“May there always be an Angel by your side”: Dirty Pair: Flight 005 Conspiracy

No goodbyes, just good memories.

This is the final Dirty Pair movie. The final Classic Anime. The final performance of Kyōko Tongū and Saeko Shimazu as Kei and Yuri. And it's time for us to take stock of just how far we've come and where we might be going from here. Because while Dirty Pair does not end with Flight 005 Conspiracy, a very important part of it does, and this is where the Lovely Angels bid Vaka Rangi farewell: Transcending our narrative one last time in search of their next adventure together.

The existence alone of Dirty Pair: Flight 005 Conspiracy is something of an oddity. In the years since the release of Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture in 1987, the franchise had been slipping into more and more of a decline popularly, falling ever more out of the public eye as audiences and tastes began to change. There's a marked dropoff in, say, promotional material and tie-in merchandise from the release of The Motion Picture, through the OVA series to this movie that tracks alongside Dirty Pair's inescapable slide into obscurity. In fact, there was next to no promotion for Flight 005 Conspiracy at all, with no significant ad spots in magazines I could find and nothing except a soundtrack CD and a small calendar to go along it. Even the LaserDisc cover is the most unassuming and humble of things: While even Original Dirty Pair got unique, elabourate and colourful sleeve art for each volume, here we only have a simple illustration of the girls set against a solid colour background and the title printed in basic, no-frills font in a tiny corner at the top of the sleeve.

Of course this is not at all to insinuate the series' quality had been declining in parallel, the contrary, in fact: I'd argue the run from the premier of Original Dirty Pair to now is a strong contender for the single greatest run of stories in all of Dirty Pair. Yet it seems like even as animated Dirty Pair came into its own, gradually leaving its own indelible mark on the series as a whole, viewers started to grow less and less enamoured of it. It's not like this is anything of a surprise, considering the TV series, debatably the most well-known and well-loved version of the franchise, was canceled before all its episodes could be produced. I suppose you could point the finger at Dirty Pair being science fiction that trends more or less to the traditional side of things as the culprit behind its fall from favour, but I don't think that really explains it: Plenty of other sci-fi shows that had just as traditional roots went on to be far more successful. For an especially poignant contrast, look at Star Trek: The Next Generation, the popularity of which only continued to steadily climb during this exact same period.

No, I'm far more inclined to blame shifting demographics. I think viewers overlooked Dirty Pair and left it behind in favour of newer and more exciting series as the popularity of shōnen anime and manga exploded in the late-1980s and early-1990s owing to the increasing dominance of the so-called “otaku” subculture in the discourse. There's a whole essay that's not this one on how and why self-professed otaku naturally gravitated towards media that is strictly speaking intended for children and why those particular tastes became synonymous with anime and manga in the Long 1990s, but the long and short of it for our purposes is that Dirty Pair isn't a children's show-It's a science fiction show for adults (primarily, arguably, adult women) that just happens to be a cartoon, and that's what had gone very out of vogue by 1990. Dirty Pair will always have fans in adult sci-fi enthusiast communities, just like the one Rick Sternbach and Mike Okuda were a part of, but those people were no longer the target audience for anime. And so the series retreats further back into its OVA sanctuary for its final screen outing of note.

One wonders if the Sunrise animators were aware of all this on some level. While I'm not sure Dirty Pair: Flight 005 Conspiracy was intended to be the last Dirty Pair as it doesn't have a particularly funereal tone about it, it does very much feel like a series looking within itself and doubling down on its strengths. That's not to say the film plays it safe either, actually this might be the most brazen and envelope-pushing effort of the lot, at least in some respects. But Dirty Pair: Flight 005 Conspiracy is definitely a film that knows what it is, knows what it's good at and knows who really cares. It's a veritable Dirty Pair Greatest Hits of thematic elements and plot beats executed absolutely flawlessly: It's once again a dense espionage thriller, there are mentions of Planet Lionesse, Yuri gets to wield her signature Bloody Card for the first and last time on TV and even Lucifer plays an important role. Yet Chief Gooley still makes a cameo, the Lovely Angel herself is the model from the OVA Series and Kei and Yuri's uniforms resemble their outfits from Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture. The story even involves a mystery surrounding a plane that's tearing a family apart, just like in “No Way! 463 People Disappeared?!”/“We Did It! 463 People Found!”. The film reaches across the entire span of the Classic Series and the light novels to bring together all the quintessential little signifiers that make Dirty Pair Dirty Pair for one last show.

And that's even before you get to the writing and direction.

I'm not even going to bother talking about the plot: It's a complex tale of twists, turns and fake-outs and relies on world-building to such an extent I'd be spending the whole essay just summarising it, and that's not what I want to talk about. I hasten to add this is not in any way a complaint or a criticism: Dirty Pair: Flight 005 Conspiracy is sprawling tale of political intrigue and human drama that spans the entire galaxy and beats within each and every human heart, even that of the smallest child, and I've never before seen a story like this conveyed this effectively. If you're looking for a recommendation or endorsement, that's it: If you haven't seen it before and care at all about Dirty Pair, go watch it. Now, preferably. It is “harder” and less openly metaphysical than, say, Affair of Nolandia, to use the obvious point of comparison and it also has something of a reputation for “darkness”: Flight 005 Conspiracy is a somewhat somber and melancholy film and is definitely the darkest of the Classic Anime series, but it must be said (and without spoiling too much) there's nothing here that would seem out of place in, for example, The Dirty Pair Strike Again.

But just as was the case with Affair of Nolandia, the keyword here isn't “dark”, but “adult” and “mature”. This is a Dirty Pair that plays itself straight for a change (well, not *too* straight: This is still Dirty Pair with all the requisite puroresu performativity that goes along with it, of course). There's no more Blade Runner-influenced Elenore City; there are no more clueless and strangled shout-outs to James Bond. This is a Dirty Pair movie with unfaltering confidence in just being a Dirty Pair movie and the knowledge it doesn't need to be anything else to blow us away. Star Trek, however, thankfully does still remain: We get to see a lot more of the Lovely Angel then we ever have before, including quite a few going-to-warp sequences that are obviously a hat-tip to similar effects shots from the film series. The animation and art direction, by the way, are both top-notch, here and in every other scene: This movie is as vivid, colourful, imaginative and evocative as the series has ever been.

But having Star Trek stick around is both touching and also quite fitting because, with Flight 005 Conspiracy, Dirty Pair is once more and for one last time a space-based science fiction show about a voyaging starship. And appropriately, this is the most mature and nuanced depiction of Kei and Yuri's relationship we've seen in a very long time. The girls go through hell in this movie and, under the strain of their charge, come perilously close on quite a number of occasions to explicitly confessing their obvious feelings for each other. But they always stop short, because that wouldn't be appropriate in this setting: That's not what this film is about. The mission must come first. The mission must always come first. There will be time for that after the credits roll. But we can read it plain as day in the way they talk and act around each other, like we never could before. Two hearts beating as one, the entire universe before them. 

Dirty Pair: Flight 005 Conspiracy show a Kei and Yuri with the weight of the world on their shoulders and well aware of it. And it's not just them: This is the most crazed and obsessive Chief Gooley of all, apparently driven completely to the brink of sanity due to the combined stresses of his job and working with the Lovely Angels, and not entirely in a comedic way. And in a way this is quite fitting, because as much as Flight 005 Conspiracy reaches across the span of Dirty Pair's collected history, it also serves as a kind of limit case for it: Frankly, this movie can make a strong case for being the absolute pinnacle of Sunrise's animated Dirty Pair franchise, but in order to be that it must push every single thing about the series as it exists right now as far as it can possibly go. There's a brilliant scene where the girls use the trappings of fluffy pulp sci-fi and detective fiction against itself (and us), reappropriating it for themselves. The movie even ends with the Angels squaring off against the leader of Lucifer himself in a life-or-death stakes battle the likes of which they've never seen before. There can never be another detective mystery as simultaneously sweepingly grandiose and heartrendingly personal as this. There can never be another Golden Age-influenced sci-fi story this powerful and effective that doesn't also bring something else to the table.

This is Dirty Pair's Loser Retires match.

And yet at the same time, the film knows this, because of course it does. Kei and Yuri are here, aren't they? Who knows their story or the fabric of narrative magick with which it's woven better than them? And Kei and Yuri know better than anyone just where their path will take them next. Music once more plays a very integral role here, and it's overwhelmingly more effective and memorable than any other time the series has tried this. The OVA Series themes were perfect, but music was not worked into the basic structure and body of that show except for the familiar leitmotifs that played during the action scenes. Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture wanted to be a feature-length abstract music video, but it had trouble syncing up its musical symbolism with its linear narrative. Dirty Pair: Flight 005 Conspiracy, however, works just like Miami Vice, delicately weaving music into key wordless moments throughout the movie. Unlike the dissonance of The Motion Picture's score, here the story's animation and its soundtrack (very, very appropriately called Love Songs) at last truly compliment each other, working in perfect tandem to elevate the entire production.

(And of course the theme song is a work of genius. Why wouldn't it be? In fact, to me it anticipates, uncannily, some of Dennis McCarthy's scores for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Enterprise.)

