Dirty Pair

What it comes down to is that we were compelled to write it. That’s the main thing.

It started, like most things do, with a vision. Some people say visions are messages from somewhere else telling you what you need to do next. But I don’t think that’s true, personally: For us…for me…It’s more of a brief flash of some image or feeling, always without any sort of context. We never comprehend the things we see as we see them. You have to understand that when we touch the visions we see are not clear at all-More…fuzzy and muddy. Those are words you could use for it. But the vision is still there, and it’s my job to bring it to you because, in my experience, visions usually tend to mean something. So now I suppose you want me to talk about the things we said and the order in which we said them. R-really? I mean, isn’t the story already enough for you? I’ve already said my piece. I’m a storyteller, not a philosopher. I just do my job and consider myself lucky to be able to do what I do. I can’t possibly be that interesting to you, can I?

Well, fine, I guess you wouldn’t have called me here for any other reason…

I’m of the mind that things happen because we know they’re going to. Planets orbit their stars in the silent darkness as they always have, casting day into night and into day again. I don’t believe that space is an ocean, but I do think that our words, our songs and our mantras flow through us just like water flows through the oceans (which reminds me, I need to check the tide charts for Ocean Ridge. We’re going on vacation soon, you know). The very best we can strive for is to be able to channel this flow in a way that can help us. When we do this, I think we can feel a bit the arcs and rotations of the universe. Those philosopher guys who spend all their days in the casinos spinning wheel after wheel hoping that *this* time it will be different understand maybe some of this, but they’re so focused on spinning around and around in circles they never get to the point of realising they’re in the wheel too.

But look at me. Here I go on and on again like a silly broken record. This isn’t what you wanted to hear me talk about, was it? Well, what we saw that night was a ship adrift in inky night. It was an enormous ship clad in the loveliest shade of blue you’ve ever seen. It was sparkling and glowing, illuminating the darkness around it Except, not really. It was more like the idea of a ship…but also the idea of a ship not being there.…

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Irritatingly, the much-discussed pattern is still in effect. You know what that means.

Although truth be known that’s being a tad unfair. “Nostalgic Blues Makes a Killer Soundtrack” isn’t terrible: There’s a handful of things about it to recommend and it’s not ethically bankrupt, but the fact is this is still an off week and this still means it doesn’t work either. The big problem is this is yet another episode that lacks thematic cohesion: The best way I can come up with to describe it is that it seems to be a combination of The Good, The Bad and the Ugly and The Defiant Ones. Also the blues for some reason. Why…I honestly couldn’t tell you, unless I’m missing something particularly blatant, which is always a possibility.

The first film is credited with finally killing off the western genre in the US and chronicles the falling out between a bounty hunter and an outlaw who decide to terminate their partnership and come to blows over the money, while a mercenary discovers the whereabouts of a hidden stash of Confederate gold during the Civil War. The other two find out, and proceed to generally try to swindle and betray each other throughout the film’s runtime. Our analogues here would I guess be Blues the assassin and his target, the business tycoon of the “Miss Creamy Gal Beaty Pageant” (and I can’t believe I actually wrote those words: This is going to look so, so wrong outside the context of this episode) who killed Blues’ mother, a Blues singer, by throwing her into the gaping maw of an active volcano for reasons I don’t think are ever actually explained. The owner is running an insurance scam on the local hotel and plans to blow it up, and Blues is out to stop him and avenge his mother’s death.

The second is the classic story about two convicts, a black man named Noah and a white man named Joker, who escape prison, hate each other, but are handcuffed together and are forced to co-operate and learn to appreciate each other in order to survive. The analogues here are clearer, with Blues as Joker and Kei as Noah, as they spend the majority of the episode in handcuffs bickering with each other and have to team up against the greater evil of the owner. The Good, The Bad and the Ugly also has a scene where Tuco, the bandit, is captured by Union forces and is handcuffed to his captor. Both it and this episode also have scenes where trains and bathrooms play pivotal roles: Tuco uses a trip to the men’s room to escape in The Good, The Bad and the Ugly by leaping from the moving carriage and killing the Union soldier he was chained to and Dirty Pair uses restrooms to make a really lame and unfunny joke. And indeed, trains do prove important to the climax here, as the owner has rigged a ridiculously convoluted scheme that involves running a monorail over a precise section of track at a precise moment in time to detonate a bomb that will burn down the hotel.…

