Just like its main characters, Dirty Pair as a franchise is an expert in the art of obfuscating comedy. On the surface, this series seems to the uninitiated to be the most ridiculous thing ever, and even the title story of The Great Adventure of the Dirty Pair played out very much akin to a straightforward parody of pulp sci-fi and space opera tropes, and even of Haruka Takachiho’s own Crusher Joe. It’s probably because of this that Dirty Pair possesses the hyper-niche, marginal status it does. This *also* means that Dirty Pair is able to quietly do something flagrantly radical and openly experimental and go completely unnoticed and uncredited except by a handful of ardent admirers because it’s not the kind of series that sort of thing is necessarily expected of.

Just as Kei and Yuri can make wisecracks and giggle disarmingly in the middle of a crisis, so does Dirty Pair’s reputation keep it as fiercely marginal as its heroes themselves are.

Which is why episodes like this one are Dirty Pair’s secret weapon. “Red Eyes are the Sign of Hell” is, without question, the darkest, most sombre story this franchise has done to date, at least on screen. It’s also one of the best. Even though Affair of Nolandia definitely had its more contemplative moments and had that one admittedly disturbing bit of psychological and body horror, it was on the whole a tight, jaunty, engrossing piece that kept the audience engaged from start to finish. Even “Criados’ Heartbeat” had to throw out a subplot about the girls’ vacation and Kei getting ready for a date and kept an upbeat tone throughout. This though is genuinely difficult to look at sometimes: This episode has a body count to make both Doctor Who and the original Star Trek blush, and I’m pretty sure every single supporting character introduced here gets gruesomely and ruthlessly killed off by the end of it. But more importantly, these deaths are absolutely not played for cheap shock value or sensationalism: Each and every one is played as a tragic loss and an unconscionable blow, which is only to be expected given this episode deals in some of the most incandescent anti-imperialist rage I’ve ever seen from Dirty Pair.

“Red Eyes are the Sign of Hell” is a perfect case study for exactly why “That Little Girl Is Older Than Us. The Preservation Was a Success?!” was plainly the misstep it was. The plot here is absolutely no less formulaic or predictable than it was in that episode, but it absolutely doesn’t matter. Kei and Yuri are dispatched to a planet whose government is embroiled in a thirty year war with a rebel faction that was on the verge of signing a peace treaty before a group of elite assassins showed up and started indiscriminately slaughtering the rebels, serving to escalate the war even further. The show wastes no time in letting us know what we’re in for, by the way, with the assassins, who the camera shoots essentially as horror movie monsters, showing up and gunning down an entire platoon of rebel soldiers in the *teaser*.…

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It might be worth taking a little time to look at the way Original Dirty Pair was first distributed to viewers. This is, of course, an OVA series: Far from the stigmatic connotations direct-to-video works have in the West, Japanese OVA programming is best seen as an early precursor to something more akin to Netflix Originals or Amazon Prime Studios-Shows that have a vocal and loyal enough audience worth catering to, but one that’s not big enough to justify trying to pitch the show to a major network. In addition, this would be the medium of choice for more unconventional, experimental works that would be hard to sell anywhere else.

The thing about OVA though is that, as the title might suggest, these were things released only on physical home video media, which meant you had to actually go out and buy each new release as it hit store shelves. In the case of Original Dirty Pair, the show was spread across five volumes of VHS and Laserdisc, each with two episodes each. Today’s episode, “That Little Girl Is Older Than Us. The Preservation Was a Success?!”, was released on what would have been volume four as a double bill with “Revenge of the Muscle Lady!”. The reason I bring this up is that, for the first time, Original Dirty Pair sort of feels like it’s treading water a bit here, and that’s something of a larger concern when we’re talking about an limited run OVA series with a sparse ten episodes as opposed to a major network television series that ran for a full season with an episode count pushing thirty and all the accompanying pressures, restrictions and obligations that go along with such a structure.

It’s not that this episode is bad, far from it: In fact, this is a perfect case study for how much progress has been made in the past four years. The TV series basically had two modes-Unbridled masterpiece and catastrophic misfire. There were a small handful of middling or mediocre episodes later on, but by in large this was the general model we were working under. Here though, every episode up ’till now has been absolutely magnificent and a contender for the franchise’s best work. But the downside of that is when we finally hit “functional”, “serviceable” and “watchable” it’s much more more noticeable and worrying than it would be in any other context. What we have this time is a bog-standard detective story in a light sci-fi setting: There’s an unsolved mass murder on a star liner culminating in a scientist putting his young daughter into cryogenic deep-freeze and sending her off in an escape pod. Madame Beryl was assigned to the case, but couldn’t solve it, and it goes cold for twenty years until Kei and Yuri stumble upon the girl’s escape pod while returning home after coming off on an unrelated investigation. Stuff happens, there’s some cute moments with Kei trying to bond with the kid and a shootout with the orchestrator of the original attack, who turns out to be the most predictable suspect imaginable.…