It's a refreshing reiteration, here in the year that Miami Vice itself went off the air, of the timeless beauty and power of Long 1980s visual logic and cinematography and a metaphor for the lasting legacy of Dirty Pair itself. The true gift of Kei and Yuri's magick is its ability to settle in our hearts, remind us of our greater selves and our more cosmic purpose, and to inspire us to reach for them. They're always within our sight should we take the time to remember them and reflect on them. Because the biggest secret of all is, for all of its alleged “darkness”, Dirty Pair: Flight 005 Conspiracy may just be the most hopeful Dirty Pair yet. Utopianism does not mean a perfect world free of strife and conflicts, but it does mean a world where we can deal with such things in a positive and constructive way. It's a commitment to improve ourselves and to strive for an ideal that is not necessarily a tangible thing for us to reach, at least not in this life, but that allows us to sublimate the life we have now. Kei and Yuri know this better than anyone, and in order to prove it they once again break the God Canon. But this time they too are caught in the blast.

Kei and Yuri have always stood in for the concept of the Glorified Body, and it's always been their charge to help prepare humanity for the next phase of their spiritual development, oftentimes by bringing forth traumatic, yet necessary, transformative change. And now it's time to do that for each other, and for Dirty Pair itself: Summon all the franchise is and has ever been, and explode it outward spectacularly in every direction. Blow it up so that it may be sublimated. With Flight 005 Conspiracy, Dirty Pair as a viable franchise is effectively over, but as an idea, as a dream, it's become infinite, immortal, and unending. Just like our Glorified Lovely Goddesses. There will be more official Dirty Pair here and there, certainly, but there will be even more homages, reiterations, reincarnations and evocations in all but name. Dirty Pair belongs to the collective unconscious and the realm of symbolic magick now, and that's where its greatest work can be done. Dirty Pair has reached its own point of singularity. The Lovely Angels have transfigured into higher states of being. Kei and Yuri have grown up.

What more can I say about Dirty Pair? About Kei and Yuri? As much as they have changed at the end of this movie, so they have changed me. They've certainly changed the course of this project permanently, that much is self-evident. But the effect on me personally will be even more lasting and resonant. As I was writing this book, my world slowly became a more and more uncanny, and unmistakable, example of life imitating art. This isn't a true autobiography, in spite of what it looks like and the influences it draws from the genre, so I won't go into too much more detail here. But this show...This series...Those girls...Those ideas, have changed my life forever. If a goddess is the idea of a goddess, then Kei and Yuri are mine. Like Kira Nerys once said, “That's the thing about faith: If you don't have it, you can't understand it and if you do, no explanation is necessary”. There's a landscape of memory and emotion Dirty Pair evokes for me, and the amount of truth I can convey about it through pseudo-academic prose is rapidly running thin, so I too, must depart, alongside my Lovely Holy Guardian Angels. All I can do is invite you to take your own journey and discover your own truths for yourself...And to hope your journey is even a fraction as rewarding, fulfilling and affirmational as mine has been.

So, after all of that what have we learned? We've travelled across the universe and traversed the future-scapes of our most vivid memories and imaginations to discover the universe that exists in all of us; in each and every living thing. We've touched the soul of world and seen the paths that lie before us, and that lead us to each other. It's been an amazing ride, and I can only dream of where we're going next. We've barely only scratched the surface. What does the future hold for Kei and Yuri? Only the stars can know. But they do assuredly have a future, because their future is now, and it is them. They live it, and every day the tide turns over once more, they live it again.

And now, I really can't say anymore. Take it by yourself. And let it always be summertime.

See you next volume...!? Again, bye bye...

“And I think it's gonna be a long, long time/'Till touchdown brings me 'round again to find...”: No Need to Listen to the Bad Guys. We are Space Truckers!

What could I possibly say? This was perfect. A perfect story serving as a perfect capstone to a perfect show. Words fail me trying to convey the mixture of emotions I'm feeling right now.

There really could have been no better way for Original Dirty Pair to go out. A finale that knows it's a finale and knows the promises it must reaffirm. Who else could Kei and Yuri be but Space Truckers? Sure, they're technically undercover again, this time to infiltrate an independent truck company on the verge of folding due to corporate pressure, but it feels a little bit different this time. There's no obvious diegetic guise the girls slip into here, and they certainly don't seem to be acting very hard. Indeed, Kei and Yuri are for one final time handled perfectly, and this might be the story that shows their relationship in the best and purest light. They're just being themselves here, which is the boldest, most brazenly revolutionary thing they can do. And they clearly relate to and empathize profoundly with the truck drivers, and why wouldn't they? They share a common bond as travellers on the cosmic highway, as fated to be alone together as they are to constantly journey from place to place. The title “No Need to Listen to the Bad Guys. We are Space Truckers!” couldn't have been more accurate: It's as apt a summary of the episode itself as it is a crystal clear statement of purpose for Dirty Pair on the whole.

(And notice how, in the teaser for this episode, it's *Yuri* who gets the most excited about becoming a trucker, saying it's something she's “always wanted to do”. Try as she might to pass herself off as a romantic, refined Yamato Nadeshiko heroine, at heart Yuri is just as much a working class wanderer and voyager as Kei is, and her true colours shine the brightest and most vibrant of all.)

We've seen Space Truckers in Dirty Pair before, in “Lots of Danger, Lots of Decoys”. But that episode, much like the TV series it's from, had an extremely goofy, tongue-in-cheek tone to it. That wasn't a bad thing, and a lot of the first Dirty Pair show was laugh-out-loud funny. But this time it's played a bit more serious and a bit more sophisticated. Not that there aren't still laughs to be had, of course, but the comedy tends to come more in light doses delicately woven into the fabric of the narrative itself, rather than shoved front and centre in slapsticky glory. There's an elegance, nuance and sense of mature dignity to the writing here that really sells the quiet tragedy of Uncle Jayd and the truckers, and Kei and Yuri effortlessly fit right in. This has been a signature of Original Dirty Pair from the beginning, but it's so very important that this episode in particular embodies this sophistication as well as it does, because of its delicate subject matter. We know from subtext dating back to The Great Adventure of the Dirty Pair where Kei and Yuri fall in terms of the class, gender and labour wars, but this is the first real time that's *explicitly laid out* for us. It's crucial this happen now, in the finale, and that it happen as elegantly and deftly as it does, because this means the show leaves us reaffirmed in our loyalty to it as well as to Kei and Yuri themselves.

One of the things I immediately noticed and that brought a smile to my face is this episode's soundtrack. It uses all of the memorable cues from not just Original Dirty Pair, but the Dirty Pair TV series as well. This hasn't been the first time Original Dirty Pair has recycled music from the old show, but it feels particularly appropriate here, especially considering the cuts they went with. The score fees like a Greatest Hits collection of all of the best Sunrise Dirty Pair music, with the exception of the tracks from the movies. Which is appropriate, because, as much as Original Dirty Pair was most definitely it's own show, it also felt like an extension or reimagining of the TV show. This feels particularly special and meaningful, because “No Need to Listen to the Bad Guys. We are Space Truckers!” is as much a delayed finale for that show as it is a finale for this one.

Remember, this came out right about the same time as With Love from the Lovely Angels, due to the latter being stuck in production limbo for three years, and the shunting of everything to OVA means Dirty Pair and Original Dirty Pair are intrinsically linked (even with the last episode of the former ending with a teaser for the first episode of the latter...done in the latter's style). What this all means is that “No Need to Listen to the Bad Guys. We are Space Truckers!” is very much the end of an era for Dirty Pair: There's one last movie in the pipeline, but that's more of an epilogue than anything else. This story then in many ways marks the official end of Sunrise's Classic Dirty Pair franchise, at least in collective memory. It's the final episode of the final episodic series done in this style, and the penultimate work in that style period. Adam Warren's Amerimanga is only a year away now, and Sunrise will strike back with its own comprehensive reboot Dirty Pair Flash five years after that. And while Haruka Takachiho keeps writing novels starring Kei and Yuri for another twenty years, the series never again reaches the levels of popular, commercial, critical (and dare I say aesthetic) success it saw here.

The writing on the wall couldn't be any clearer than the fact this is the very first episode not to end with a cheerful “Next time on Dirty Pair” trailer from the girls. Samhainn is over.

Fittingly, “No Need to Listen to the Bad Guys. We are Space Truckers!” also feels like a Greatest Hits collection of everything that makes Kei and Yuri so wonderful: They take down an incestuous corporate-state power in the form of a giant shipping conglomerate that's working hand in hand with pirates and local police to forcibly stamp out independent truckers (as in, using *lethal* force) so they can monopolize the merchant's trade. They despise corruption but, as Kei herself says, what they hate even more is people who abuse power to oppress others. The girls promise that selfish people like that are always doomed to fall, and they can speak with conviction because they know that, as the Lovely Angels, it's their calling to act on behalf of the universe to ensure that they do. And so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that the universe of Dirty Pair is one where banal evil will always fail, because that's what the universe of Dirty Pair is all about. Kei and Yuri help people because they heal them. Their mere presence allows situations to improve for everybody.

But more importantly, Kei and Yuri aren't just divine agents of positive change, they're divine agents of positive change because they're *good people*. They love, they understand and they forgive, and that's as important as anything else. Kei and Yuri show Jayd how to move on with his life without forgetting his past actions by both fighting *and* caring for him. And while they pretend-fight about the technicalities of the statute of limitations at the end, this is simply the expected trappings of a performance by “Good Lawkeepers”...And of Sunrise Dirty Pair. They very clearly would have let him go regardless. But ultimately conscious intent is unimportant here: Kei and Yuri make things better simply by acting and getting involved. This is what makes Kei and Yuri utopian ideals: Through living the life they're meant to and that's healthiest for them, they've become role models worth meditating on. This is the whole reason the girls have the trans- and posthumanist symbolism of the Glorified Body surrounding them: Kei and Yuri are here to teach and to learn and to make the universe a better place by doing so.