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Over at Teatime in Elenore City, webmaster Nozmo has a list of mini-reviews of several animated Dirty Pair stories with ratings out of five. Apparently, this one was terrible enough to warrant Nozmo’s lowest possible score: A 1 out of 5. Now, I can certainly see how this episode could rub some people the wrong way, especially if you happen to be of a Hard SF predisposition, as this is essentially the opposite of that. It is *quite* silly and there are times you worry because you’re not sure which way it’s going to go, but its not long before it becomes clear this is, at least as far as I’m concerned, yet another classic.

For the first time in what feels like ages, though in reality it’s only been three weeks, Dirty Pair is actually shooting for the stars and hitting its target. There are moments of undeniable wackiness; almost to the extent of the Mouse Nazis, but this time there’s enough charm permeating the whole production that it doesn’t feel off-putting or inappropriate. And furthermore, much to my delight, “An Unjustified Lover’s Grudge. Let Me Love You Without Revenge” is once more as cosmic and profound as this series has ever been. But before we can get into that, we should square away what is likely the biggest complaint about this episode right away. You would think that after all I’ve ranted and raved about lately in regards to Kei and Yuri being written badly, badly out of character and the narrative constantly mocking them I would throw an absolute *fit* here. This is, after all, an episode where Kei and Yuri seemingly spend an inordinate amount of time competing for the affections of a reclusive suave bishōnen millionaire, each trying to prove she’s a “better woman” then her partner. Well, in between blatant pratfalls at any rate.

Ah, but this isn’t even what’s going on at a textual level: The girls are undercover again, this time extradiegetically. Kei (natch) even comes right out and tells us (that is, she looks straight into the camera and addresses the audience directly) their mission is to show their client what real women and real love are truly like. They fear Reamonn’s dedication to Meshuzura, a plaster statue, is unhealthy and counterproductive, especially as they go in thinking he’s a raving misogynist. He’s not, just *literally* allergic to women (hence why he only allows himself to be intimate with plaster statues), but his inability to coexist with them is nevertheless seen as a problem that needs to be corrected. So, Kei and Yuri put on various elabourate displays of femininity they assume Reamonn, a dashing, upper-class aristocrat, will find attractive and appealing. Naturally, they fail hilariously and spectacularly, because Kei and Yuri can never and will never be subsumed by traditional gender roles and commonly held notions of ideal femininity.

(This is, in some ways, a scene that is more relevant today then it would have been in 1985, with contemporary young Japanese society *literally* divided along gender lines due to confusion over the collapse of traditional gender roles.)…

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Yup, it’s not so hot.

Although, we do seem to be experiencing a kind of averaging-out of the show’s quality. There are numerous good bits intermingled with more then enough not-so-good bits to land this one at decisively mediocre, but at least it’s not another catastrophic derailment. The girls aren’t really right again, landing more often then comfortable in a depiction that reinforces their inaccurate pop stereotypes, though there are a number of scenes that do balance this out some. Much like last time, the show is trying to combine slapstick humour with a darker and more serious tone, but its not as effective here. There are specific moments that really stand out, like the comedic shootout in hotel in the first act, which contrasts with the dramatic storm on the police station at the end where Gooley is gunned down by the crooked chief who set the 3WA up, but this episode can’t mode shift to the same degree last week’s could, and this ends up giving the impression of a story that, in spite of its individual successful setpieces, never really comes together in a cohesive form.

