“...dispersed in clouds of narrative language”: R-Really?! For Beautiful Women, "Canon" is the Keyword to Escape (With Love from the Lovely Angels Part 2)

One consequence of subverting the stock Big Epic Season Finale plot four times over means that any attempt you do actually make to close your filming block off with a bang is sort of by necessity going to be unsatisfying. Somehow I think I've heard that somewhere before. The sensible solution would be, of course, to not do a Big Epic Season Finale plot for your season finale.

Regrettably, Sunrise do not adopt the sensible solution.

We have a hostage situation where the head of 3WA security, a painfully generic megalomaniacal villain, takes over the research firm (which is in a gigantic volcano for some reason), kidnaps Gooley and threatens to blow up Elenore City with a big-ass Lazer Cannon if he's not given some exorbitant amount of money. The plot is bog standard “we leave nobody behind” military fueled science fiction: Kei and Yuri go against the 3WA's board of directors to rescue Gooley and they positively leap at every single opportunity to sacrifice their lives for each other, which is supposed to cut against them bickering throughout the episode's entire runtime. Kei gets a big, dramatic speech at the end when she thinks Yuri is killed that is meant to be a parody of such speeches, but it feels stilted, goes on way too long and is nowhere near as effective as the subtext in “Something's Amiss...?! Our Elegant Revenge”. The episode tries to rack up tension with exasperating pulp stalling, and the villain even gets a speech of unfiltered misogyny (yielding the story's one good line when Kei responds with “For a young guy, you sure are old-fashioned”) in an attempt to force some strangled moral out of the past 26 weeks.

This is, in point of fact, a perfectly straightforward demonstration of what it looks like when a show tries to artificially inflate its stakes to do something self-consciously “big” to wrap up the filming block: It makes everyone and everything explode in a desperate effort to send the series off on an “epic” note, and it's tragically unaware you can't do this with Dirty Pair. The humour is back to feeling forced and inappropriate, it's once again a story that isn't really about anything except its po-faced epicness, and it has other problems too. As has become frustratingly the norm for late-period Dirty Pair, while the story is on the one hand trying to make a point about how special the Angels and their bond is, it still can't resist the temptation to make Yuri the hero. Kei bumbles around as the comic relief, sticking her foot in her mouth, and making silly melodramatic speeches with Yuri as the consummate, quick-witted foil. Then there is, of course, Gooley himself, of whom I've spoken far too much lately. I'll just say that it's probably a bad sign that the episode had me agreeing with the board of directors' plan to cause the volcano to erupt with him in it.

(There is, in among all this, one solitary scene I did like: After sending Gooley out in the last escape pod, the girls think they're going to die in the explosion. Yuri looks at Kei and calls her name very softly and gently as if she wants to say something, but then asks her if she's really planning to use the God Cannon to effect their escape. It's a sweet, tender moment of deferred confession, and the one moment of genuine heart in the entire episode.)

Another thing that's more than a little concerning here is that, even setting Gooley aside, the 3WA has completed its transformation from “problematic” to “cartoonishly evil”. They really are responsible for everything that goes wrong here: The board of directors are a bunch of dicks, Calico has become even more ineffectual and after all, *they're* the ones who designed and built the God Cannon, placed it a prime spot to loom menacingly over the entire city and appointed a psychopath to oversee it. There's nobody to sympathize with except Kei and Yuri, which is fine, but the show has given up problematizing their parent organisation such that it still wants us to cheer for the girls selflessly risking their lives for them, even though now it's stretched so far beyond the last remaining vestiges of credulity I'd called it parodic had the show been on its game this week.

So, just as it has for the past two weeks, Dirty Pair ends feeling like it's worn itself out, which is as sad as it is sadly predictable. But this is, as someone once said, a depressing note to end things on. Dirty Pair should bring joy, and even here the story-within-the-story hides magic surprises to make us smile in the places we're least likely to check. Namely, the God Cannon. Supposedly imbued with the power of the gods themselves, the 3WA raised what amounts to a doomsday weapon in an attempt to “protect” the people of Elenore City, as the old story always goes about those in power gambling with the lives of its citizens in the name of “safety”. But even the 3WA wouldn't dare use it, fearful of being responsible for wielding the power it contains. Even Carlos, mad with ambitions of conquest as he is, doesn't want to actually use the God Cannon, he just wants to threaten people with it. He gives Gooley a “demonstration”, as stock megalomaniacal cartoon villains are wont to do, and then quickly hides the thing back under his base.

The only people who actually do use it, the only people who could ever use it, are Kei and Yuri. The Lovely Angels use it to make their escape by blasting apart the research centre just in time to overload the God Cannon such that it's destroyed with the rest of the base when the volcano erupts. The God Cannon is a weapon of mass destruction, of course, and on a material level (and especially considering the Cold War and Japanese context) such things are shortsighted and destructive and hold no place in a progressive utopia. But there's more symbolic power here: Firstly, while it could be read as a translation error, the word in the title of this episode is not “cannon” but “canon”, and this mark even reappears in 3WA security's monitors inside the base. “Canon” derives from institutionalized religion, and traditionally refers to a body of laws and scripture considered “official” and “authoritative”, the latter of which is a word that shares a root with “authoritarianism”. Canon is a concept universal to institutionalized religions, existing in Christianity, Buddhism, Taosim, Judaism and Genre Fiction. The “God Cannon” then, is also a “God Canon”.

What would a pantheon of gods becoming a canon of gods look like? I suspect not a whole lot different then a hierarchical church (which could be a church of ideas and social structures as much as it could be an actual religious institution) proclaiming itself the ultimate moral and spiritual authority and condemning, shunning and marginalizing anyone who disagrees as heretics and blasphemers. The reoccurring constant in all cases is a set of ideals, which more often then not tend to be reactionary ideals, elevated to a stature such that they're taken for granted and the system perpetuates and polices itself by stamping out its own dissenting voices. If Alan Moore is correct and the Ideaspace exists everywhere and within everyone, then our ideals and gods are shaped by the mythopoeic power we project onto them, and our canon gods perpetuate tyranny and fascism in the noösphere. So, a “God Canon” would really be a “God Cannon”, a weapon of mass destruction evoking the power of the gods to wreak painful suffering and destruction upon us all.

Yet Kei and Yuri are a kind of deity as well: Marginalized narrative goddesses who mantle themselves in perpetuity so that we may know how to do so as well. And, in some of their forms, they are certainly Gods of Destruction, reshaping reality in the name of material cosmic progress. But that which they destroy is the hurtful, counterproductive, corrupt and outmoded and is to be read as part of the cycles and motions of the universe. Kei and Yuri have long been established as Tantric figures, not Abrahamic or even Norse ones: As such, they are in this episode comparable figures to that of Kāli, who in Tantric philosophy represents multiple dualities. Kāli is at once destroyer, slayer of evil forces, spirit of vengeance, figure of benevolent love and forgiveness, bringer of death, and generative energy of rebirth. In the Shaktist school in particular, which posits the figure of Shakti, the divine feminine, as the cosmic oversoul, Kāli is seen as one of the Ten Mahavidyas, all of whom are individual facets and manifestations of the godhead. She represents the goddess as “Devourer of Time”, and in some cases the supreme being herself. Symbols take the power they represent within themselves to become it.