Astrologically speaking, Kei and Yuri are a fire sign and a water sign, respectively. Both fire and water are symbols strongly associated with fluidity, mutability and change. Change can come in many forms, including that of death and destruction. And we all know what tends to follow the Lovely Angels no matter where they go. But death is as natural a part of life as birth, and sometimes worlds have to be destroyed before newer, better worlds can arise in their place. This is reflected in Tarot as well, where the symbol of Death is usually seen as a sign of the impending end of one stage of life and the beginning of a new one. Similarly, Kei and Yuri have also been associated with the Tower, representing imminent and traumatic change, usually in the form of the collapse of a familiar and stable structure. But then again, sometimes such things must first fall before things can change for the better. And the Tower can also represent a transcendence and freeing of the mind and spirit: Apparently, the “Triple Goddess” flavour of Tarot refers to the Tower as “Kundalini Rising”.

As Glorified Bodies whom we can learn from and aspire to be but whose presence can frequently lead to catastrophic, yet needed, change, perhaps the real purpose of the Lovely Angels is to help bring forth the next stage in human evolution. Singularity Archetypes in the form of divine, utopian ideals. After all, it's said that the Singularity looks like the apocalypse to those below it. Who's to say role models aren't goddesses, or that trying to better yourself isn't a form of growing enlightenment? Who's to say we really won't transcend our current forms as the end result of simply trying to be better people?

I know I have Dirty Pair: Flight 005 Conspiracy to look forward to, but as good as I expect that movie to be and even though I fully realise it's going to be an even more sombre occasion and a more fitting place to eulogize the series' material Soda Pop Art wing, I need to take some time here to say a few words about what Kei and Yuri mean to me personally. Because Original Dirty Pair is special. Over the months I've spent trying to study and learn from it, Dirty Pair has very swiftly positioned itself as one of the very few things that transcend arts and entertainment for me. This is more than a show for me. It's images, emotions, experiences and ideas I would catch fleeting glimpses of throughout my life and try to distill out into something without realising it already existed somewhere. It's happy memories of the way life should be.

Things seem to happen to me for a reason, and I discovered Dirty Pair during the most uncanny of times, where the lessons and ideals it represented seemed to manifest themselves directly within my material, physical life. In some strange way, I almost *really do* feel as guided by Dirty Pair as I would be by a goddess or a spirit guide. And it's been this show that's spoken to me the loudest and the clearest: Original Dirty Pair is utterly perfect and an absolute work of art. From beginning to end, it's everything I ever wanted out of episodic visual media and everything I hold the most dear, and it came into my life precisely when I needed it the most. This will be something I'll always remember, will always hold close to my heart and will keep returning to time and time again. Kei and Yuri gave my life direction and purpose-I'll never forget that.

“I can't say anymore”

“Never go to war. Especially with yourself.”: Red Eyes are the Sign of Hell

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*. While there, the girls run into a freelance arms dealer by the name of Mazoho with whom Yuri had unspecified prior dealings with. Pretty soon its revealed the assassins are actually kidnapped soldiers from other planets who have been brainwashed into acting out a terrorist campaign against the rebels by a third party interested in prolonging the war.

It's pretty obvious fairly early on that Mazoho is going to end up being revealed as the scheme's orchestrator, and the show is plainly uninterested in keeping this inevitable twist a secret. From from it: The show does just about everything it can to telegraph Mazoho as the culprit from the beginning. In fact, Original Dirty Pair seems to go out of its way to let us know precisely how stock this setup is at every opportunity, even to the extent of having the massacred soldiers in the teaser state immediately pre-massacre how much they're looking forward to time off or a cease-fire, which doubles as possibly the single best bit of gallows humour in Dirty Pair yet: The show might as well have had them say they only have two days left to retirement. But the plot structure isn't the point here-Much like Kei's distracting theatrics in “Are You Serious?! Shocked at the Beach, Wedding Panic!”, the show is making its plot conspicuously vestigial by deliberately pointing out how stock it is so we focus on other things, namely the repercussions all of this has for its setting and what it's trying to tell us through that.

Understandably, we immediately want to side with the rebels here. They're the ones suffering the most grievous and catastrophic losses and, simply because they are rebels fighting against a government, I'm going to make a presumption of my readers and guess we'd all likely give them our sympathies without learning anything else about the plot or setting. And the episode does acknowledge this desire, as it's with them that Kei and Yuri spend the overwhelming majority of the story and their city is depicted as a burned down, bombed out post-apocalyptic wasteland where even children must act as sentries (which results in a nice nod to “Who Cares If They're Only Kids!” from Kei. The implication is that the kids don't make it, by the way). It might be a bit off-putting at first to see the episode absolve the government of any and all blame: There isn't even a twist that Mazoho was working clandestinely with them, they really are depicted as entirely innocent. The leader of the army is even the first overtly sympathetic person we meet.

But the story here is not a simple one of a populist uprising versus statist authoritarianism. The critique of imperialism is manifestly not embodied by the local government here; This planet is overtly a backwater, run-down one, frequently described as “faroff”. With the exception of the lavish entryway for visiting dignitaries Kei and Yuri are greeted in, the government buildings and the soldiers themselves look grungy, dirty and worn-out. This isn't a corporate-state power tightening its grip over its populace or trying to assimilate some foreign indigenous culture, this is a long and bloody protracted civil war in the galaxy's equivalent of a third world country. And in that kind of scenario, only one party truly profits: The sprawling world powers with a vested interest in exploiting the conflict for their own ends. And that's why Mazoho is the perfect villain for this piece, even if he seems a tad predictable and facile at first glance.

Mazoho is explicitly referred to as “The Merchant of Death” by Randall McMurphy, which means he's not just any arms dealer, he's immediately evocative notorious arms dealer Sarkis Soghanalian, who gained infamy by supplying Saddam Hussein with howitzer artillery to use against Iran during the Iran-Iraq War. For a time, Soghanalian was known as the leading arms merchant of the Cold War, and, in addition to Hussein's government, also provided his services to the Mauritanian Polisarios, Ecuador, Nicaragua, the Phalange during the Lebanese Civil War, and to Argentina during the Falklands War with the United Kingdom. However, what this summary leaves out about Soghanalian's life and operations is the fact his dealings with Saddam Hussein in particular had the full backing of the United States government, in particular the CIA, the entire Reagan administration, Richard Nixon, Jack Brennan, Spirou Agnew and John Mitchell. The US not only didn't do anything to stop Soghanalian, they actively encouraged his efforts, hoping Saddam Hussein's government would be receptive to US interests.

Really, the stunning thing here is that Dirty Pair seems to have broken the Merchant of Death story before the actual Merchant of Death did, as Soghanalian's actions working with the United States during the Iran-Iraq war didn't become common knowledge until 1991. But that's never stopped our girls before who, let's not forget, share the power of clairvoyance. There's a very important point to be made here, and the show makes this perfectly clear by depicting Mazoho as just about the most contemptible character imaginable. He's explicitly called a pervert and constantly objectifies and harasses Kei and Yuri, and the climax has him rolling in leading an ominous and lavish-looking fleet of starships seated in a throne of a captain's chair drinking from a martini glass while laughing contemptuously at the soldiers throwing their lives away below him. Mazoho is a composite of arms dealers and the neo-imperialists who use them as proxy agents. He's a distillation of the worst aspects of western capitalism, once again intrinsically linked with patriarchy and oppression: In a word, Mazoho is a Ferengi.

Speaking of Star Trek: The Next Generation, this episode marks an interesting point of comparison with “The Arsenal of Freedom”, as they both cover similar subject matter...In two wildly different ways. And, counterintuitive as it may seem, it's the Japanese cartoon that comes across as the more urgent and sophisticated. As great as “Arsenal..” was, it was quite explicitly aiming for a largely comedic tone, hence the overt Douglas Adams influences. “Red Eyes are the Sign of Hell”, by contrast, is deathly serious in every meaning of the term, as the title probably indicates. The entire episode is a procession of pointless, unnecessary inconceivable death and destruction to satiate the greed of a power-hungry psychopath. People needlessly give their lives in the hope it will protect their friends, families and homes just that little bit longer, or end up killed violently, suddenly and meaninglessly. And it finally all becomes too much for Kei and Yuri to bear, leading them to play against type for perhaps the first time: They take the fight into their own hands and punish Mazoho themselves. By quite literally taking his life with their own hands.

Even though they leave a trail of devastation in their wake, the Lovely Angels *never* directly bring it about themselves. The cosmic cleansing is something that accompanies their presence because of who at what they are; it's not something they consciously will into existence. This is, after all, almost the entire point of their characters. They'll take out nameless mooks in more lighthearted stories, sure. but it's different this time. With nobody left to fight for their freedom and agency (...because they're all *dead*), Kei and Yuri stoically, wordlessly face the might of Mazoho's starfleet themselves...but not with the Lovely Angel. Deliberately positioning themselves as the honourable warriors Mazoho is the complete opposite of, Kei and Yuri actually put on spacesuits and face down an entire battle wing *in person* armed only with handheld weapons. If you must fight to the death, do it such that you see your opponent and know the person you intend to kill. And with the ensuing volley of gunfire, the episode fades to black.

