“I just wanted to make a phone call.”: Hah Hah Hah, Dresses and Men Should Always Be Brand New

Thankfully, it doesn't take long for Dirty Pair to get back on its feet.

“Hah Hah Hah, Dresses and Men Should Always Be Brand New” is a proper farce, and one of the most memorable episodes in the series yet. The show's rapid-fire humour and beat-perfect comic timing is the best it's been since “The Chase Smells Like Cheesecake and Death”, a story which this outing is definitely in company with. This time, though, the show doesn't need to evoke any external works to make its point: This episode works purely on Dirty Pair logic and Dirty Pair logic alone. And, if you can keep yourself together through the manic assault of comedy, you might just notice the series has gone and said something really profound about the nature of narrative and the roles of protagonists.

“Hah Hah Hah, Dresses and Men Should Always Be Brand New” is a story about Kei and Yuri trying to get ready for a party. It is also a story about Kei and Yuri being mistaken for 50-year old bank robbers, accidentally kidnapping a group of schoolchildren and being chased all over a city by planetary armed forces. Not only does this week's episode intuitively understand what last week's utterly failed to, it exaggerates it beyond infinity: Our poor girls are so chronically and ridiculously unlucky they can't even go shopping without stumbling into some gigantic disaster. A farce is such a perfect match for Dirty Pair's setting because this is the structure it operates under already: It's either unfathomably tragic or unbelievably funny the amount of inconceivable destruction left in Kei and Yuri's wake, and thankfully the show went with unbelievably funny because really it all just works better that way.

Speaking of humour, it's maybe worth pointing out the jokes here are *extremely* bawdy and sexual, more so than I think the show's ever been before. I could see that rubbing some people the wrong way, especially in the opening scene where the girls complain to Gooley about not being able to get dates and how their interest in the party basically boils down to them being able to chase men. However, as is the case with most things on this show, it becomes in my opinion extremely easy to explain away and forgive this once you realise Kei and Yuri are making fun of themselves. My absolute favourite bit comes near the end when a despondent and exhausted Kei and Yuri, having just outwitted an entire planet's armed forces, escaped a mob of spoiled children and singlehandedly captured the real bad guys, are desperate to take off, fearing they'll be late for their party. Naturally, they are promptly surrounded by reporters who all want exclusive interviews with the beloved duo, and their panicky excuses to get out of doing primetime TV are pure gold: “We already have plans for tonight! We hate kids! Look! A naked woman!”.

(Also note how in an additional bit of cynical self-deprecation, the pubic personas of the Lovely Angels are shown to be idolized by children, but the kids are horrible to the real Kei and Yuri. No wonder the girls aren't great with kids.)

Though one might expect Dirty Pair going whole-hog into farce would entail a lot of casual destruction, there actually isn't as much explodium in this one as you might expect, save for that smuggling colony that gets remotely detonated during the opening scene, anyway. In hindsight, the reason for this is likely because the Angels are on their day off: If Kei and Yuri's job is to purge the universe of things that should not be in the name of material cosmic progress, then it stands to reason when they're not on the clock they'd only be dogged with the worst case of mistaken identity in recorded history (and also note the colony that gets exploded explicitly goes up in flames at the culmination of the girls' last mission and even Gooley flat-out says the Angels get jobs nobody else can handle). This isn't Kei and Yuri's fault, of course, it never is, it's just the role they must play within their narratives. Which is also, as a matter of fact, another thing this episode is looking at: See, the point this story is making is that because Kei and Yuri are Kei and Yuri, namely the protagonists, they can't actually have a day off.

I touched on this truism very briefly way back in The Great Adventure of the Dirty Pair, but here's the point where the series actually comes right out and explicitly addresses it. Dirty Pair is an action sci-fi story. Granted, it's an extremely postmodern, subversive, self-aware and transformative action sci-fi story, but the fact of the matter this is what it is and always will be. This kind of story needs, well, action. Preferably lots of it in elabourate, well-done setpieces. Actually, there's a certain element of spectacle inherent in all science fiction if you think about it-Even Hard SF wants you to drool over its fetishized imagined future gadgetry. And certainly spectacle is something that's part and parcel of visual media, because without it there would be no purpose in said media being visual in the first place. Now, what Dirty Pair brings to the table is an awareness and embrace of spectacle: Thanks to its pro wrestling heritage, it neither shuns spectacle or pretends it doesn't exist, but rather openly acknowledges it, though in the process reappropriating it for its own purposes. Dirty Pair detourns spectacle.

I know I harp on this theme a lot, but it's really important and its ramifications are everywhere. And one of them happens to be that no matter how far we may want to pry into Kei and Yuri's personal lives, it's not a captivating story if something doesn't blow up at the end. Kei and Yuri can't *truly* take a day off because if they did there would be no adventure, and a Dirty Pair episode with no adventure where Kei and Yuri just go out for lunch in Elenore City or sit around the Leaning Tower of Damocles reading magazines and tinkering with the TV set isn't a very interesting Dirty Pair episode (I mean *I* wouldn't mind it necessarily and I suppose someone could pull it off, but not in a 20-minute animated action cartoon). You can't actually have a Dirty Pair story that works this way: This episode tries, and the Lovely Angel ends up being surrounded by tanks.