For in becoming the agent by which the God Cannon destroys itself, Kei and Yuri have broken time, or rather, freed time from the rigid linearity that a God Canon would impose upon it. Sunrise's first anime series can already make a convincing case to being the definitive version of Dirty Pair, at least in pop consciousness. The case will only go stronger with the somewhat cool reception the forthcoming OVA projects will receive in contrast to the success of this show and Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture, with which it shares the most similarities. Even Haruka Takachiho's own Dirty Pair books, which actually continue until 2007, will never get this same impact or level of attention. Its quality aside, which has been growing increasingly changeable for several months now, were we to let this first Dirty Pair TV show become “the only one that counts”, we would be dooming the entire story to the Single Vision of a Master Narrative. Neither this show, nor any other work of fiction, needs, wants or deserves to be canonized this way. Canon is the authoritarian word death of storytelling, writing it in a such a way that it would die with no way back.

So while this may be an ending of sorts, and a necessary one to prevent Dirty Pair from succumbing to the tyranny of the Single Vision as the series will never be this big or this monolithic again, it's really more of a transmutation brought upon by Kei and Yuri's healing love: For their final magick trick, Kei and Yuri help their own show to comprehend a truth they've known themselves for a very long time.

Because while “R-Really?! For Beautiful Women, 'Canon' is the Keyword to Escape” may be the series finale, it's not truly an ending, nor is it a new beginning: It's both at the same time. Released two years after the show it was ostensibly supposed to be concluding, it comes out into a world where many other Dirty Pair stories exist. It can't bring closure to Dirty Pair, because Dirty Pair will always continue so long as we have hope, dreams and love to believe in. This is not the end of Kei and Yuri's stories, and indeed we even get a welcome first glimpse of the forthcoming OVA series Original Dirty Pair right where where it should be, where the post credits teasers used to go. The music, art, costumes and visual effects may be different, but it's still the Lovely Angels doing exactly what we expect the Lovely Angels to be doing. And Kei and Yuri are once again on hand to ease the transition.

This is not “goodbye”, it's simply once more and always “See ya next time!”.

“I'll be back”: Eek! The Boy in the Manor is a Terminator (With Love from the Lovely Angels Part 1)

Though its broadcast run is now over, Dirty Pair does actually still have two shots left in its barrel for us.

Due to insufficient ratings, the Dirty Pair TV show's parent network NTV pulled the plug on it in December of 1985, canceling it before the final two episodes could air. There seems to be a lot of conflicting opinions about why the show was ended when it was, the most common one being that Dirty Pair was pretty definitively a cult sci-fi show, and that wasn't enough justification for NTV to keep it around (which makes Dirty Pair's status as “The Japanese Star Trek” all the more fun and fitting). But because Sunrise still saw a passionate and loyal fanbase for the show, they did something somewhat unprecedented. No, they didn't sell Dirty Pair as a syndication package to air in perpetual reruns or create a sequel show called Dirty Pair: The Next Generation directly for a syndicated market, but they did do something that was just as novel from a Japanese perspective as Paramount's handling of Star Trek was from a US one.

What Sunrise did was take the last two episodes, intended to air in January of 1986, and release them as Original Video Animation, or OVAs. OVAs are roughly comparable to what Western audiences might call “direct to video releases”, or DTVs, as that aptly describes what they are, but the contextual meaning OVAs have in Japan are quite different from what DTVs do in, say, the United States. Where DTVs are usually seen as no-budget schlokfests that weren't good enough to be released in theatres, OVAs are seen as niche, cult works that might not attract a huge mainstream audience, but have a passionate enough following to justify putting them on home videos people might buy.

In other words, OVAs share a quite similar audience to the kind of shows that would, in the US, go direct to syndication or cable, like, funnily enough, Star Trek. And, just as Star Trek: The Next Generation pioneered the viability of syndication for cult TV (just as it outgrew those selfsame cult TV roots almost immediately), so did Dirty Pair pioneer the viability of the OVA market for similar shows. OVAs also have a slight advantage over other avenues for niche properties, as, because they're made completely in-house for home video, they're not subject to any meddling by network executives or ratings figures, so they have the opportunity to be more unflitered artistic statements.

(In fact, OVAs tend to have on the whole higher budgets and production values then regular television shows as a result of this, another thing that sets them decisively apart from DTVs in the United States.)

These two episodes, “Eek! The Boy in the Manor is a Terminator” and “R-Really?! For Beautiful Women, 'Canon' is the Keyword to Escape”, tend to be grouped together in a subset of the larger first Dirty Pair series under a shared name that's usually translated as either From Lovely Angel With Love or With Love from the Lovely Angels. I'm going to be using the second translation here, mostly out of personal preference: The first one seems to evoke the show's spy-fi side and is an obvious play on the James Bond story From Russia with Love, but the second gives the impression Kei and Yuri are writing us a letter from somewhere far away, which I think is sweet and more fitting.

Although all that said, With Love from the Lovely Angels isn't *quite* the moment where Dirty Pair demonstrates the potential of the OVA medium (that would be the movie Dirty Pair: Affair of Nolandia), nor are they even technically OVAs in the first place. Oh sure, they were *released* direct to video, but these episodes were still *produced* in the same filming block as everything else from the first series and with a broadcast television audience in mind, so neither one of these episodes can actually take advantage of the medium in the way the other Dirty Pair OVAs do. So, in spite of the way audiences were first exposed to them, these two episodes are really more properly read as part of the first series, instead of their own little thing.

This bears a couple ramifications worth talking about. First and foremost, this means that, if taken in the context of their actual release date instead of their production date, they come across as incredibly bizarre. Though intended to air in January, 1986, these episodes wouldn't actually see the light of day until a *full year later* in January of 1987. I've also seen accounts that they might even have been released even later, in that December and March 1988. And, sadly, this does With Love from the Lovely Angels absolutely no favours: By that point, Affair of Nolandia had been out for over a year itself and was consciously doing something very different from the first series, and, if the second dates are accurate, Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture and the *second series* were out too. Both Dirty Pair and science fiction as a genre had long moved on in the interim, and this means there's absolutely no way these episodes were going to be seen as anything other then curious artefacts way, way after their time.

This is particularly awkward and uncomfortable in regards to “Eek! The Boy in the Manor is a Terminator”, because it sadly isn't very good, and doesn't hold up so well in the context of 1985, let alone the context of 1987. The title sort of gives away that this is going to be some kind of pastiche of The Terminator and, well, it largely isn't. Yes, there is a person in this episode who is so blatantly a T-800 I'm surprised there weren't lawsuits involved, but the episode does absolutely nothing with The Terminator apart from nick its most recognisable bit of iconography. There's no meta-commentary about the movie and its place in science fiction here at all, which really flabbergasts me because doing a critique of The Terminator's neo-noir with Dirty Pair's detective story legacy and the setting of Elenore City seems like the most obvious thing in the world. Even last time, while the show still dropped the ball, it at least seemed to know the direction it should have been going in: Here it seems entirely oblivious that this is a possibility, preferring to have the girls fight Arnold Schwarzenegger in a generic spooky mansion on top of a mountain in the middle of a snowfield (well, mostly Yuri, but that's a separate problem).

Aside from the larger issue of not really being about anything, the other issue is, honestly, the choice of the subject matter: To be blunt, The Terminator was two years old in 1986, and *four* in 1988. Hell, in 1988, we were closer to Terminator *2* than to the original film. No matter which way you look at it, Dirty Pair is being hardly topical here and is arriving to the party somewhat painfully late, even if it actually did have something to say. Had this episode come near the start of the season as opposed to the end (let alone two years later), that would have been one thing, but the ship had unfortunately already sailed on The Terminator by the time this was being drafted up. It might even have been OK had Dirty Pair saved its Terminator commentary for *even later*, taking advantage of nostalgia, the subsequent sequels and the series attaining iconic status, but putting it anywhere near here just smacks of deeply unfortunate timing to me.