We know what's going to happen, of course. We know the girls survive. They have to (and just in case anyone was worried, there's as always our cheerful teaser for the next episode). But the images linger long enough to convey their message.

“Defrosting Ice Queen”: That Little Girl Is Older Than Us. The Preservation Was a Success?!

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.

The big problem here isn't the rote plot itself, plot is often the least important or interesting aspect of a Dirty Pair story and the series can and does get a lot of mileage out of playing with particularly stock plot structures. And it's not, for once, that the girls are belittled, infantilized or written irritatingly out of character: Everyone is in top form and behaves the way we expect them to (although Yuri ends up with frustratingly little to do). You may raise any eyebrow at how Tia seems to grow on Kei to the point she momentarily thinks about looking after her, but remember that though Kei and Yuri are not the child-raising type, they've never had problems with little girls. Anyway, I choose to read this part of the story as Kei once again acting like a big sister archetype (note how it's her teaching Tia gymnastics that allows her to escape from Bill during the climax). No, the major issue here is that Dirty Pair doesn't actually *do* much of anything with this plot, to the point one questions if this even needed to be a Dirty Pair story in the first place.

The thing about Dirty Pair stories is that they always have to show in some way how Kei and Yuri's presence and actions bring about material cosmic progress on a grand scale, and that's what's not as clear here as I would have liked. There's no imminent threat to the continued well-being of human society that needs to be cleansed with fire here, just a standard issue story about professional jealousy and small children. The sensible rebuttal would be to point to Tia herself; to point out how she gets closure for what happened twenty years ago and that Bill was finally brought to justice, and say *that* has made the universe a better place. And while certainly true, I'd be more inclined to accept that reading wholecloth if Tia was a bit more of a character and less of a macguffin. I mean say what you will about Missinie in Affair of Nolandia, but she was a *person* with real thoughts, real feelings and a real tragic character arc. Tia just sits around and glares at things until it's time for her to make her big move in the climax.

And the larger issue is that, while sort of sweet, nothing about this episode specifically required Dirty Pair's structure or setting: You could have done this story in any other series about detectives solving mysteries with very little change, which to me does seem like something of a waste of a coveted spot amongst the ten episode limited run OVA that's to date the second-to-last Dirty Pair anime series. Also a missed opportunity is the use of cryonics: Even the episode title itself heavily hypes the fact that Tia is technically chronologically older than Kei and Yuri and the characters seemingly bring this fact up every five minutes (even if it's a bit silly for me to hear twenty years prior constantly spoken of as if it was an eternity ago, but maybe I'm just old). And yet the cryogenics is nothing more than a plot device to keep Tia conveniently out of the way for twenty years and *maybe* as a rather lame play on the phrase “cold case”.

Here's an example of the rare instance where Star Trek: The Next Generation really did do it better. While definitely problematic in other respects, one thing “The Neutral Zone” conveyed really well, and what “Time's Arrow” will similarly echo four years later, is the utopia of the 24th century (or to be more precise, the utopia of the 24th century as interpreted by Captain Picard and the crew of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D) and how it contrasts with the less-than-ideal world we live in now. It took strides to define its utopia and to demonstrated why it was important and worth striving for Another thing “The Neutral Zone” did really well is that it showed how out of time and adrift its three cyronic sleepers are, and how they needed to redefine themselves, their identities and their lives in what is quite literally a brand new universe.

“That Little Girl Is Older Than Us. The Preservation Was a Success?!” doesn't really have any of that: Because Tia's cryogenic freezing is played as gimmicky and functionally as it is, it misses the chance to say something really provocative about ideals. Here's a perfect opportunity to show the real effects of the material cosmic change Kei and Yuri bring about by showing how a world with them in it is a far better place for a child to grow up in than a world without them would have been, but the episode frustratingly doesn't seem to do anything with this beyond the occasional hints that Tia might be grateful to Kei and the extremely minor “Bill is dead now so that's a good thing”. Actually, the best use of the cryonics theme in this episode might actually come from Kei, whose response to Yuri's suggestion she “freeze [her]self to preserve [her]youth” is a wonderfully characteristic bit of backhanded flattery that's probably the best line in the entire episode.

(In this regard, it may be worth bringing up again the fact Kei and Yuri are tacitly immortal and, depending on the adaptation you're looking at, are thus entirely possibly a great deal older than 19. But as is always the case with Dirty Pair, it's the symbolic artifice that's important here. No matter how chronologically old or young they may be, Kei and Yuri are permanently of seishun age and any performances they're involved in are going to acknowledge this in one way or another.)

All of this is in no way to suggest this is a poor episode: On the contrary, in basically every other respect it's a perfectly crafted and entirely watchable and enjoyable bit of television. I certainly wouldn't call it a total waste of time and it completely and utterly lacks all of the appalling ethical lapses that have defined mediocre Dirty Pair in the past. The only thing holding this episode back is the *phenomenal* bar the show has been setting so far-“watchable” does not look good next to “genre-defining masterpiece”, and that's unfortunate. And it is here where we start to understand the logic underpinning consumer reports-style reviews of creative work, even if we don't agree with them on principle: People who picked up “That Little Girl Is Older Than Us. The Preservation Was a Success?!” alongside “Revenge of the Muscle Lady!” certainly wouldn't have been disappointed in their purchase, but they might have been disappointed this wasn't *quite* on the level of the previous releases they bought. In that format, it might start to feel to some that they haven't got their full money's worth.

Today of course, you have access the whole scope and breadth of animated Dirty Pair on YouTube and Hulu. You can just push play and marathon the whole franchise in one sitting if you want, and in that context this episode might simply come across to you as one you end up paying slightly less attention to than others. But then again, if you're only a casual fan with a limited amount of time, energy and patience for entertainment...Well, it's kind of hard for me to recommend this over much else we've looked at featuring the Lovely Angels.

“And let the past remain the past”: Revenge of the Muscle Lady!

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. Indeed, it has very little to say on the matter, and if anything it acknowledges the ubiquity of steroids and other underhanded shenanigans in professional sports: Recall how Kei has to cheat to win her first match herself. Cheating is simply part of the game, and, after all, Original Dirty Pair has done addiction cycles already so there's little need for it to repeat itself here. What's important about this plot point is what it tells us about Sandra: Sandra hates Kei and Yuri because they got Trouble Consultant positions and she didn't, despite supposedly performing better than them in the various aptitude tests (whether she did or not is irrelevant, the important things is she *thinks* she did and considers herself superior). This marks Sandra as a heel, and heels are supposed to do mean things. In the world of Dirty Pair, this translates to being a bully to Kei and Yuri and running an underground drug operation the 3WA has to bust.

And Sandra's heel status is clearly meant to contrast with Kei and Yuri's face as part of the story's central message. Even her gruff demeanor and steroid use makes her visually look and seem bigger, stronger and older then Kei and Yuri, who next to her look almost childlike here (accentuated by the general capricious and casual tone they adopt throughout this episode). But the truth of the matter is that Sandra is none of those things. All the training and steroids in the universe can't hide the fact she's not measurably grown since her school days, or even really mentally moved on from them. Kei even tells her something to that effect directly to her face. Sandra's nursed a grudge and intense, seething hatred of Kei and Yuri for gods only know how many years, going over events from her past over and over again simply to stoke her thinly-veiled feelings of inferiority and betrayal. Kei and Yuri, meanwhile, have gone on to have an illustrious career and live a charmed life together, and Sandra really has no-one to blame for her own failures other than herself, even though she can never accept it and will cling desperately to her own entitlement complex.

This all comes together beautifully during the fight in the cargo bay, where Sandra abandons all pretenses of form just to brutally whale away at Kei, while Kei keeps ducking and weaving out of her path. Sandra keeps screaming injustice and accusations, and all Kei can do is look back with shock and horror. At first the Star Trek fan in me kept wanting Kei to strike back with a big Captain Picard speech throwing Sandra's words back at her and pointing out that, far from being inferior the Lovely Angels are actually *better* than Sandra because they live their lives together in the moment instead of wallowing in self-pity and rage, but then I realised that wouldn't have been the appropriate tack to take here. While she doesn't say anything, Kei's expression speaks volumes, for it's one of profound sorrow and sadness. Kei is heartbroken by Sandra because she knows Sandra could have been a friend and a colleague if she didn't have so much hate within her.

The only hurt and betrayal here was what Sandra's anger and bitterness brought on herself and others, and, now that she's up against the Lovely Angels' cleansing fire, there's really only one fate in store for her. Perhaps this is why this story has a minor reoccurring theme about womanhood and what it means to be a woman, and why the subtitle poses a question about “the true form of women”. Obviously, being a kind of utopia, there's far more gender equality in the Dirty Pair universe then in ours. But remember this, like all Dirty Pair stories, is a performance, and, being the sort of science fiction it is, is meant to provide commentary on *our* world. Much like the trick “The Ultimate Computer” pulled way back in the original Star Trek by making Richard Daystrom of African descent, Sandra's inner turmoil is definitely something that can be compared with internalized misogyny, which is a real thing that real women go through as a reaction against patriarchy. And people like that deserve some manner of pity and sympathy, even if circumstances force us to fight them as our enemy as much as the forces of hegemony themselves. That's the big difference between Sandra and Kei and Yuri: While Sandra hates, Kei and Yuri empathize and forgive.

