“...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.