And it's not just a general lack of erudition, this episode feels depressingly out of tricks in a way Dirty Pair hasn't ever felt before, even in its weakest moments. Like “What? We're Heinous Kidnappers!”, this is again an episode of two halves, and the first half is phenomenal. Kei and Yuri are pretty much pitch-perfect, and the situations they're involved with are perfectly suited to them: Yuri is on a date with an insufferable bore trying, and failing, not to crack and lose her temper while Kei stays at home fixing the air conditioning with Mughi and Nanmo while keeping an eye on the radio chatter and pretending to be mad at Yuri. It's a riot to see Gooley and Calico change roles, with the chief constructing elabourate conspiracy theories about what the girls are up to and Calico brushing him aside for being unfair. And it's tough not to grin ear to ear when Kei takes on the counterfeit bust on her own to give Yuri a vacation (even though she knows that never goes well) and Calico pinch-hits, going out of his way to help and support Kei despite being in way over his head. And the show is once again in top comedic form.

Which makes it all the more frustrating when the second half of the episode just flails around aimlessly, squandering absolutely every bit of that goodwill. The narrative is initially set up so that any conflict that crops up is tacitly implied to be on Yuri, as she's the one who left Kei to handle the case on her own. The idea seems to be a another demonstration of Yuri's Piscean amorphousness and the ramifications this can have on the series, like it did in “Gotta Do It! Love is What Makes a Woman Explode” and “Something's Amiss...?! Our Elegant Revenge”: There are moments when even the cinematography seems to depict Yuri slipping out of the story and into an overt fantasy world. The problem is that this time it doesn't actually follow through with this level of critique, and after the commercial break it feels like the show suddenly remembered Yuri was the breakout character and needed to make her seem cool and hyper competent, and any possible character moments are shoved out the window as Yuri kicks all manner of ass and Kei and Calico are swiftly locked away in a dungeon where they won't run the risk of cramping her style *and* she gets to rescue them with flare and aplomb while they scream and beg her for help to boot.

(Furthermore, this episode falls down on an ethical level: The thrust of the plot, such as it is, is that the counterfeiters started their operation to avenge the honour of their son, who died being betrayed by a giant banking conglomerate. Everyone is against them for the majority of the episode, despite the narrative bending over backward to make them sympathetic. Kei and Calico frequently slip into a shockingly Judge Dredd style attitude towards crime and punishment, to be, naturally, swayed to the side of reason and compassion by Yuri. There's even a positively horrid anti-piracy message at the end of the episode where the teaser would normally go.)

And the problem this causes is, well, after a number of weeks of this sort of thing I must confess I started to get annoyed and resentful at the way Yuri was being treated in contrast to Kei. And that was the point I realised this episode really, really didn't work. The moment you turn the audience against either Kei or Yuri is the moment you've pretty decisively failed at writing Dirty Pair. As I've said a number of times before, I adore Yuri. I adore everything about this series. What I object to is when people put emphasis on one of the Angels at the expense of her partner, especially if it comes about through a pretty obvious misreading. I don't at all begrudge anyone identifying with Yuri; after all, I'm quite open about my connection to Kei. If she's your deity, by all means embrace it-That's a wonderful thing. I just ask any fans and writers to remember that we're all aspects of the same divine force here. Neglecting to always remember this means you neglect a divine truth, and placing one Angel on a pedestal higher then all others does nothing but harm, and sets you on a path towards the Absolute Children of Heaven.

So after all of this, the impression I was left with was of a show that has maybe now, at last, run out of steam. Dirty Pair has finally burned itself out. As enjoyable as it is in parts, it's ultimately just reiterating the simulacra of its previous successes, running through its popular old set pieces in an attempt to recapture what used to make it great. This season has gone on too long, and it's probably a good thing there's only one more episode to go. It's time to let the Lovely Angels take a break, regroup and transmute into a new form.

“Are you making all the right moves? Or are you going through the motions?”: Are You Serious? A Condo is a Dangerous Place to Live

What a strange episode to go out on.

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

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

Neither does Kei, actually: She name-drops Agatha Christie in the teaser for this episode that ran after “Something's Amiss...?! Our Elegant Revenge”, even going into a campfire scary story voice to tell us “Now you can be Agatha too!”. In the episode proper, the camera will occasionally cut outside the condo at random to show us a thunderclap and a flash of lighting for no discernible purpose and there's a lot of dramatic pacing back in forth in a circle while the suspects are seated around a table. Reading this episode as a parody of the banal Christie-style detective story, and it is a pretty good one, does also help alleviate some of its moments that are a bit too offbeat for my tastes, in particular Kei's attitude.

The thing about Agatha Christie's stories and the intellectual tradition they were a part of, as famously skewered by Raymond Chandler in his essay “The Simple Art of Murder”, is that they were seeped in unreality. Not performative artifice, but dishonesty and falseness. Chandler's big criticism of the classic detective story basically boils down to them being unrealistic, which is to me a somewhat hollow argument, but he hits on something inescapable with his comment that “The poor writer is dishonest without knowing it, and the fairly good one can be dishonest because he doesn't know what to be honest about.”. This is a bang-on account of what's going on in those dime store murder mysteries: They are indeed inaccurate and misleading in regards to why perps commit murder and how homicide investigations work, point taken, but that only gets us so far (Chandler is, of course, a pioneer in the “hard broiled” mystery tradition, which has its own problems, namely that, far from being more authentic, it bald-facedly glorifies patriarchy).

The real issue in play here is that these are substanceless escapist fluff stories people elevate far above and beyond the readings they're capable of sustaining. And that's inauthentic, not just in a basic sense, but a moral and ethical one. The danger here is a certain kind of spectacle, the kind Debord rails against: That idea that people could latch onto the warped and deformed version of reality these stories depict and actually try to build a coherent philosophy around them. And this can cause real material harm: Alan Moore frequently talks about how the world, in more ways then one, is really our idea and conception of what the world is. In one of my favourite quotes he says “There are books that have devastated continents, destroyed thousands. What war hasn't been a war of fiction?”. When we become detached from a true and authentic (meaning sincere) conception of the world, this is when Debord's Society of the Spectacle kicks in with its passive, unaware subservience to artifice and commodity fetishism. This, far more then its lack of fealty to representationalism, is the problem with the Agatha Christie school.

So, given its own self-aware relationship with artifice and detournement of it and its dedication to the sincere and true cosmic self (not to mention its own detective story heritage), Dirty Pair tackling Chandler seems like a no-brainer. Through their magick, art and craft, Kei and Yuri are here to usher in a new era for humanity by showing us the importance of ideals and kicking us onto a path to material social progress. And, given the nature of their situation this week, it's little wonder that Yuri leaps into the proceedings with aplomb and Kei can't take anything seriously. Remember, as a Piscean, disappearing into unreality is a reoccurring issue for Yuri, so it actually makes a lot of sense that she'd take centre stage here. Now after all that, it seems like this episode has the makings of something I should absolutely adore, so why did I come away from it feeling indifferent?

I think a good portion of it is due to the fact that while it sets all this up and has summoned all the proper marks and symbols, it never quite manages to follow through on all of them to deliver a coherent message. It never seems to move beyond straightforward parody, and I know Dirty Pair can do a lot better than that. Dirty Pair can run through genres all it wants, but it has to do a little bit more then just point out all the silly little cliches to be truly effective. When it's been at its best, this show has used its ability to transgress narratives to then sublimate and reshape them into something fresh, new and helpful, and I don't *quite* get the sense it's pulled that off here. There's also the reoccurring issue of Gooley and the paternalistic attitude he represents, and that does hurt the story for me. Being a puppet for Elenore City's Mafia-controlled drug cartel really should have been the end for him: That the show's kept bringing him back time and time again, on the one hand making him and everything he stands for increasingly horrifying and indefensible and on the other making him a sympathetic masculine authority figure is probably the most egregious and problematic flaw of this incarnation of Dirty Pair.