It's also interesting to take stock of how this episode immediately follows on from “Are You Serious?! Shocked at the Beach, Wedding Panic!”, if not in terms of plot, then certainly thematically. While that episode was very much about Yuri, this one is largely about Kei, and Original Dirty Pair gives her the exact same care and nuance it gave her partner (and her, for that matter!) last time. Pay close attention to how the girls divvy up screentime here-Kei gets the big fight scenes and the brunt of Sandra's evil monologues, while Yuri runs around trying to keep the rocket meth lab from taking off. However, neither one truly slips into a support role: Yuri tries to, especially in the scene with the bomb after she meets up with Kei, but she never quite manages to, always finding herself falling into an action sequence somewhere, much to her chagrin. Yuri even tries to hide behind Kei during Sandra's final meltdown, passing the plot and conflict onto her, but it's played for laughs and Kei doesn't let her get away with it. This story is as much about her as it is Kei, and that's going to prove very revealing.

Notice how when Kei finally does get a story about her, it's explicitly within the performative artifice of a literal wrestling angle. Even when the story overtly tries to focus on her, things aren't comfortably straightforward. So, “Revenge of the Muscle Lady!” isn't *really* about Kei, it's rather a play Kei and Yuri have placed themselves in as insert avatars and is actually about something else, namely solidarity and what the way different people conceptualize the past and memory says about the way we live our lives. Even here, Kei is deflecting narrative forces in intriguingly different directions. Although really it's Yuri who gets the best visual metaphor for this in that genuinely delightful scene where she shoots out the spy drone that's following her as she climbs the cliff face...A spy drone that, for a brief moment, actually shares our camera's POV and tries to shoot Yuri through the Male Gaze. That's what you get for trying to leer at Yuri's interiority, you pervert!

But it's appropriate that the girls would be on the same wavelength here, because its their working together, and staying together, that ultimately saves the day. Digetically in the sweet “I'll be the arms, you be the eyes” scene, and extradiegetically all throughout by serving as the necessary counterexamples to Sandra's agony and pain. Sandra lived in one sad moment from her past that she could never find her way out of. Like DaiMon Bok in “The Battle”, she can't ever let go of what happened years ago and the person she used to be. But Kei and Yuri, who live in the eternally unfolding present, have found a way to extend a happy moment to last several lifetimes. They once again show us the value of tenselessness not just linguistically and mentally, but philosophically and spiritually. And as the modern shamans they are, they do it through performance. Kei and Yuri seem to shake off the rather devastating injuries they acquire over the course of this episode rather easily and quickly, with Kei even drawing attention to this and writing it back into the text through a sort of improvisation. Just like the grudge match itself, it's was all just an act.

But isn't that why Kei and Yuri are so wonderful to begin with? They live. They take action.

“Someone who's loved you forever”: Are You Serious?! Shocked at the Beach, Wedding Panic!

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. This freaks Kei out for a number of reasons, so she spends most of the story trying to keep them apart. Meanwhile, in “Gotta Do It! Love is What Makes a Woman Explode”, Yuri's willing to throw her entire life away to fly off with a boy she hasn't seen since she was seven who promised to marry her someday because she fools herself into thinking he's actually going to keep this promise from decades ago.

But just like in all those other instances, what's actually the most interesting, at least to me, is what this reveals about Kei. While Yuri only exists within the series' diegetic text, Kei is even more elusive because she possesses every ounce of Dirty Pair's narrative agency. Where Yuri is tacitly a character in Kei's story, Kei herself is *aware* she's telling a story and knows how to play off her audience to elicit a certain reaction from them. Dirty Pair in its original novel form is in truth a delicate call-and-response Kabuki dance between us and Kei, and how the anime adaptations have attempted to deal with Kei as a character tends to tell us a lot about how well the various creative teams have understood and conceptualized this over the years. Where Yuri wears the guise of a Yamato Nadeshiko, Kei's chosen mask is that of the Yamato Nadeshiko's foil; a comically unrefined rural working class woman. But while Kei herself may freely and openly take on the role of comic relief, given how steeped in performativity this series is she can't actually be straightforwardly written that way. She's no more her character than Yuri is.

And so whenever Dirty Pair has cast Kei as a comedic, bumbling foil to Yuri's refined cool competence and elegance, it has utterly failed, because it has the girls become their masks. In essence, the creative teams themselves are falling into the most archetypically naive mistake beginning pro wrestling fans make: Taking kayfabe at face value. Kei's funny, but her humour can't come from incompetence or lack of culture: She has to be *deliberately*, *consciously* funny, and of her own volition. She has to be funny with *agency*. Like the classic standup comedian who makes jokes in deference to a challenging world, Kei is funny because she wants to deflect attention away from herself and towards her story in general and Yuri in particular. Kei is in truth fiercely marginal, to the point it's written into her down to the level of her appearance and her birthday. Which only makes sense, because Kei is a storyteller, and storytellers are shamans.

All of which is to say the way the girls are written here is absolutely superb and entirely in keeping with all of their symbolism in this respect. These characters are so heartwarmingly recognisable as Kei and Yuri it's somewhat difficult for me to put into words: The OVA Series has been nothing but good so far and I'm not surprised by this, but it strikes a deep chord nevertheless. True to form, this episode is set up from the beginning to put Yuri front and centre, with the camera lovingly taking its time to pan around her in beauty shot after beauty shot,  deliberately and methodically dressing Yuri up as a classical romance heroine. Kei, meanwhile, only pops up every now and again through intentionally intrusive cuts, oftentimes literally hanging about in the background with a grin on her face and a twinkle in her eye. And the episode contrasts them in other ways too: Yuri spends the story acting genteel and contemplative, while Kei bounces around restlessly. Yuri thinks Carine is handsome, while Kei goes for more muscly guys, preferably brash ones.

Where Yuri gets to play the ingenue archaeological student, Kei takes on the role of a salty barmaid, an impoverished flower girl and an unassuming nun. As we've seen in the past, Yuri throws herself wholeheartedly into one role to the point she almost vanishes into it completely while Kei constantly leaps in and out of different stock personae; a magician performing a quick-change routine. Kei darts around making herself conspicuously marginal, always making sure the narrative's attention is on Yuri instead of her and entirely cognizant of the way we're interacting with the story. Kei may be a fool, but she's a wise Shakespearean fool if she is, and it's said those who take the path of the Fool posses the inner peace and wisdom to let the turnings of the universe guide and shape them rather then struggle in vain to impose their Will. It's thus appropriate that this episode should evoke “Something's Amiss...?! Our Elegant Revenge” (even with a plot about a mob family), which was the first real time we got an unfettered look at this side of Kei's personality.

(This is in fact, so fundamental and essential to who the girls are that had Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture simply swapped Kei and Yuri's roles such that Yuri was the one who got seduced by the dashingly roguish cat burglar and received the big love story plot and Kei was the one slinking around wearing monster skins and stumbling through ventilation shafts it would have been about a billion times better and more effective.)

And yet in spite of Kei's deep fondness and love for Yuri compelling her to craft a Harlequin romance starring her, there remains an inescapable truth about the Lovely Angels that precludes this wedding from having a conventionally happy ending. Though Yuri probably has some subconscious awareness of this, Kei is very mindful of it on multiple diegetic levels: The exaggerated looks of confusion and bewilderment she gives in response to Yuri's whirlwind romance and marriage are of a woman facing the prospect of zero-summing. Though Kei pretends she's jealous of Yuri every time this kind of story happens (and lesser creative teams will fall for the ruse and write her under the assumption she is), she's actually upset at the possibility of Yuri leaving her, not just because Kei loves Yuri herself and doesn't want to be alone or lose her soulmate, but also because Kei *literally* can't live without her as there's no Dirty Pair without Yuri.

Notice how Yuri's wedding is to-the-note stereotypical Christian, even though Yuri herself isn't and such weddings would be practically unheard of in a country whose populace is 2% Christian. Yuri would even reject her beloved Mughi as a bride, for fear the cat's hair would mess up her dress. And that's the problem in a nutshell-Yuri is so caught up in her fantasy she's on the verge of dropping out of Dirty Pair, thus completely negating Dirty Pair as a functional form of storytelling. Kei is absolutely right when she tells Yuri and Carine in the big emotional climax that “We don't have time for this!”: The episodic action sci-fi world of Dirty Pair precludes Yuri from running off to live this kind of story. They're simply not compatible. Well, that and the fact a bomb was about to go off destroying everything in a five block radius, but isn't that what I said? The Lovely Angels exist on a different narrative plane of being, which is reaffirmed when Yuri begs Carine to come with them at the end, and he says he can't.

And when Carine parachutes out of the plane as “Aki kara no Summertime” starts to play, who do we cut back to but a smiling and welcoming Kei in the pilot's seat? Yuri has a lover and a life partner whether she's aware of it or not. Like most things, she probably has some inkling of it, even if it's not something she openly thinks about regularly. But Yuri has a divine role to play herself, and this means she'll always come back in the end. There was never any real danger to Dirty Pair, nor any chance this kind of major character development would ever take. Like everything else, it's just a story, and one we immediately know how it's going to turn out. Knowing how a story ends does not invalidate the telling of the story itself, though, because it's only through dreams and stories that we can understand ourselves and each other. Perhaps Kei and Yuri act for each other as much as they do for us, and they hope their performances will help show us how we can all do the same.