But the quality argument isn’t an especially captivating one anymore: Another thing “Pardon Us. Trouble’s On the Run, So We’re Coming Through! “ shares with “Come Out, Come Out, Assassin” is that it’s a further step in the development of Sunrise’s version of Dirty Pair: Mixing light comedy with drama and heady sci-fi concepts is a theme that will be dealt with explicitly (and far more effectively) in the second series and two of the three movies, Dirty Pair: Affair of Nolandia and Dirty Pair: Flight 005 Conspiracy. Looking at Sunrise stumbling over this now really isn’t much help to us except as an example of what amounts to a rough draft. Part of this may also simply be do to the fact it’s functionally impossible to sustain momentum over a 30-episode season of *anything*, and even Dirty Pair isn’t immune. This is why it’s such a wise decision on the part of Sunrise to slice the episode count for the second series by two thirds, but now I’m in real danger of spilling my hand too early in my attempt to avoid talking about this episode.

No, what’s of more interest to me at this point in the show’s history is a theme I noticed and touched on briefly in the last mediocre outing: Who exactly, is this show for and what makes it unique among Dirty Pair adaptations?

The answer seems, at first, obvious: Surely fans who wanted to see the next logical step in the evolution of Kei and Yuri’s dynamic and their narrative universe, right? But it’s actually a more complex and muddled issue then it might seem to be at first glance. We’ll talk about it in considerable more depth when the time comes, but one of the things that’s revealing about Affair of Nolandia is that it was explicitly made for and marketed to fans of the light novels who didn’t like the first series, and the movie pretty clearly sees that audience as “hardcore science fiction fans”.…

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Predictably, given the way this show works now, “Come Out, Come Out, Assassin” is another good one. I have a few issues with it that keep it from, in my estimation, quite reaching the same heights as some of the masterpieces Dirty Pair has done in the past, but it’s still a welcome rebound that reminds us what the series is capable of.

And if nothing else the opening scenes are absolute knockout works of art. The 3WA loses one of its own, gunned down in a dark and rainy alley during a flashback Kei solemnly narrates over. Not since “Criados’ Heartbeat” immediately followed “The Chase Smells Like Cheesecake and Death” has the show pulled a mood whiplash this severe on us. It would be even more so if you were to, as I would suggest, skip last week’s episode entirely such that this follows the goofy Indiana Jones pastiche instead. I must confess I do usually enjoy it when Dirty Pair takes itself just a *little* bit more seriously, and I will say it brought a smile to my face to see Kei make her triumphant return to the role of narrator. But this story is doing something a little bit more clever then just giving a graceful nod to the show’s source material: This episode is, at least in part, Dirty Pair taking on both film noir and traditional detective fiction and, as you might expect, it hits a home run.

One only needs to give Blade Runner a rewatch to discern that a big difference between the cyberpunk that tends to be more popular in Western territories and the kind of stuff Dirty Pair is doing is a perhaps somewhat concerning lack of self-awareness. Blade Runner played its film noir trappings uncomfortably straight, so there’s no way Dirty Pair could do anything other than the complete opposite. While the internal monologue Kei delivers through much of the episode’s first half is indeed about as grim and bleak as this show has ever been, this is constantly tempered by metatextual signposts and the story’s other themes. What this manages to do is weave the episode’s more somber themes together with Dirty Pair‘s signature postmodern humour exquisitely deftly. A thundering round of applause is really owed to Kyōko Tongū, Kei’s voice actor, here: The way she segues out of Kei’s recount of her colleagues death to the big punchline, that the “one clue” their fallen comrade left behind was blatantly and precisely when and where the assassin who killed him is going to be, is simply masterful. She doesn’t audibly change gears, rather, she shifts the emphasis and intonation of her voice just so, making it seem like both the scene’s pathos and its humour are subtle movements of the same dance.

This tone pervades the whole episode, elegantly balancing its deeply serious subject matter with the signature Dirty Pair humour, though it’s most pronounced early on.…

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Well, it’s not *as* bad as the last time this show went off. That’s a positive sign at least.