(There is one moment of unabashed brilliance in this episode I have to point out though: In the opening scenes, the camera shares the PoV of one of the killers as he stalks and murders one of his victims, all while audibly breathing very heavily, before cutting away at the last second. It's genuinely disturbing, and is a blatant attack on the normalization of male gaze in cinematic media. If somebody ever tells you Dirty Pair is exploitative, show them that. Its a lovely bit of postmodern cinematography of the sort that will only go stronger and more pronounced in the other Dirty Pair anime works.)

All in all, I have to say “Are You Serious? A Condo is a Dangerous Place to Live” is an episode I enjoyed thinking and writing about a lot more than I did watching it. There really is a lot to recommend here, moreso in any of the other mediocre off-week episodes: It has everything it needs in place to be classic Dirty Pair, but never seems to actually attain that level. So we're left with a feeling that the show ultimately hasn't quite lived up to its own ideals and potential.

Man, that's a depressing note to end on. There's gotta be more to it than that...

“Today I settled all family business”: Something's Amiss...?! Our Elegant Revenge

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

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

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

What happens is the Lovely Angels dirty bomb the entire narrative, including the audience. The girls deliberately lead us along about who and what exactly they're getting their revenge on: In the episode's opening salvos, it seems like it's Mahogany, as we open in medias rens again as they storm his compound. But, after Gooley betrays them, it would be entirely understandable for them to exact vengeance against the 3WA itself. Especially Kei, who gets some of her best moments in the series when she quite rightly explodes at the evasive chief over the videophone in her apartment after Yuri is seemingly killed in the retreat. From Yuri's perspective, it at first seems like she's going to punish Daniel Sezar for what looks a whole lot like him taking advantage of her, before both Angels regroup and the attention is shifted back to Mahogany.

From this point, the majority of the episode is spent setting up the elabourate con job on Mahogany, which basically turns into a deconstructive humiliation conga for the Puzo/Coppola Mafia Godfather archetype as Mahogany falls for every single half-assed stunt the girls and Daniel pull, no matter how transparently fake it is. It's a laugh riot to see: My favourite bits are him not batting an eyelash when he finds out the branch headquarters of the business he's meeting with is in a parking garage behind a door with fresh paint all over it and how he doesn't even notice Mughi and Kei buried beneath the obviously fake gold behind the obviously fake bank vault door that even gets shut on Mughi's tail. That's not even touching the obvious one-The whole idea of selling this wealthy, influential and well-connected crime lord a deserted old mining planet that absolutely everyone in the galaxy knows is worthless. And Mahogany falls for it hook, line and sinker: He's no elegant and refined man of honour, he's a self-absorbed, greedy putz who'll buy into anything if it he thinks it will give him more money and power.

But then this story promptly gets shot out an airlock when Daniel turns on the girls, revealing he set both them and Mahogany up and tries to abscond with the money...at which point Kei and Yuri cheerfully point out they knew this was Daniel's plan from the very beginning and literally hoist him with his own petard, as Kei snatches him up with a crane and dangles him over a giant smelter. Then comes a scene of unparalleled genius as Mahogany scrambles up the crane to retrieve the briefcase of money and Yuri whips out a sniper rifle, seemingly poised to headshot him...except then she moves the sites to Daniel...and then moves the sites to the briefcase, shooting it open and sending all thirty million credits plummeting into the smelter to be incinerated. It is one of the single greatest moments in the entire series.

At this point we recoil dumbfounded, because Kei and Yuri are sending a message loud and clear to us as much as they are their two shortsighted acquaintances. Never, ever underestimate the Lovely Angels. Suddenly, all those little micro-performances Kei and Yuri put on throughout the episode make even more sense (and I got an absolute kick out of Kei in particular here: Note how Yuri slips entirely into her heiress role, but Kei constantly jumps in and out of different characters. She seriously gives Bugs Bunny a run for his carrots): They're using their marginal performativity to hide in plain sight and let us focus on the big revenge story, the charismatic con man and the melodramatic Godfather such that we forget about them just long enough that they can deliver a knockout sucker punch in the final moments, leaving us all feeling a little sheepish. Its the exact same thing they've done to all the *diegetic* stories they've visited over the course of this show, only now they're doing it to Dirty Pair *itself* and the target is *us*.

Oh ye of little faith: Unlike absolutely everyone else in this story, Kei and Yuri will never betray you or let you down. How could we ever have forgotten that?

But all this rampant recursive performativity hints at perhaps one more truth. Yuri gets the defiant speech where she reveals the big con to Daniel and Mahogany at the climax, which is fitting, and yet we never really get a feeling for how she and Kei could have logistically planned all of this. There are numerous points where either one or both of the girls seems completely in the dark about some of the larger machinations in play here, and Yuri is decidedly ambivalent about her true feelings for Daniel. And, just as Yuri had done for her in “Go Ahead, Fall in Love! Love is Russian Roulette”, Kei teases her partner about her crush as they drive off at the end. This is where the comparisons to “Gotta Do It! Love is What Makes a Woman Explode” come back as well: Recall she's the one who spends the most amount of time in one particular role, and, though she declares she'll never let a guy break up her partnership with Kei, she did come very close to doing that at the other end of the season. This, combined with her being the person with the most obvious stake in the revenge plotline at numerous levels, it's quite possible to read Yuri as once again fading in and out of the narrative ether.

So, is Text!Yuri letting fantasy get the better of her again, or has she truly pulled the con of the ages on us? Does it really matter if she did or not? Perhaps we shouldn't be looking to her, but to her even more marginal partner. Always the narrator and the storyteller, Kei spends the whole episode almost seeming to embody the feeling of a wink and nod at the audience (she even gets a lot of shots where she glances sideways at the camera grinning). Perhaps Kei forgives, just as she always does. Or perhaps she's once again pulling the narrative strings so Yuri comes across in the most positive light possible. Or maybe, just maybe, the story here is of Kei and Yuri finally outgrowing their narrative boundaries and turning their energy inward. With all this episode's twists and turns, it almost seems as if the girls are flipping through television channels, or editing the story on the fly with the remote control. An epic condensed into a jam session conveyed through the magick of video technology. The Lovely Angels remind us once again how they're not of this show, but that the show is of them.

So in a sense maybe this is a successor to “The Chase Smells Like Cheesecake and Death” after all: Finally sublimating their narrative existence Kei and Yuri's diegetic representations have taken the next step in Tantric meditation, mantling their Iṣṭa-devatā, their favourite deities. And in the process, as Kei so aptly puts it, they have become Elegant themselves. But as the rest of this episode shows, unlike Lan and Jerry, these new divines will never and can never turn against the greater good. How fitting a summation for everything Dirty Pair has done.

“Like water to a blood red rose”: We Did It! 463 People Found!

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

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

Anyway.

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

I don't write stories. I channel them. What that means to me is I don't see wheels going around and around, but tides ebbing and flowing, coming and going. The tide goes out and comes back in again because it always does. We can predict when and where its going to happen (damn it, what did I do with that tide chart?), and though the tide is a little different every day and every night, it's still there and still a tide. Remember, we can't say precisely what's going to happen in the future (I don't think I'd even use that particular term, to be perfectly honest with you), but because we see things happening we know, by definition that they'll happen. We see things in the present, and then they happen, um, presently. That's kind of like a tidal cycle, yeah? Well, those are just a bunch more symbols for you. You can do whatever you like with that.