“Know when to walk away/Know when to run”: And So, Nobody's Doing It Anymore

If there was going to be an episode that caused me any manner of trepidation, it was going to be this one.

Dirty Pair has historically not been good when it comes to gambling or games. Any kind of games: Casino games, card games (unless the Bloody Card is involved), video games, the lot. Despite “Go Ahead, Fall in Love! Love is Russian Roulette” being an early highlight of the TV series, “The Vault or the Vote? A Murderous Day for a Speech”, which saddled Kei with a crippling gambling addiction basically for shits and giggles, gets *my* vote for quite possibly the single worst bit of filmed Dirty Pair ever made. Even the first chapter of “The Case of the Backwoods Murder” from The Great Adventure of the Dirty Pair bugs me a bit, because Takachiho seems to cluelessly conflate video arcade games with gambling, and as someone who has very fond memories of afternoons spent in such places and for whom video games as a medium became dreadfully important, it left something of a bad taste in my mouth. I know Japan has a much stronger tradition of linking arcades with gambling then the West does, such as in pachinko halls, for example, but it's still not to my tastes. And of course, there was that terrible, terrible Famicom Disk System game from last year.

So I was a bit nervous to see the trailer for this episode prominently featuring the girls dressed to the nines in a casino, a deeply worried Gooley and Mughi dressed as what appears to be a pallet-swapped Mario. Thankfully, the episode itself turned out to be completely contrary to any expectations I might have had. It really is it's own thing (indeed, this may well be the episode that codifies what the stylistic tone and general themes of the OVA series are), but if we were to compare it with one of the TV episodes, we wouldn't liken it to either of the casino or gambling romps, but rather to “Something's Amiss...?! Our Elegant Revenge”. As was the case in that story, “And So, Nobody's Doing It Anymore” is actually about, at least in part, diegetically and extradiegetically underestimating Kei and Yuri. It leads us along thinking the girls (and in one scene, even Mughi) are going to go badly astray somewhere along the line, building to some embarrassing failure and then just...doesn't. And, I have to sheepishly admit, I fell for it.

Most of the plot for “And So, Nobody's Doing It Anymore” is essentially window dressing for its central joke, but there is a point to the to the high-rolling casino trappings. There are two main threads to unpack here, one of which flags the story's ultimate resolution and one of which involves the fact Meteo is a game that's built to be rigged and built to get people addicted. The casino can control where the asteroids land, and thus determine the winner game to game based on their video surveillance of the bets people are placing. The whole idea seems to be to get people into a high after successive wins, thus getting them addicted so they'll spend more and more time and money at the table chasing that initial high. As exaggeratedly sinister as that may sound, it's actually not too far removed from the way casinos operate in real life: Despite their assurances that all their games and tables are based on “luck” and “skill”, really they're all designed around carefully orchestrated mathematical patterns and formulae that are calculated to pay out just enough to keep you interested in playing...even though in the end you will always lose far, far more money than you'll ever win.

Casinos rely on exploiting addiction cycles, and keeping that in mind does allow us to sort of see a link to video games. This episode doesn't make the connection at all, it's purely about gambling, but the franchise *has* made the link in the past and it's worth taking some time to parse out. Very early video games, meaning certain arcade games and their intellectual precursors the pinball tables, did very clearly rely on getting players hooked somehow. After all, their entire business model was predicated on getting people to put quarters into the cabinets, and the dream of any coin-op operator was to get a whale who was so addicted to the games he'd park himself in the arcade for hours upon hours plugging in quarters to beat his high score or to get further in the game (and as I write this, yet another pioneering moment in the evolution of Gamer Culture is revealed to me). In fact, the whole idea of video game difficulty itself probably stems from this, as the goal has always been, in the words of the immortal Angry Video Game Nerd, “to piss you off just enough so you want to keep going”: Ghosts 'n Goblins is but one particularly notable example of a game that works precisely this way.

And yet by 1988 video games had already begun to move away from that model. Nintendo had completely redefined the medium by emphasizing the potential of video games to be eminently sharable things that could bring people together and inspire their imagination, and while punishingly difficult games certainly continued to be made, there was no longer the requirement to wed that to an exploitative addiction-based business model as the advent of home consoles meant you could buy a game once, take it home and never spend any more money on it again. So, game design was allowed to grow in different directions, emphasizing the transcendent psychedelic fun of the experience itself (which, while certainly something arcade games could do, was not always by default a guiding design principle). Indeed, by 1988 a whole slew of instant classics for the Famicom, Famicom Disk System and NES were already out; games like Super Mario Bros. 1 and 2 (both versions of it), Duck Hunt, Castlevania, The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Mega Man, Contra and Bubble Bobble. Games that were all revolutionary masterpieces, and none of which worked by archaic carnie rules.

What then, do we make of Mughi looking for all the world like a knock-off Mario in this episode, if there's nothing else remotely about video games in the whole story? Well, since Mughi is with the Lovely Angels and he shares their job of helping evoke positive change in the universe, I choose to read that scene as an endorsement of the future of video games Nintendo embodies in 1988. Maybe that's what the title means too: “Nobody's Doing It Anymore” refers to how nobody's playing those old casino games anymore because the fad has passed and they've moved on to better, more fun and more egalitarian sorts of games. Well, that and the fact the space station explodes and rains down asteroid storms on the planet below, but isn't that what I said?

But this focus on the theme of addiction also means we can read “And So, Nobody's Doing It Anymore” as a more effective version of “Symbiosis”, because both stories look at how addiction can be weaponized by authoritarian power structures and those who profit from them to keep people docile, complacent and controllable. I prefer the subject matter of “Symbiosis”, because I find drugs and the pharmaceutical industry to be a better metaphor for this system then people running a crooked gambling casino, though they're naturally both symptoms of capitalism in one respect or another. “And So, Nobody's Doing It Anymore” is certainly the stronger standalone work of art though, and its very localized, introspective focus on Dirty Pair and its mythology ends up redeeming a lot.

Because Dirty Pair has done casinos before, because it has made fun of Kei's gambling and does, at least in its Sunrise incarnations, invoke the high-rolling James Bond as often as it does, we think we know how this story is going to play out. The whole opening act exists so Gooley can do what he's best at and talk down to the girls. And the narrative seems to want us to side with him, giving him that scene where he paces around his office worrying that Kei and Yuri will fall prey to gambling addiction, and comically freak out when he gets the bill for the “preparations” the girls need for the mission. Which again, the series under Sunrise has done this before. Then the girls spy on the station before going undercover as whales. And there's even that tense build-up when the casino boss orders his technicians to get Kei addicted to Meteo, and then we immediately cut to Kei winning big and saying “I could get addicted to this”. The whole story is clearly building to the girls catastrophically screwing up, getting themselves addicted and getting away by the skin of their teeth at the last minute, perhaps with the help of the legendary TroCon they've been sent to retrieve.

And then It Just Doesn't Happen.

The girls' plan goes off without a hitch. Their “preparations”, involving lavish and expensive costumes and a big-ass space cannon which Gooley was convinced were all frivolities, actually turn out to be vital to their mission: They need their outfits to blend in with the gamblers, and the cannon is used to deflect the asteroids and reveal how rigged the game was. Kei and Yuri even explicitly say this is what they're going to do directly to the camera early on, but the episode makes us forget about that as we worry the girls are going to fall prey to the vices of gambling. There's a big public fight between Kei and Yuri in the climax that seems to come out of nowhere, but it's soon apparent this is a big show they're putting on to manipulate the casino owner into slipping up and revealing his plan. And it's the honourable, disciplined martial artist TroCon with a perfect record (Gooley naturally neglects to mention how the girls, in spite of their methodology *also* have a perfect record) the episode has spent its whole runtime building up to be a hero who ultimately snaps and trashes the place, *not* the supposedly flighty and irresponsible Kei and Yuri. The girls have set up and sprung the perfect trap for patriarchal assumptions we don't even know we have.

Kei and Yuri are performers who have put together an incredibly meticulous act. And we've once again made the mistake of confusing kayfabe with reality.

(There's also a really clever nod to the Angels' astrological and spiritual symbolism here: Kei and Yuri are sometimes associated with a syncretic Japanese Buddhist goddess of luck known as Benten or Benzaiten. Particularly Kei, who, as a Saggitarian, is said to be blessed with preternaturally good luck and fortune. And in this episode Kei certainly does seem to have extremely good luck, as she rakes it all in at the Meteo table. But remember that was artificial, as the payout is controlled by the casino operators. Furthermore, Saggitarians are said to be terrible gamblers. The real reason Kei is so lucky is because she can play the game without becoming addicted to it, and perhaps also because of the blessed life she leads with Yuri and Mughi.)

As much as this episode relies on tripping up those who would underestimate people like Kei and Yuri thanks to their cultural predisposition to patriarchy, I would like to say a few words in my defense here. I have never once, since I began observing, studying and trying to learn from them, lost faith in the Lovely Angels. They remain every bit the ideal forms for me they've always been, indeed they're even more so the longer I've spent time with them. What I do question and have doubted on occasion is the strength of the material Soda Pop Art forces they travel through. I know Kei and Yuri would never betray me or let me down, but I do fear sometimes that their TV shows, movies and books will let them down. Because Soda Pop Art is inherently and fundamentally capitalistic, and capitalism is based on patriarchy and other forms of inequality, exploitation and oppression.

It's up to those of us who would meditate on such lovely ideal forms to make sure the works we craft in their honour pay proper respect.