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The thematic framework Dirty Pair inherits from Japanese women’s professional wrestling cannot be overstated. The inherent and accepted performative artifice of puroresu is absolutely central to how Dirty Pair operates at a basic level, as is the genre’s target demographic. As an anime or manga, Dirty Pair is typically understood as seinen in the usual system of genre classification: This would be works specifically aimed at men between the ages of 18 and 40. Except…that can’t really be true, can it? In Japan, the original market for women’s professional wrestling was women themselves, and the wrestlers became icons to a generation of teenage female fans: Men were a periphery demographic. And so it is with Dirty Pair, which, while later appropriated and stolen by men (as men always do to things targeted towards women and have done throughout recorded history), certainly must be seen as a series written with an at least significantly female audience in mind.

Dirty Pair has done pro wrestling before, of course; There’s no way it couldn’t with its lineage. We have an entire chapter dedicated to Kei narrating a wrestling match in The Dirty Pair Strike Again, the girls being confused for wrestlers in “How to Kill a Computer” and participating in a sort of mock match themselves in “Go Ahead, Fall in Love! Love is Russian Roulette”, then fake fighting coded as a full-on worked shoot in “Hire Us! Beautiful Bodyguards are a Better Deal”. “The Chase Smells Like Cheesecake and Death” even featured actual wrestlers as major antagonists, Kei’s personal heroes Lan and Jerry, who were running an underground doping ring based around exploiting their brother’s developments in steroid research. This episode, “The Revenge of the Muscle Lady!”, plays out vaguely similarly, with an acquaintance of Kei and Yuri’s going rogue and getting involved in the trade of pharmaceutical muscle enhancements and the girls having to go in and sort things out.

But the major difference this time is that this is a story that doesn’t just evoke the trappings of pro wrestling as a nod to Dirty Pair’s heritage, it actually works entirely by the genre’s logic and storytelling conventions itself. The animosity between Sandra and the girls is quite explicitly a grudge match, especially the final confrontation in the rocket hangar bay, and the entire story is basically a wrestling angle. And what makes this story in particular unique and special is that it takes that style of narrative structure and blends it with subject matter more fitting Dirty Pair’s audience: Namely, young adult female fans of pro wrestling and science fiction (remember, this is Japan in 1988 so that demographic isn’t quite as strange as it probably sounds to a certain sort of Western audience). What we have here is a story that has its roots in school and relationship drama caricatured to puroreso levels.

In spite of the obvious steroid references, this is not a story about doping or drug use in sports, that’s largely just a framing device to get the girls to confront Sandra.…

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This is the moment where Original Dirty Pair finally lives up to its title.

“Are You Serious?! Shocked at the Beach, Wedding Panic!” is a very Yuri story. Structurally, it’s extremely reminiscent of the other big stories that have focused specifically on her as a character, namely “The Curse of the Backwoods Murder”, “Gotta Do It! Love is What Makes a Woman Explode” and “Something’s Amiss…?! Our Elegant Revenge”. As was the case in each of those past adventures, Yuri becomes entangled in a love story that plays out very much akin to stock or cliched Harlequin fare, with Kei becoming the third wheel. Part of Yuri really wants to just completely immerse herself in the romantic atmosphere of it all, because she does have an attraction to that sort of mushy stuff and wouldn’t necessarily mind living a quiet and charmed fairy tale life like that. This time, she falls in with the second son of a notorious mob family involved in a counterfeit operation the girls have been sent in to bust. She goes along with it mostly to keep up her undercover identity and gain access to the family’s printing room, but she pretty clearly has real feelings for the guy too.

In spite of being a deft Miami Vice style “you become your alter ego” sort of plot on top of things, this is largely the archetypical Yuri story. The reason why this is her signature plot is because the girls’ personalities and characterizations are drawn quite explicitly from astrological symbolism, and Yuri is a Piscean. Those born under this sign are said to be romantic dreamers who are infinitely fluid and malleable: They can reshape themselves into any number of different identities, but tend to be most drawn towards roles that allow them to be very expressive, such as art and dance. This makes sense because, if you recall, the Dirty Pair novels are all told from a first person perspective, namely Kei’s. This means Yuri isn’t technically a character, or rather it would be more accurate to say she’s a *diegetic* character and the only things we learn about her are what Kei cares to tell us. In that respect, Yuri really is an ephemeral, intangible being.

However the downside to all this is that Pisceans can get so wistful and so formless they can become totally detached from reality and become lost in their own fantasy worlds they imagine for themselves. And, like clockwork, in each and every one of the stories that has taken care to seriously engage with who Yuri is at a fundamental level, this is depicted as the greatest threat she faces. In “The Case of the Backwoods Murder”, she starts to dream about rekindling a relationship with her childhood friends Thunder and Lucha: Yuri can only view them through rose-tinted and distorted memories of her youth, and imagines running off with them as part of a inauthentic romanticized conception of simple country living.…

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