One of the many things that's so heartfelt and powerful about “The 463” is how it projects the Jones family's story onto the larger smuggling mystery, or perhaps collapses the mystery down to the Jones family if you prefer. Either way, the two stories are not just diegetically intertwined as Arthur's ultimately harmless (though seriously brazen) prank is usurped by the smugglers who proceed to betray him, they're actually metaphors for each other. Both Arthur and the smugglers are trying to force Eddie and Shannon's hands, but for very different reasons. The smugglers are acting out of greed, obviously, but Arthur is ultimately acting out of love, and this is another reason why him and his family walk away heroes in the end.

There is a criticism that could be raised here in regards to that conclusion: It could be seen as problematic how the narrative seems to posit the solution to everyone's problems is for Eddie and Shannon to reconcile for their children when there could be very good reasons why they're getting divorced, especially in the context of how notoriously central the family and domesticity is to traditional and reactionary Japanese culture. But I'm not convinced that's what this story is trying to tell us: Remember, nowhere does it say Eddie and Shannon are going to get back together to live in heteronormative wedded bliss. They could very well still be getting divorced as soon as the credits roll. All Kei and Yuri wanted was for the family to talk to each other, to respect each other and try to understand why everyone feels the way they do. To not hurt each other, at least not more then is inevitable. Communication is another big theme: Notice how Yuri keeps emphasizing Arthur's feelings, how Kei keeps trying to get Eddie and Shannon to work together, and how the majority of the battle is fought on all sides with information and communications technology.

Speaking of, Dirty Pair's eye for postmodern critique is once more bang on here. Arthur bring a computer genius whiz kid who manages to pull the wool over the eyes of an entire team of professionals is evocative of many things from this era, but the one that jumps to my mind is the 1983 movie War Games, where Matthew Broderick's character hacks into a military supercomputer and dicks around, almost triggering nuclear winter in the process. Though Broderick's character is something of a mischief-maker, he's ultimately harmless and actually becomes heroic, which is a hallmark of the Long 1980s as the 1990s archetype of the dangerous or criminal hacker (and that actually characterizes much post-Dirty Pair cyberpunk) hadn't quite ossified yet.

This episode takes this archetype to its logical endpoint, however. Arthur is what the child prodigy 1980s hacker would actually be like, a young child fascinated by the computers he was learning on and who unwittingly causes a huge disaster. In War Games, Broderick's character ends up teaching all of NORAD about the nature of computers and the folly of Mutually Assured Destruction. Arthur isn't teaching anybody anything, and it's in fact his attempt to do so that is what allows him to be manipulated by the very real and dangerous bad guys.

Speaking of the bad guys, they have pretty familiar names, don't they? Crocker and Stablos, two ace pilots with flawless records who suddenly snap, go bad, and fall in with an interplanetary smuggling ring. Yup, aside from War Games and the whiz kid hacker archetype, Dirty Pair is also taking on the hottest show of the season, Miami Vice, about two ace vice cops named Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs who, due to always being deep undercover, have frequent existential identity crises about whether they're truly on the side of the law or the underworld drug cartels. Eddie even looks a bit like Tubbs, and he's constantly burdened by his looming divorce, just like Crockett.

And what Dirty Pair does to Miami Vice is sobering. Not only does it have the divorcees reconcile, or at least talk to each other and stop fighting, thus decisively cutting the big emotional dramatic plot line off at the neck, it turns its Crockett and Tubbs analogues into reprehensible villains. It should be pointed out that Miami Vice, and by extension those two characters, were at the absolute pinnacle of their popularity in 1985, and though the series was probably not as popular in Japan as it was in the United States, this is still a pretty bold and daring thing for Dirty Pair to do.

And it's a damning critique to boot, because all Dirty Pair does is change a handful of things and have Crockett and Tubbs finally give into temptation and go over to the other side. And it reveals that to be an absolutely horrific thing, depicting the two of them as embodying the absolute worst aspects of authoritarian lawfulness and organised crime. Crocker and Stablos are every bit as charismatic and dashing as Crockett and Tubbs, only now they're frightening instead of charming: Crocker and Stablos went bad through the counter-factual. Dirty Pair just pointed out the lurking horror within Miami Vice and cast the year's biggest pop culture icons as practitioners of dark magick.

In looking at all these works together alongside itself, what Dirty Pair is able to do is take Long 1980s postmodernism and apply it to the Long 1980s themselves, and, in the process, it transcends them. Ironically, in doing so, it becomes arguably the definitive 1980s work of fiction. This, moreso even then its legacy, influence and basic quality, is why Dirty Pair can never be dated and will never fade away.

This is what I meant when I mentioned the casinos earlier. Each time the philosophers re-spin that wheel, they just change little things: How much they bet and on what colour, how hard they pull down on the handle, the way they flick their wrist when they spin it, and so on. But the thing is, they're still spinning it. In the grander scheme of things nothing much has changed. I just don't think that's the most productive use of anyone's time, or that it's going to get us much of anywhere. Call it intuition, but I have a feeling a better solution will come to us someday.

(Oh, by the way, did you notice we snuck the new ship in there as a little gift to the viewers? No, not that one, the other one. No, not that one, the other one. Geez, keep up! Wait, what? N-no...That's not very new, now is it? Ugh, never mind, I give up.)

Though the narrative can't redeem Crocker and Stablos, it goes out of its way to forgive Eddie, Shannon and Arthur, and it's absolutely wonderful to have Kei and Yuri so explicitly be the arbiters of that forgiveness. They're not Narrative Gods in the authoritarian pop Abrahamic sense, but only that they're personifications of ideals, and thus their inherent goodness, altruism, friendliness and gentle strength quietly contrasts with the pain and confusion of the rest of the plot. You can feel their very palpable sense of sadness and heartbreak at the plight of the Jones family and their strong desire to help without them having to say too much. Kei and Yuri don't swoop in and consciously, deliberately force Eddie and Shannon to be better people, nor do they pass judgment on the family from On High: Rather, it's through working and interacting with the Angels, who are just doing their job to the best of their ability, that Eddie and Shannon grow and evolve as people. Kei and Yuri don't just forgive, they teach people how to forgive. And that's what ideals are all about.

(And of course it's not just Eddie and Shannon, but Arthur too: I absolutely adored how kind, patient and caring the girls were with him: Yuri's clear investment is heart-wrenching, and both she and Kei enthusiastically take on the role of Arthur's cool big sisters, cousins or babysitters, and this allows him to finally open up and give them the information they need to bring everyone home safely.)

A further contrast is between the tense, argumentative and broken dynamic exhibited by the Jones family (at least at first), and the tender, profound love that exists between Kei and Yuri themselves. For the first time in the history of this show, the girls' banter is portrayed not as them losing their temper and shifting blame, but as light and affectionate teasing, which is what it absolutely always should have been. It's positively endearing and delightful, dare I say romantic, to see this: Kei and Yuri are clearly two people who understand each other absolutely innately and completely. They have the utmost level of trust and faith in (and affection for) one another. Just as many animists have no word for animism because it is so fundamental and mundane to them so as to be taken totally for granted, there's an unspoken, intractable bond between Kei and Yuri that doesn't need to be spoken of because it runs so deep and so strong.

(I also smiled at the blink-and-you'll-miss-it joke that bookends the entire two-parter: Kei's first line in the first episode is how she wants to save Ocean Ridge for her honeymoon. Even in the teaser, she talks about dreaming of her honeymoon there, beholding a vision of it. And in the climax of the second part, it's Ocean Ridge where Flight 808 ends up redirected and where Kei does indeed end up taking her vacation...With Yuri. Lovely.)

...

Does it really need saying? Well, I guess it does. But not between us-That's not how it works. That's not how it's ever worked. I guess you might like it if it was a bit more spelled out, but we just don't think it's that important. See, it's sort of like...Once you get to a certain point it's just us. That's all that is, all that ever is. All that matters. We don't need those sorts of words because we just understand, you know? Well now, I guess you wouldn't, would you? That was thoughtless of me, I'm sorry. But I do hope someday you do, and I hope that I've been able to help you in that regard somehow. And we'll always be waiting if you ever want to talk again.