“It turned into a pig”: Who Cares If They're Only Kids!

Kids are horrible.

One lingering consequence, among many, of the damagingly retrograde social norms of the Victorian age has been an idealization and objectification of children. Drawing on sources as seemingly disparate as the scripture of the New Testament and Rosseau's notions of the blank slate and social contract, the Victorians reconceptualized childhood (some would say invented and defined it) as a time when human beings are inherently good and innocent, free from the poisonous influence of cynical adult society. What this does, of course, is only facilitate the oppression of children and the removal of their agency, because “The Children” in the monolithic general must be looked after, sheltered and protected. It's another manifestation of what Lee Edleman calls reproductive futurism, an oppressive ideology where one is shamed out of political agency out of respect for idealized future children.

This project itself is not immune to this reading. I've several times used the word “childlike wonder”, though not in ignorance of what I was saying, I might add, and I certainly do have a fixation on children's literature and people who place heavy emphasis on children's perspectives, such as Steven Spielberg and Hayao Miyazaki. But when I use phrases such as “childlike wonder”, I try to do so with the conceit that such a state of mind would really just be a variety of idealism and cosmic wonder that might come more easily to children than to distracted adults. And the very best children's literature, in my view, does the exact opposite of sheltering children and forcing them to remain apolitical: It listens to them and gives them an outlet to form their voices and positionalities, and in doing so it helps them grow into better people. That need for respect and dignity in narrative is not limited to children, even if it's the sort of thing that, for whatever reason, is thought of as strange to afford anyone but children.

Youth and maturity come in different forms and have many different meanings and contextual associations. As I've argued before, I'm of the opinion a perspective to strive for in life is a delicate mixture of the two elements: Youthful energy, spirit, drive and idealism with experience, maturity and wisdom. Star Trek: The Next Generation seems to be shaping up to be this sort of thing with the restless, yet worldly, sense of adventure that permeates the show's worldview. And this is what Kei and Yuri, our evergreen seishun heroines, stand for as well. But here also I'd like to draw a distinction between childlike and childish: This is what the girls are up against in this episode, and they make it perfectly clear their intent is to dispel any outdated myths about the intrinsic goodness of children. Obviously, Kei and Yuri would be against reproductive futurism: Their affinity with Missinie in Affair of Nolandia notwithstanding, kids have not been especially kind to the Lovely Angels over the years, and the implicit shaming that accompanies reproductive futurism is something that affects women in particular. Yuri even gets a scene here reiterating that she “hate[s] kids”, while Kei is almost shockingly derisive of them all throughout the episode, once even referring to their adversaries as “animals wearing the skins of children”.

Not that Kei and Yuri are out of line to make these statements, of course. These kids are properly awful, taking over a top-secret military installation in charge of developing a weapon with the suitably frightening moniker of “dimensional vibrator” that can supposedly destroy the universe (I wonder if this is where the writers for Godzilla vs. Megaguirus got the idea for the Dimension Tide cannon that shoots black holes) and starting a war just for kicks. They're utter psychopaths, freely and openly torturing any adult who tries to stop them and wantonly firing off guns left and right at anything that moves simply because its fun. Anyone who's experienced bullying, been through the Western educational Panopticon or really just socialized with people their own age while growing up can likely sympathize with the Angels' plight here.

Kids...OK, let's cut the pretense here, boys, are by nature selfish, and lack the experience living in social structures necessary to curtail their antisocial predilections. Thanks to being born into patriarchy, girls are far more tuned to the existence of oppressive social mores and power structures from a very young age, while boys grow up quite literally thinking they can get away with anything because they're entitled to everything. I tend to wonder if little boys are inherently destructive, if they possess an innate fascination with breaking things. If so, many of them never seem to grow out of it. Which is another thing this episode touches on, because it's just as much about supposedly “grown” men and the thoughtless risks they take as it is about little boys, because the same power structure enables and fosters selfish egotism and destructive attitudes in both of them.

There's a very clear and firm critique of a certain kind of militarism here: As much as the boys' brazen act is shown to be the result of childish foolishness, it's also shown to be very much in keeping with a disturbingly common sort of macho warmongering bravado. It's an old joke that the military is really just run by a bunch of overgrown boys and that military technology is just designed to explode things in the most lurid, spectacular and “badass” way imaginable, but there is some truth to that: The United States military, or at least the contemporary United States military, intentionally recruits teenage boys because that's the age group statistically most likely to act as rashly, aggressively and impulsively as possible and they make the best sort of ground troops in the modern army. Certainly, the dimensional vibrator is not the kind of thing someone would come up with in a sane or cogent mindset, and this is something Original Dirty Pair wants us to think about.

Because the kicker is that the boys' “war games” are simply a manifestation of the capriciousness and lack of human compassion exhibited by the military itself, and this episode in truth pushes Dirty Pair properly close to Paul Schneider territory. Actually, it does him one better, because while Schneider did a lot of hand-wringing about boys playing war (most notably in “The Squire of Gothos”), he never managed to deliver a cohesive critique of militarism besides vague antiwar generalizations. Dirty Pair rises to the challenge, and gives one of the most mature, nuanced and gravely serious explorations of the motif I've ever seen. This episode is a veritable generator of memorable quotes, and one of the best is Kei's grim declaration that “only children make a game out of war”, a sentiment that cuts in both direction. It hits the boys, obviously, but it's also aimed at the military, who leap at the chance to roll out all their platoon squads and all their most heavily armed vehicles to use lethal force against a bunch of kids. Indeed, the episode's subtitle is “Wargamers face the firing squad”, which isn't just a metaphor for rounding up the out of control kids or condeming those who play war, it's literally a thing that happens in the episode's climax.

Kei and Yuri's response, after they get over the initial exasperation at being sent after a bunch of children and the ensuing abject shock and horror at what the military intends to do to them, is to, once again in Kei's words, “show” everyone “how to fight”: Kei and Yuri aren't just shamans here, they're warrior shamans, and this means they represent values of honour, respect and dignity. They bring a reverence and ceremony to combat, which is something everyone else in the story lacks, and they bring this all back to the story's fine-crafted feminism by equating hedonistic militarism with an abandonment of manhood. Kei openly challenges the leader of the boys to face her in honest combat if he thinks he's a man (an act she's perfectly willing to make a heroic sacrifice if need be, as the boy naturally gets himself a power loader so he can unfairly outmatch her), and then chastises anyone who “doesn't listen when a woman puts her body on the line” for being less than men. Yes, Dirty Pair is now saying patriarchy degrades the concept of masculinity.

There are so many ways this could have gone wrong, and the narrative explicitly does not fall prey to any of them. Kei and Yuri do not prescribe an ideal template for what a man should be, that's not their job, but they do point out that the culture and power systems that exist now are inherently toxic, hypocritical and dishonourable and must not stand any longer. I mean, if there was any doubt about this series' feminist street cred, this ought to put any of that to rest at last, shouldn't it? And what's even better is the label the girls give themselves: They explicitly refer to each other as Oneesan, which means older sister, but is an extremely formal, honourific term used to convey a considerable amount of respect. The Lovely Angels identifying as older siblings is both an extremely important symbolic shift for the series but also one that's particularly meaningful to me: Of course, they couldn't be parental figures-They're too disconnected and restless to be that, and the episode even calls attention this by having them angered that the boys' parents aren't taking responsibility for their children and hoisting the problem onto them. I don't know how many of you grew up with younger siblings, but this is a sentiment that hit rather close to home for me.

But the fact older sisters are manifestly not mothers has an even deeper resonance: Older sisters like Kei and Yuri are a firm rejection of heterenormativity and reproductive futurism: They're grown women whose lives are their own and are not defined by domesticity, nor are they authority figures like parents are (also note how the boys throw out the most horrific, unfiltered misogynistic bile at Kei and Yuri all throughout the episode. Like I said, boys are horrid, and very few of them grow out of it). But older sisters can also be an inspiration and a role model to their younger siblings, being old enough to have experience and wisdom they don't, but not old enough such that it would preclude kids from being able to relate to them. The Cool Big Sis archetypes is an important and powerful one, and as an older sibling myself, the responsibility we have has always been something I've been cognizant of. Even when I was an only child, I had older sibling figures I looked up to and deeply admired and who had a profound impact on shaping the person I grew up to become. Because this is something I've always been aware of, I view elder siblings as being in the best position to demonstrate ideals of material social progress.

Which is, of course, what Kei and Yuri are, and what they do. They're everyone's Cool Big Sisters, and that's just another manifestation of the divine Glorified Body ideal states they represent. And this is why perhaps their most revolutionary and revealing act here is to simply walk away. They show the boys, the military, Gooley and everyone else how one can posses a warrior spirit and solve conflicts nonviolently, but they make it very clear the world of patriarchal militarism and heteronormative reproductive futurism is manifestly not one they wish to be a part of. Would that we all shared their freedom to fly away. They warp off saddened at how the boys' dysfunctional childhood will scar them for life and how they'll go on to run the planet themselves someday, thus starting the destructive cycle anew. As Kei tells Yuri at the denouement, and as Yuri echoes back to her in the episode's closing moments while a gentle rendition of “Aki kara no Summertime” plays them both out, “Compared to those boys, you're lucky to be with a caring person like me”.

“Prophets of the Galactic Spirit”: We're Not Afraid of Divine Judgment. It's Like Magic?!

If a god is in truth the idea of a god, what does it look like when gods fight?

