destiny. It really is as simple as that. But, can we really make a story out of all their stories?

Now I’m sitting on a beach tending a campfire because we were getting ready to go on a surfing trip before you stopped us and asked me to talk about storytelling structure. So I gave you the best I could come up with.

Anyway.

One thing I think the philosophers might be on the right track about, as I told you before, is the idea that there might be some truth in the wheel. No, wait, that’s wrong. What I mean to say is, if you look at a wheel, that can maybe tell you something about the universe because it’s a symbol. It’s something that stands in for something else. You don’t need words, at least not the things we typically think of of as words, because the thing reflects the truth-bits you write onto it back at you all by itself. But this is all stuff you already know (you did watch the episode, right?), so there’s little point in me rambling on about it. Where I might disagree with the philosophers I think is the idea that everything goes around and around, constantly repeating itself (I’m not repeating myself, am I?). That’s a consequence of them fixating on the wheel so much.

I don’t write stories. I channel them. What that means to me is I don’t see wheels going around and around, but tides ebbing and flowing, coming and going. The tide goes out and comes back in again because it always does. We can predict when and where its going to happen (damn it, what did I do with that tide chart?), and though the tide is a little different every day and every night, it’s still there and still a tide. Remember, we can’t say precisely what’s going to happen in the future (I don’t think I’d even use that particular term, to be perfectly honest with you), but because we see things happening we know, by definition that they’ll happen.…

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