Now, if you'll excuse us, we have some waves to catch!

“I want to give you all my love”: No Way! 463 People Disappeared?!

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

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

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

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

But look at me. Here I go on and on again like a silly broken record. This isn't what you wanted to hear me talk about, was it? Well, what we saw that night was a ship adrift in inky night. It was an enormous ship clad in the loveliest shade of blue you've ever seen. It was sparkling and glowing, illuminating the darkness around it Except, not really. It was more like the idea of a ship...but also the idea of a ship not being there. It wasn't like it was there one moment and gone the next, nor was it like it was both here and gone at the same time. It was as if these two images kept repeating and following each other forever. And then it just stopped, before we'd even had time to process what had just happened. This sort of thing is always confusing at first, but we did have a clue, so that was a place to start at least.

So we got to thinking, what sort of story could we tell that would allows us to share a part of what we'd seen with all of you? Was the cosmos trying to tell us something? And what could we do with the knowledge that had flowed through us, limited though it might have been? What we came up with looked something like this...

The mere fact I'm writing this means I am somewhat forced to spoil what is unarguably the most ambitious and clever story in the entire first series. But, considering you can readily find Dirty Pair episode lists anywhere from Teatime in Elenore City to Wikipedia to the actual Dirty Pair wikia wiki (not to mention this show is as of this writing pushing thirty years old), there's not a whole lot of purpose in keeping this episode's trump card a secret. Or rather, I should say episodes, because “No Way! 463 People Disappeared?!” totally bucks this series' convention by being part one of a two-parter.

The magnitude of this is not to be overstated. Not counting the occasional reoccurring character or offhand mention of the Leaning Tower of Damocles, the only other time Dirty Pair has referenced a previous episode directly has been “Do Lovely Angels Prefer Chest Hair?”, which was only the second episode ever made and came out months and months ago before anyone knew what the show was going to be like in the first place. Dropping a “To Be Continued” here is a stroke of genius and comes as a genuine shock, reminding us of the gravity cliffhangers used to have the potential to evoke. It's not like today when everything is expected to be part of some ongoing serial or story arc: Back when television was episodic, cliffhangers were akin to pulling the rug out from under your audience precisely because they were so rare and unexpected. There's a reason so many of them tend to be remembered as television landmarks.

And this one absolutely is, because between its two episodes, this is a triumphant masterpiece of a story that's a serious contender for the show's very finest hour. It's the highest stakes and most dramatic this show has ever been, but also the most charmingly piquant. Dirty Pair has more than earned the weight it throws around here: It's heartfelt, emotional and moving on any number of levels and each and every one of them is an exercise in sci-fi perfection. If you're only going to watch one Dirty Pair story, I can come up with very few that encapsulate everything that's great about this show better and tighter than this episode and its conclusion.

One of the big reasons this is the case is because “No Way! 463 People Disappeared?!”/”We Did It! 463 People Found!” (hereafter “The 463 two-parter” or just “The 463”) is essentially everything episodes like “Come Out, Come Out, Assassin” and “Pardon Us. Trouble's On the Run, So We're Coming Through!” were trying to do, except successful. Hell, more than successful, more then a home run, this is a grand slam: Far from being a farce or a parody, it's a deeply moving, emotional and powerful story woven together expertly with an endearing and delightful sense of gentle humour and brevity. It's got an intricate and captivating central mystery populated with a really fascinating cast of characters, each and every one who goes on to play an important role in the case and its ultimate resolution.

A true to life ghost ship lands at a planetary space port, with all 463 passengers seeming to have simply vanished into thin air without a trace. Chief inspector Eddie Jones, Kei and Yuri's local contact, has an emotional investment in the case as his daughter Melody is among the disappeared and his son Arthur misses her terribly. Eddie's also going through a divorce: Melody lives with her mother and was coming to visit her brother and her father when she vanished with the rest of her fellow travellers. Even so, Eddie acts very erratically, arousing the girls' suspicions. There's a mysterious hooligan who seems to be deliberately targeting the Angels, and Yuri has a hunch Arthur knows more then he's letting on. What seem at first to be tangential bits of character development and minor bits of exposition all eventually prove to be of tremendous significance, and the way the episodes tie up all their disparate story elements together is a work of art.

Lest you think the show's newfound pathos has doomed Dirty Pair to self-indulgent grimdark, the show doesn't hesitate to point out its own medium awareness by, among other things, flagrantly violating every single rule of epic two-parter storytelling and giving away its big resolution in the title of next week's episode, which the girls cheerily and helpfully recite for us in the post-credits teaser. Oh, you thought Dirty Pair would preoccupy itself with maintaining dramatic tension and suspense over the course of the week? Why ever would you think that? *Obviously* Kei and Yuri are going to win and the missing 463 passengers are going to be found. That's a given. The truly savvy move lies within shifting our curiosity about “what happens next” to other areas, namely, our investment in the plight of the divided Jones family, which is where it's really supposed to be. Just like with “Criados' Heartbeat”, this is a story that's high stakes and well done enough to serve as a season finale, and Dirty Pair once again adamantly refuses to deliver the patriarchal pleasure of a narrative climax that doing so would entail.

(I can't help but think here about something Rick Berman once said in regards the Star Trek Voyager episode “Living Witness”, where the EMH curates a museum exhibit in a possible 31st Century chronicling the exploits of the Starship Voyager. The original writer, Joe Menosky, wanted the museum in the Alpha Quadrant, but Berman made him change it to the Delta Quadrant because he felt it would supposedly “spoil” the planned eventual revelation that Voyager would make it home, even though that was basically a bleeding obvious foregone conclusion from about the fist episode.)

But what really reminds us of the true purpose of this series is Kei and Yuri themselves, who make a point to lighten the mood whenever it's needed. The girls have never, ever been depicted better: Colourful, animated, kindhearted, charming and devastatingly competent, they are unquestionably the narrative's prime movers, yet they remain strictly marginal figures, albeit conspicuous ones. Kei and Yuri reveal their true selves to us once again through their actions, but also in little vignettes interspersed throughout the plot, occasionally (literally) cutting in but never stealing the spotlight, because this isn't their story. This is the story of the Jones family on multiple levels, and Kei and Yuri are here to do what they do best, and better than anyone else: Healing the universe by reconstructing reality and being utopian role models to those in need.

Well, that's the gist of it at any rate. I don't really need to go on any further, do I? I mean, you can all watch the episode yourself-It's right *there* after all. But I suppose you'll want to know about the people and the love stories and the computer magicians and the ocean tide. Fine, fine, I'll talk more about all that as soon as I stoke the fire.

To Be Continued

“O Sister, Where Art Thou?”: Nostalgic Blues Makes a Killer Soundtrack

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

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

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

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

What's even less clear then the actual symbolism is what any of it is supposed to actually mean. If this is indeed supposed to be a nod to both The Good, The Bad and the Ugly and The Defiant Ones, there are a couple paths the show could have taken. Likening Kei to a person arrested for belonging to an oppressed group of people is interesting, or it at least would have been had this episode followed up on any of the possible avenues it could have gone down with this. Even scaling it back to just an outlaw could have been intriguing, especially given the girls' increasingly strained relationship with the 3WA owing to their commitment to material social progress, and also because as far as the galaxy is concerned the Lovely Angels may as *well* be outlaws. If Yuri is then supposed to be Angel Eyes the merc from The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (presuming that Blues is Tuco, the owner is his ex-partner and perhaps sometimes Kei as well), this would also explain why she spends so much time once again flippantly acting like she's better and more competent then her partner...But it's mostly just annoying.