But it’s about the best I can come up with to say about “Leave It To Us! The WWWA is a Wonderful Job”, unfortunately. Once again, it’s not terribly funny. Once again, the Chinese are worryingly othered. Once again, the girls are written basically wrong, though there are some nice scenes near the end that hedge against this somewhat. Kei in particular is pretty bad, though thankfully not the extent she was two weeks ago: She basically drops out of the plot after the commercial break never to be seen again until near the denouement so Yuri can get an extended scene of ass-kicking. When Kei does come back she’s at least the Kei we recognise instead of some buffoonish clown, so the episode’s got that going for it. And, while I do enjoy seeing Yuri get to be unequivocally awesome, I still wish it wasn’t done at the expense of her partner. Really, Sunrise, how hard is it to depict *both* Lovely Angels as likeable, professional and competent?

The plot is about the least stimulating the show’s been yet. This can go both ways, however: While it means the outing this time is exasperatingly uninspiring, it thankfully also means it’s not a gruesome train wreck either. It’s The Prince and the Pauper with Kei and Yuri as the pauper and the young chairman of a big important corporation as the prince. Where it goes wrong, apart from being boring, is that it has Kei and Yuri angrily complain about their working conditions and openly jealous of the luxury the chairman lives in. As working class characters, we rightly expect to see Kei and Yuri upset about the gap between the rich and poor, but framing this in a 1980s yuppieish desire to be more “upwardly mobile” is a craterous misreading of the characters. Contrasting the way Kei and Yuri are portrayed here with the girls’ eagerness to leap into any case and to make a difference, Kei’s strong belief in the power of the 3WA to bring about positive cosmic change and her gratitude for the opportunity it’s afforded her and Yuri to spend their lives together in The Great Adventure of the Dirty Pair is an exercise in anguish and frustration for me.

(Also, as an aside, I am beyond sick to death at this point of jokes about Kei and Yuri’s bonus pay and every time Gooley appears onscreen I develop an irrational compulsion to punch him.)

Like previous episodes in this particular series, “Leave It To Us! The WWWA is a Wonderful Job” is attempting to be a postmodern riff on an established stock plot to make a larger point. Sadly though, this time it’s not entirely successful. The best it can manage, and credit where credit is due this *is* somewhat clever, is to have the chairman come out at the end and say that were she to be reincarnated, the life she would choose without question would be that of a 3WA Trouble Consultant.…

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Oh Thank God. 

Dirty Pair hasn’t quite managed to self-destruct just yet. This is brilliant. Returning to the motifs of “Hah Hah Hah, Dresses and Men Should Always Be Brand New”, the Angels are once again on vacation, which means some random ridiculous other story has to crash headlong into them. This time, it’s a wizened prospector by the name of Grampa Garlic Joe, who crash-lands into Kei and Yuri’s hotel swimming pool trying to evade the Blues Brothers goons from “The Chase Smells Like Cheesecake and Death”. I could criticize the show for recycling motifs from earlier episodes, but I’m not going to firstly because even in spite of the missteps, this has been an absolutely phenomenal run of fifteen weeks for a scripted genre fiction series, and secondly this isn’t what the show is doing. This episode recognises Dirty Pair‘s by now familiar and signature themes and continues to build on and extrapolate them. And better yet, it’s another comic masterpiece.

On the surface, this is another “Dirty Pair does a genre romp” story. The genre in question this time is pulp adventure serials, but in particular the revival of the style in the 1980s that followed the massive popularity of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones movies. However, the problem with the Indiana Jones movies, and anything else that tried to capitalize on their success, is that they were just that: Revivals. Spielberg and Lucas (though this does seem to be mostly Lucas, given Star Wars) dug up a bunch of old film serial tropes and cliches and…did absolutely nothing with them apart from slavishly reiterating them. And the problem with that is that those old films serials tended to be appallingly racist and sexist. And, well, so is Indiana Jones because it is completely and utterly lacking in any sort of postmodern self-awareness. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is rather infamous for its depiction of India, not to mention Short Round, but in my opinion it’s the best of the three because it’s actually ever-so-slightly cognizant of how silly it is: I think Raiders of the Lost Arc might actually be the worst in terms of gender roles and I find The Last Crusade to be basically unwatchable.