“We're Not Afraid of Divine Judgment. It's Like Magic?!” opens up seeming like it's going to be a cross between the Dirty Pair novels and, of all things, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!. The girls arrive incognito on an agricultural planet that's been subject to a number of mysterious unsolved murders. An extremely religious culture, the settlers on this planet all swear fealty to a massive church that dictates their social, spiritual and material lives. It's the belief of the local police that it's the planet's God itself that's responsible for the killings, though they see it more as “divine retribution” than murder. But Kei and Yuri suspect something else is up, so they sneak in undercover to investigate. The design of the planet is definitely a memorable one, featuring a mix of pastoral farming scenes and twisted, nightmarish imagery straight out of a horror movie, Original Dirty Pair upping the ante with futuristic space ravens and blood red, almost volcanic skies, befitting the tone of the story.

It at first seems as if the show is building to the reveal of an implausibly massive Scooby-Doo hoax gambit: We get early confirmation this “God” is a “new” one, far more stringent and judgmental than the old one and, while there are a series of awe-inspiringly grotesque scenes of God's supposed furor, Kei and Yuri swiftly reveal them to be part of an elabourate, yet mundane (albeit futuristic) technological smoke-and-mirrors trick. But it's then that this episode gets *really* good, because, as the Lovely Angels face down *God himself* and declare to a giant space church full of parishioners that all of his miracles were the work of sophisticated technoscience, God blindsides us all with the confession that yes, obviously everything he does is thanks to science. But what does it matter? He is, so he claims, the “One True God”. The God of Science. Someone who has “cast off” his “mortal bonds” to become a Divine Machine. In other words, this God is the God of Scientism and technofetishistic positivist atheism. This is the God of the Church of the Singularity.

What this story becomes then is one of gods in conflict with one another: Kei and Yuri are up against an opponent who is genuinely playing on their level. The God in this episode bears some resemblance to both Criados from the TV series episode “Criados' Heartbeat” and The Master from The Dirty Pair Strike Again: Like Criados, he's an explicitly transhuman character who has attained both his trashuman status and his spiritual enlightenment through experimenting with technology, but while Criados went mad from the process, this person decided his enlightenment gave him the right to start a religion around himself. Much like The Master, he designed and built an entire hierarchical church structure with himself at the centre, although unlike The Master he decided he was both God's Chosen and God Himself. With a setup like that, it sounds like “We're Not Afraid of Divine Judgment. It's Like Magic?!” would come across as very redundant, but it actually doesn't: What we're actually getting is a musing on two different forms of trashumanism and enlightenment that builds noticeably on the themes from the previous two stories.

Firstly, if God is a machine singularity, than this makes his character an explicit, and well-deserved, critique of the Scientism that tends to permeate both actual science and science fiction communities dating back to at least Isaac Asimov. This is what it would really look like if the New Atheists and the Church of the Singularity people got their way; this is a *literal* Church of Science, with all such a descriptor entails. Tellingly, and amusingly, God's church operates under an extreme, yet very recognisably Christian model (in particular the Catholic flavour of Christianity). Sinners constantly repent and are brutally punished for their transgressions and infractions, however minor they may be, and clergymen spend hours upon hours genuflecting before the Altar of Positivity. As I've always said, New Atheism and religious fundamentalism are two sides of the same coin. Dogmatic Atheism is every bit a product of Western thought as the Abrahamic religions are. There's also a great moment in the climax where, after the church gets vaporized and the tide of battle turns against him, God's attitude towards Kei and Yuri completely changes. Before this, he was issuing fire-and-brimstone condemnations of the “infidels” and “adulterous whores”. After, he speaks very frankly and openly to the girls, as if he considers them equals. Once he no longer needs to keep up appearances before his flock, he drops all airs and pretenses and reveals the whole thing for what it always was: A performative facade.

And Kei and Yuri really are God's peers in this respect. For one thing, they're both transhuman. But while God is a machine singularity, Kei and Yuri are Glorified Bodies, representations of a singularity archetype: Idealized effigies of humanity and humanity's future augmented through the help of technology, rather than the glorification of technology and subservience to it. This is but one critical philosophical disagreement underwriting the girls and God, and shows through in the way they interact with one another. Notice how when God pleads to the girls that he only sublimated his own existence and that he did bring peace and prosperity to his people, Kei and Yuri don't dispute this. He's correct. But what the girls do call him out for, and rightly in my view, is his attempt to force his Will unto the people.

The girls show him how his people have no freedom and can be killed at any time on a whim. God has imposed an authoritarian power structure, as is always the case with institutionalized religion, a force that drives a middle-man between people and spirituality. God is, in essence, a Philosopher King. An Enlightened Despot, and the ultimate dream of so much liberal Western thought. Kei and Yuri don't fault him for attaining enlightenment the way he did, they fault him for everything he did with that knowledge after the fact. Kei and Yuri are gods too, but they're a very different sort of god. What we're seeing here is a tension between two different forms of divinity: The idea that a person can simply declare himself God and that he has divine right to do as he sees fit to everyone else, or the idea that divinity is actually just a set of ideals to be meditated on and invoked on a day-to-day basis. Kei and Yuri, who have mantled spirits, are individualist goddesses, and in many ways marginal ones.

(Before the Star Trek fans' eyes collectively gloss over as I launch into the mystical, I'll briefly mention one way you could read this episode is as a bottom-up, deconstructive inversion of the “Justice” and “The Apple” story archetypes with the Federation's philosophical worldview being given the same treatment they would give the belief system of others.)

God dictates. Kei and Yuri lead by example. They act and they live, and simply in living the life they are meant to, fulfilling their Great Work, if you will, they make the universe a better place naturally. While God has an entire church at his command, Kei and Yuri are forced underground to the barrows like the Tuatha Dé Danann they are. Nobody believes in these spirits, as their infamous reputation as the Dirty Pair makes quite evident. They're marginal in just about every way they could be: They're women (Kei even arguably a woman of colour). They're liminal. They don't conform. They're not “consummately normal”. They're everything that's been feminized and forced out of sight, everything Avital Ronell describes as having been labeled “stupid”: They're the enemy of rational, logical, accepted masculinist thought...indeed, the very virtues God claims to embody. And yet Kei and Yuri remain divine, because they have meditated on ideals and, through that process, taken those ideals into themselves. As a result, they have become one with their art, magick and goddess figures through living performance.

Kei and Yuri are agents of the divine feminine, and what they've done, what they always do, is show us what a *reclaimed* divine femininity looks like, and this episode may be the most crystal clear evocation of the concept to date. I wonder, is it even possible to have a female God? Not a goddess, obviously, but an actual distaff counterpart to the Western, Abrahamic God of the sort we see here. I posit that we actually can't, because such a God must by definition be an authoritarian one, and authoritarianism is the province of patriarchy, and thus fascism. Female divine energy, *real* female divine energy, is dispersed and generative. Shaktism describes the divine feminine as a godhead or divine oversoul, within everyone and everything. Animistic. Anarchic. And we've already seen how Kei and Yuri can be compared very easily with the Tantric goddesses Tārā and Kāli, both of whom are seen in Shaktism as Mahavidyas; individual manifestations of the larger goddess oversoul (and the former of which even has a homonymic counterpart in both Celtic and Polynesian mythology) that one might reflect and mediate upon.

In the context of The Elder Scrolls, Michael Kirkbride once described an era of that series' fictional history as a time when “wars...were ideologies given skin”. And Alan Moore talks about how all ideas are ultimately materially real within the ideaspace. If this episode depicts a war between the gods, how does this reshape the landscape of the noösphere? Another idea of Moore's might be useful here, in particular, his stance that life exists on a spectrum between two binary extremes, fascism and anarchy. What Original Dirty Pair is giving us through “We're Not Afraid of Divine Judgment. It's Like Magic?!” is a representation of what happens when these two oppositional forces come to blows with each other in the ring to decide the fate of the cosmic whole. This immutable central tension manifests within the text of Dirty Pair's utopian speculative fiction as a textual echo of itself; war, ideology and narrative becoming thought-forms. Or perhaps, simply returning to their natural states of being.

And anarchism decisively wins, as Kei and Yuri do what they do best and blow up God, the church, the parishioners and beset the planet to an unending wave of natural disasters (in other words, “Acts of God” or, in the more appropriate Japanese context, the revenge of the natural order of things). But while Kei and Yuri may have won the revolution, they're fated to remain marginal figures, both diegetically and extradiegetically. Textually, their reputation among the universe's human population never improves and Chief Gooley still resents them. But in another sense, this affects Dirty Pair as a franchise as well. Original Dirty Pair is, of course, an OVA series specifically made for a niche audience, and even now the girls' metatextual lustre seems to be fading. Their moment in the spotlight that accompanied Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture has passed, and this show would be the last Dirty Pair release to see any sort of populist fanfare or major PR campaign. With Samhainn over, the Tuatha Dé Danann must return to the barrows, taking on the visage of the Old Gods in Hiding.

And yet this seems fitting for the Lovely Angels, because another difference between them and God is that their job is to inspire and guide, not to lead, and there's an important distinction to be made there. Kei and Yuri could never put themselves above anybody else, because true revolutionaries do not become statesmen. They remain forever underground and marginal, restless in their quest to improve themselves and the world around them. And so it is for Kei and Yuri, whose moment will not end not because time is frozen, but because it's now and forever. As much as it's always summertime for our girls, their summer memories are made every day.