The larger issue with this reading is that The Good, The Bad and the Ugly is a prime example of a deconstruction of the western genre, and I'm not sure there's much new ground to be gained by Dirty Pair looking at it, especially considering what this show has already done in “Hire Us! Beautiful Bodyguards are a Better Deal”, which is an unequivocally superior Dirty Pair western pastiche in every conceivable way. That episode was furthermore based on Yojimbo, the movie that was the direct inspiration for the Dollars series The Good, The Bad and the Ugly was *itself* a part of, so this whole thing to me just feels like an aimless and second-rate retread.

(And even so I can't for the life of me figure out the Blues motif: It's clearly important, but, apart from his name, Blues only plays the Blues once and it's never mentioned again. Is this supposed to be a callback to the show's affection for The Blues Brothers, whose titular characters were outlaws on a mission from god? If that's the case, that's even more strangled then the half-assed connection I've tried to make between this episode and The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.)

Apart from the thematic issues, this week's outing is also less then satisfying on structural grounds. It relies on pulp stalling tactics to an extent I found noticeable and irritating, which is particularly a problem in a 20 minute cartoon show: It's nice that Yuri's attempts to blow off Kei and go solo to finish the job on her own are once again thwarted and shown to be ill-conceived, but it would have been nicer had that been done without her getting captured. The girls are depicted pretty changeably here, with about an equal mix of positive and negative portrayals, though what bugged me the most is how Blues' badassery wound up sidelining and stealing the show from them both. The thing about the Lovely Angels is that while marginality may well be built into their characters, Dirty Pair is still their show, so when they cross over with other stories great care has to be taken to balance the fact that they are in a different story with the fact that we still want to see the action revolving around them. And this episode basically doesn't.

(One word of praise I do have to give this one is that the world is absolutely sublime: It's an old west town at the base of a volcano connected by an antigrav monorail network with *dinosaur aliens* for horses. It's one of the most creative and memorable locales the show's come up with yet, which once again just makes you wish the episode itself was better.)

Even though Mark I of Sunrise's Dirty Pair is growing ever nearer to conclusion, we know it's not out of steam yet-It's still quite clearly capable of greatness, which only makes it all the more frustrating when it doesn't quite deliver.

“Heart of Wax”: An Unjustified Lover's Grudge. Let Me Love You Without Revenge

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

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

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

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

From this point the episode does indeed get very slapsticky and silly, but I don't have any problem with that here. Firstly because it feels appropriate for the setting and the particularly light-heated tone about it, but also because, really, slapstick is good for women. Women should be allowed to be funny in media: It's an old and tired notion that only men should engage in pratfall humour because women are supposedly more proper, mature and refined. It's just another form of patriarchal objectification, just of the positive discrimination kind. As avatars of reclaimed femininity, Kei and Yuri obviously understand this and are perfectly willing to engage in slapstick, and with wild abandon to boot. Done well, this is a very *good* thing: It's a feature, not a bug, of material social progress. This is another episode I think is extremely easy to read as the girls poking fun at themselves (as opposed to the diegetic narrative poking fun at them, which is an entirely separate matter) in order to tell a story and make a point about what their roles are. And anyway, there's enough tension, action and symbolism to reassure us there's a great deal more going on here than a simple comedic runaround.

The opening scenes of the episode are divided between two wildly different stories: We open in medias rens with Kei and Yuri already involved with a case in progress, embroiled in the midst of an incredibly dramatic and brutal conflict with a crazed military leader who goes largely nameless, so I'll call him Colonel Patch. Not that I'd advocate watching “Pardon Us. Trouble's On the Run, So We're Coming Through!” of your own volition, but if you paid attention to the post credits sequence last week and then watched this episode, you might notice that every scene that teaser pulled from, with the exception of a brief glimpse of the final shot of Reamonn and Miralda, happens in the first two or three minutes. Thus, the “real” Dirty Pair story is of them sparring off against Colonel Patch and his armed forces. But this is not what this episode is actually about: The story we're supposed to pay attention to is quite obviously that of Reamonn, Meshuzura and Miralda, which the episode further spends its opening salvos going out of its way to contrast with the world of Kei and Yuri.

Reamonn soliloquizes alone and removed from everyone and everything else in his castle atop a cliff with only his plaster statue for company, his iconography immediately reminiscent of about a million different plots and motifs. His love poetry and the theatrical way he describes his plight is quite obviously Shakespearean, both in the level of its bombast and flair and also in the way it's dealing with very mundane, everyday emotions: His allergy to women aside, Reamonn's isolation and crushing loneliness is something a lot of people could probably relate to. His giant, sprawling, more-than-a-little creepy castle also evokes Gothic horror and Gothic romance alike, and his undying dedication to the inanimate Meshuzura seems custom-tailored to remind one of the horror movie Mystery of the Wax Museum and its remake House of Wax, the latter starring Vincent Price in one of his best roles. Both movies concern a quiet and lonely sculptor who channels his passion into a museum of lifelike wax sculptures he considers his only friends. He's driven mad when his business partner burns the building down to collect on its insurance, seeing it as more profitable then actually maintaining the failing museum.

But this seems a world away from the gun-toting drama of Kei and Yuri's story, as the girls dogfight with Colonel Patch's starfleet in the skies high above and beyond Reamonn's castle. The two plots have absolutely nothing to do with each other, and the editing goes out of its way to make this as clear as possible: It almost feels like we've perhaps tuned into Dirty Pair late and have caught the girls at the conclusion of an episode we never get to see, and the camera itself, recognising this, is flipping back and forth between two different channels.

Indeed, this is precisely what's happened. Just like in “Criados' Heartbeat” and “Hah Hah Hah, Dresses and Men Should Always Be Brand New”, we've stumbled upon a Dirty Pair story that exists within the subtext of the Dirty Pair story we're currently watching. Except it's a bit different this time: Given the elabourate and meticulous way this was set up, this is a situation the girls seem fully in control of, and this ties into how they portray themselves in-universe (and incidentally, this also gives further credence to the reading we afforded “Criados' Heartbeat” positing it as an abandoned or ethereal season finale from a potential future). What this means is that the actual Dirty Pair story is intangible and visible only in fleeting glimpses: The real story this week is that of Reamonn, Meshuzura and Miralda, and Kei and Yuri only get involved when they literally crash-land into their world. No wonder the girls seem to slip into the margins as soon as they get to the castle, occupying themselves with a comedy sideshow in order to give Reamonn and Miralda the spotlight.

See, Kei and Yuri were never going to win over Reamonn's heart because they are flatly incapable of being somebody's love interest, or getting one themselves. Their narrative roles will never permit it (unless you read them as each other's love interests). This is why they portray themselves as being utterly hapless and inept at romance: Yuri's overbearing efforts cause Reamonn to break out into severe allergic reactions and Kei's not a whole lot better. But it's OK, because, completely divorced from the micro-plot as always, Kei and Yuri have a far more important and interesting job then getting themselves involved in a Gothic romance. It's Reamonn himself who gives us a clue as to what this might be: As he recites poetry to Meshuzura, he tells her the gods themselves must be jealous of her beauty, and if she were any more lovely the gods would punish them both. Poetry, like all art, is an attempt to reflect some aspect of an indescribable and intangible ethereal drive in material form, and Reamonn's words seem to have touched on some kind of truth as fireball meteors light up the night sky above his home. Fireball meteors that are the remnants of Kei and Yuri's battle with Colonel Patch and a sign of the imminent crash of the girls' damaged fighter pod into Reamonn's castle.