And Dirty Pair is *explicit* about what it’s referencing this time and what its intentions are. Grampa Joe is manifestly an Indiana Jones analog, except instead of the rugged, manly and dashingly handsome Harrison Ford, he’s an old geezer with two missing front teeth who pretends to be hard of hearing and scatterbrained just to be annoying and who eats too much garlic. When they’re in the temple, the girls even find what are obviously the skeletal remains of the *real* Indiana Jones caught in one of La Kahanga’s traps. But let’s stop for a minute: Dirty Pair is about construction and healing, not destruction and mockery. This, by contrast, should at first feel off-putting and mean spirited and perhaps not what this show ought to be doing.…

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I really, really hate it when Dirty Pair is bad. Probably more so then in any other series. And this one is really, really bad. As in, actively unwatchable. This episode gets pretty much everything wrong it was possible to get wrong, and is a serious contender for the worst Dirty Pair story ever.

I’m not going to waste any more time on this then strictly necessary because this one genuinely, properly makes me angry and offends me on a personal level. The plot is boring crap about a possible assassination attempt on a presidential candidate due to give a speech at the 3WA headquarters. There’s a modicum of interesting content here about there being two ways to disappear a person, physically killing them and erasing their social records such that they’re no longer part of the capitalist system and thus never existed, but it’s never developed upon enough to merit pursuing it to any serious degree and I honestly don’t care enough to make the effort. Racist Chinese Chef Stereotype shows up again, as does a particularly shocking blackface character in the soap opera Kei is watching in the beginning of the episode, and this is all compounded horrifically by the main plot going out of its way to infantilize, belittle and dismiss the Angels in the most blatant, upfront and disturbing ways imaginable, in particular Kei.

The show attacks them at every possible level, and it’s no longer in on its own joke. Kei and Yuri ask for overtime and get brutally shouted down by Gooley, who is, need I remind you, by this point completely beyond redemption and yet is someone whom this show bewilderingly *still* thinks we’re going to sympathize with, accusing them of being spoiled, irresponsible and wasting the company’s money to the point he actually makes them cry. And the girls get *no* comeback to this-We’re not meant to side with them *at all*. This becomes a recurring theme throughout this episode, the “joke” being that Kei is apparently careless and addicted to gambling and blows all her money at the casinos and by compulsively making bets with people she can’t uphold. Yuri, meanwhile, is of course depicted as mature, responsible, demure and altogether more competent and together then her hapless partner. Aside from making light out of a kind of addiction that real people actually do suffer from, this is retrograde and wrong on a very basic and fundamental level.

It is flatly out of character for Kei to behave this way, and unlike when Yuri seemingly acted out of character several weeks back, this time it’s provably a misreading that reinforces a false notion of who these characters are and how the logic of the series works. The idea likely stemmed from Kei being Sagittarian, as Dirty Pair’s series bible is basically written out of astrological signs. Sagittarians are supposedly bad gamblers and are advised against picking it up, so what probably happened is someone took a look at that and decided to write the shittiest possible script around it.…

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Perhaps, ironically enough, because it is so reminiscent of the original light novels, this is one of my favourite Dirty Pair episodes we’ve seen so far. The girls are actually solving a proper mystery that has real cosmic ramifications for the first time since the beginning of the series. As a result, it’s tight and engrossing in a way the show hasn’t quite been lately, largely because it takes itself quite a bit more seriously then it has in the past. That ends up being *really* cathartic, especially after what we’ve seen the last couple weeks. Don’t worry though, Dirty Pair hasn’t lost its sense of humour: In fact, the entire episode is one of it’s most elabourate and clever jokes yet.

Once again, the show is being rather blunt and upfront about what it’s doing here. However, unlike the Mouse Nazis, this time it largely doesn’t feel the need to scream this in our faces every five seconds, for which I am extremely grateful. That the monsters-of-the-week hail from the “Lovecraft Galaxy” basically tells you everything you need to know about what’s going on and what’s being pastiched. And Dirty Pair throws H.P. Lovecraft under the bus pretty much from the start, dispensing any and all pretenses that this is going to be some nihilistic work of cosmic horror by having the requisite Eldritch Abomination show up in the sewer under the girls’ apartment building. Not only that, but even though the episode raises the stakes every act (first there’s one monster, then a whole colony, then an even bigger monster that snacks on the other monsters), it absolutely refuses to let this overwhelm the rest of the story. There’s certainly nobody driven mad from unknowable truths here: Though the smaller monsters do eat people and the big one is definitely a serious threat, everybody knows exactly who and what they’re dealing with. Kei and Yuri even spend a good amount of time doing zoological research and give the maintenance workers a briefing on the creatures’ life cycles and how to combat them.

We really shouldn’t be surprised at the tack Dirty Pair takes here. The thing about Lovecraft is, beloved and influential as he may be, there are serious flaws underlying the philosophy and worldview he explores in his horror novels. The whole impetus for Lovecraft’s oeuvre is a combination of dumbfounded, slack-jawed reaction to the vastness of the universe: The point of the Old Ones is that they’re so beyond human comprehension they could wipe out reality as we know it and there would be nothing we could do to stop it because of how insignificant and helpless we are. Combine that with the fact that Lovecraft was also demonstrably a racist and it starts to become clear how uncomfortably indebted to xenophobia his work really is. There’s also the matter of Lovecraft’s legacy among other writers: Though his actual stories weren’t expressly magickal per se, they’ve had a tremendous impact on those people who do have an interest in more spiritual and esoteric matters.…

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There is, believe it or not, an upper limit to how much forced zaniness I can handle in Dirty Pair. As it turns out, that tolerance threshold is somewhere around “Mouse Nazis”.

This episode is pretty much the inverse of “What? We’re Heinous Kidnappers!”. Like the earlier story, this absolutely doesn’t work in any conceivable respect, except this time it’s the first half that’s an unwatchable disaster and the second half that features one or two intriguing bits of erudition. Let’s just get the big one out of the way right off the bat: The plot is, ironically enough, insufferably dumb and idiotic. There’s a very fine line between “offbeat and clever idea” and “unbelievably annoying idea”, and this episode leaps across that line with boundless enthusiasm. For the first time on Dirty Pair, absolutely none of the humour feels natural or appropriate: Kei and Yuri’s incessant quips about vacations and bonus pay, disarmingly cute and endearing in “Lots of Danger, Lots of Decoys” and “Hah Hah Hah, Dresses and Men Should Always be brand New” now just feel strained and overused, and that’s just one example. There’s an overwhelming, and unsettling, feeling of the show trying far, far too hard to be “wacky” and the whole thing just comes across as stilted.

The 3WA gets overrun by an army of mice who want to form Mouse Nazi Germany with swastikas and everything! Aren’t we clever! Mughi (who we’ve retconned from being an advanced sentient extraterrestrial being to a genetically engineered house pet) is terrified of mice! Isn’t that so funny? Let’s have Nanmo fly in at the last second and shoot some stuff to save the day because robots! Everyone in the building is shockingly cruel to Kei and Yuri, who spend half the runtime throwing temper tantrums, breaking things or talking about boys, vacations and special bonuses! Those girls sure are silly! We even have our own more-than-vaguely racist comedy relief Chinese stereotype now, who naturally will go on and on about ancestors and Chinese history and is actually named Chan, because those funny Chinese people across the pond are quirky and strange and we don’t quite understand them.

You get the picture. Frankly, fuck this.

There is, obviously, an attempt at meta-commentary about the novel and short story Flowers for Algernon here. This episode is trying to do something similar to what “Hire Us! Beautiful Bodyguards are a Better Deal” did by referencing a familiar plot, mashing it up with a mixture of different motifs and signifiers and then from there exploring themes that build off of the ones in the original work, but are fundamentally separate from them. However, it can’t even do that right, because this episode isn’t *referencing* Flowers for Algernon, it *is* Flowers for Algernon, down to the plot centring around a genetically engineered laboratory mouse with artificially enhanced intelligence who is actually called Algernon.

(The story, for those who haven’t read it, concerns a janitor named Charlie Goodwin who undergoes the same treatment as the titular Algernon, swiftly gaining and then losing remarkable intelligence, and is about how people treat him differently every step of the way.…

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