As performance magicians, Kei and Yuri are both divine avatars and ordinary people. Mantling the angels and being guided by the cosmic oversoul, they, as we well know by now, speak for the universe, are guided by its drive to better itself and bring about the cleansing fire wherever it must be spoken. Though they didn't mean to hurt Reamonn and the “death” of Meshuzura isn't their fault, Reamonn is made to change and grow and move beyond her because it is imperative that he must do so. This isn't, I don't think, an idolatry motif: Meshuzura may be a “fake woman” and thus, I suppose, a “false goddess” but she's real enough to Reamonn because magickal symbols gain their power through belief and, after all, Dirty Pair has done sacred totems before. Meshuzura is also, at least at first, the only woman Reamonn is allowed to be with and her “death” is a very real and visceral thing that causes him much anguish. More relevantly, Kei and Yuri are not vengeful Old Testament gods who go around smiting people for idolatry. No, the problem with Meshuzura is that she symbolizes unnecessarily false love, and even if he doesn't realise it yet, Reamonn must be made to understand that his self-imposed isolation with Meshuzura is hurting him and, more to the point, Miralda.

Because he doesn't realise his allergy doesn't extend to Miralda (or rather doesn't apply to someone he discovers his true love for) and doesn't understand that Miralda's dedication as his butler is the only way she knows how to express her love for him, this means Reamonn is not living as true and fulfilling a life as he could be and is not experiencing a truly harmonious and liberated existence and is similarly keeping someone who should be his equal and lover from doing the same. Whenever one person discovers their own path towards material and spiritual enlightenment the universe on the whole benefits, so, on its behalf, Kei and Yuri play cosmic matchmaker; accidentally on a diegetic level and very purposefully on an extradiegetic level. This is the job of ideals: Kei and Yuri don't tangle with the complexities of love and relationships themselves, but instead tell us a story about how the importance of love manifests in other people. A love story.

Yes, Reamonn and Miralda's tale is as tropish as they come. Note, in fact, how Miralda is every ounce the Yamato Nadeshiko Yuri wears the stylized, caricatured Kabuki mask of-Once she lets her hair down, it's even revealed she has a near-identical character model to Yuri, save for her elegance, poise and proper jet-black hair to contrast with Yuri's cartoonish blue. Miralda is just about as stock and demode as they come, but she is the kind of heroine this story would have, and this is the kind of story that would have her as its heroine. It's the sort of story one might expect to be targeted at Dirty Pair's original demographic and, as usual, Dirty Pair has rehabilitated it into a story that works.

This episode even takes care to keep the Lovely Angels on a separate narrative level: Tacitly and arguably fictional characters in-universe, Kei and Yuri's fiery showdown with Colonel Patch is an awe-inspiring, catastrophic spectacle playing out in the night skies above Reamonn's castle, a story within a story within another story (and one that satisfyingly returns at the opposite end of the episode). Heroes and villains, they are our new narrative gods and goddesses, and when they fight there's no room for the mundane and everyday. But that doesn't mean they can't teach us something important about it: Indeed, the twisted, tormented melange of romance and horror themes joined of course, by the shared lineage of Gothic fiction, is a kind of voyeurism for emotions as grotesque and captivating as the imagery on display. Many such stories gain their strength by the way they magnify and highlight such things in order to say something about the everyday, and Kei and Yuri are not above telling this kind of a story...though they are above the story itself.

And in being so, perhaps it's now clear how Kei and Yuri also symbolize the true nature of Nietzsche's Übermensch as Avital Ronell sees it: Not as an Übermann, or “superman”, but as someone who is “over”, as in being “done with”, the idea of man, mankind and the certainty and singular, unified Master Narratives that go along with those concepts. Not “superior”, but “beyond”. In other words, transhuman. Ronell argues that Nietzsche saw the Übermensch as the philosophy of the future, a philosophy whose truths would lay with women, whom conventional philosophy does not understand and cannot read.

And, as they do for Reamonn and Miralda in this network of stories, maybe it's our divine, transhuman, cosmic avatars of reclaimed femininity who can show us how their future can help us usher in our own.

“Prisoner and Escort”: Pardon Us. Trouble's On the Run, So We're Coming Through!

Yup, it's not so hot.

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

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

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

The answer seems, at first, obvious: Surely fans who wanted to see the next logical step in the evolution of Kei and Yuri's dynamic and their narrative universe, right? But it's actually a more complex and muddled issue then it might seem to be at first glance. We'll talk about it in considerable more depth when the time comes, but one of the things that's revealing about Affair of Nolandia is that it was explicitly made for and marketed to fans of the light novels who didn't like the first series, and the movie pretty clearly sees that audience as “hardcore science fiction fans”. So, by being made in direct contrast with Affair of Nolandia, one could be forgiven for assuming this show is for more general audiences. And yet the show itself apparently struggled in the ratings such that it was canceled before all of its episodes could be aired, and even today its legacy exists almost exclusively within science fiction (not even anime and manga) circles. I have to wonder if some of the wheel-spinning the show has been doing in recent weeks isn't in part its own reaction against conflicting and sporadic audience numbers, especially as it otherwise seems so strange given the imperious confidence with which the show stormed out of the gate at the opposite end of the season.

Because this really is frustrating and hard to watch. When the show had been mediocre in the past, namely in “Do Lovely Angels Prefer Chest Hair?”, it still *worked*. That episode wasn't terribly memorable or exciting, no, and Graves was an absolute pain in the ass, but at least he was clearly *supposed* to be a pain in the ass and the episode on the whole was largely inoffensive. With “What? We're Heinous Kidnappers!”, The Little Dictator! Let Sleeping Top Secrets Lie”, “Leave It To Us! The WWWA is a Wonderful Job” and, well, this one, it's really hard not to read these efforts as the show losing the plot and forgetting what its core themes and characters are (and that's not touching on the absolute calamities like gambling addicts and Racist Chinese Chef Stereotypes). Watching a show you *know* is incompetent and cack-handed flounder and flail about is one thing, but seeing a show you know for a fact is capable of absolute greatness and has furthermore demonstrated it quite recently squander its potential is unbelievably aggravating and it makes you wonder what the heck is going on.

I think one thing to remember over everything else is that Dirty Pair should probably always be fun. It can blast off to the ends of the universe, reshape narrative reality and plumb the depths of inner space to reveal fundamental human, spiritual and cosmic truths with the best of them, but this series needs to remember its sense of humour and lightness above all else. After all, what's the point of doing a show about two intergalactic crime-fighting professional women wrestlers and a giant alien cat beast who blow up planets together if it's not going to embrace how ridiculous (and ridiculously awesome) that premise is, in addition to all the other good things it does? Key to this is also remembering what its humour is actually about,who its laughing with...and who it's laughing at. Without fail this show's weakest episodes have been the ones where it's laughing *at* Kei and Yuri rather than with them. Dirty Pair should always be fun, and this simply isn't.

But this too belies not just the way in which the show is able to wrongfoot itself, but of its own metafictional reality. This is another example of the external world in some sense letting Kei and Yuri down, as the material production of the show isn't aware of its own potential, and even here this is an example of Dirty Pair's diegetic truths transcending textual boundaries: Just as the human world never appreciates Kei and Yuri for who they are and what they do, so will the world of media Soda Pop Art frequently be unwelcoming to the Lovely Angels. Their own show isn't always up to the task of encapsulating and conveying their magicko-symbolic power. Even when it is its truths are falling on deaf ears, and this is why there are only eight episodes left. Perhaps the show itself could even be likened to the figure of a harried and despondent secretary of the phantom desperately trying to take down signal flashes from the ether.

Having assumed the mantle of primal figures of change and creation, perhaps Kei and Yuri's recursion extends to the ether of symbols and images itself, and this is where their true destiny lies after all.