And this is made abundantly clear everywhere in this story, from Kei and Yuri getting turned down by every one of their boyfriends because they're never around to make plans with such that when they finally have time off it's on too short notice, to being mistaken for bank robbers while out shopping and chased all over town to the fact the one party they actually *do* get invited to turns out to be a private family gathering thrown by Gooley himself. Just like how the only person Kirk was allowed to be emotionally honest with was Spock, Kei and Yuri are only allowed to be intimate with each other. Their job is an allegory for their narrative role, and they can't be reduced out of that. Ultimately, the girls are making visual spectacle (even if it's visual spectacle about visual spectacle) and that's not something you can escape in action sci-fi. Or on television.

This is not to dismiss the idea of examining the everyday in visual media at all, however. As of this writing, this has been a much bandied-about subject for the past few years in critical fandom discourse, typically in the context of comic books and action movies. There is a predilection to wanting to see our fictional heroes engaging in downtime and for a deeper exploration into the personal lives of characters (the most recent archetypical example I can think of probably being the wild popularity of the Young Justice cartoon show, not to mention any number of Internet fanart and fanfiction creators), and there is some merit to that desire. In fact, when Star Trek finally comes back, this is something both Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine will demonstrate the potential to be surprisingly and somewhat uniquely brilliant at, it's something I'm a big fan of in both shows and I'll praise them up and down for it when we get there.

However, there's a downside to this: That very ability to engage with the everyday is completely incompatible with the action sci-fi flavour of spectacle. This is what Dirty Pair is proving with this episode, and this paradox is going to end up absolutely scuttling at least Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. That's not to say there aren't ways for visual media, even science fiction in general, to handle this, there absolutely are, and we've even looked at a few of them already: It's just a matter of playing to the medium's strengths. It's once again a question of performativity, and in particular the kind of performativity to invoke. You can't do a sprawling Western epic poem about relationship drama, but you don't stick a camera in front of somebody and do a cinema verite flick about somebody eating breakfast either. You can do the everyday just fine, it just needs to be appropriately caricatured and exaggerated: Take a look once again at how both Mister Rogers Neighborhood and Reading Rainbow were able to create captivating, imaginative and inspiring fantasy worlds out of mundane reality. That's the sort of place to turn, I think.

And what of Dirty Pair? Although Elenore City may not be the Neighborhood of Make Believe, there's still power in its images and ideas. We may not be able to have a Dirty Pair episode about the girls' days off, but that doesn't mean they don't have them. One of the many virtues of our heroines is that we need not voyeuristically pry into their inner psyche to learn about them because they freely share with us everything we need to know about them. Though they're constantly acting and forever seeped in artifice, Kei and Yuri are never not honest: Their true selves, when they're not explicitly drawing our attention to them, exist within the subtext and paratext of the stories they tell us; intentionally left there for us to discover and interact with.
 
And, perhaps, to take into ourselves.

“It is lonely when you're among people, too”: What? We're Heinous Kidnappers!

Even the best of shows can have bad days. Yes, unfortunately, it is in fact possible for Dirty Pair to go off the rails, and this is a good example of what it looks like when it does. The streak is over: For the first time, we've come across an episode of this series that doesn't really work.

The basic premise is a sound enough one. Throwing Kei and Yuri into a high fantasy story and seeing what happens is an entirely reasonable idea for a Dirty Pair episode, especially in the context of the way the genres of high fantasy and science fiction have evolved over time. Though the most famous iteration of it began as technophillic futurist speculative fiction about logic puzzles, sci-fi as of the 1980s is a profoundly different thing. This is in part due to Star Wars making it OK again to do sci-fi stories on a mass-market scale not in the US Golden Age Hard SF vein, but other ways of doing high-tech stories about starships and space travel and things like that have always existed. This secondary tradition is one Dirty Pair is very much a part of, in part because of the differences between US and Japanese Golden Age science fiction, but also because Dirty Pair is the kind of sci-fi that is able to divorce a futuristic setting from futurism: This is not a series that speculates about future technology, it uses its setting as metaphor and allegory for the issues it's trying to look at. Again, this is a hallmark of Japanese science fiction in general, but Dirty Pair takes it to its logical endpoint.

(The crowning achievement in using sci-fi settings and imagery as narrative is, of course, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the film version of which it is quite clear to me that the writers of this episode had seen, if not actually understood. More on this later.)

Because of this, perhaps counterintuitively, science fiction is uniquely suited amongst genre fiction to looking at extremely ancient and esoteric themes: Look once again at, for example, BRIAN's role in “How to Kill a Computer”, or indeed, the resolution of last week's episode and the Lovely Angels themselves. The Dirty Pair Strike Again effortlessly tackled really complex and heady themes about spiritual enlightenment and material social progress. High fantasy (and by this I mean the kind of tradition that sprung up in the wake of people like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and that George R.R. Martin seems to be a part of), by contrast, tends to be very gritty and political, focusing on the nuts-and-bolts of human society and, due to its fixation on things like kings and queens and knights and princes, enjoys gossiping about the goings-on in the halls of power and nobility. Exploring the space between these two poles and the way the two traditions have developed the way they have is right in this show's wheelhouse.

But then there is, of course, the problem. “What? We're Heinous Kidnappers!” is a story of two halves, to the point it almost feels like a different person wrote the last few acts. It genuinely feels like a switch was flipped during the commercial break and some other script took the place of the thing we were watching. The first half of the episode is perfectly executed Dirty Pair, with a lot of enjoyable banter between the girls, really tight action setpieces and a lot of musing on the lineage between science fiction and fantasy and what the role of contemporary sci-fi is. The second half...isn't, mainly. After picking up the young prince during the car chase, Kei and Yuri are as charming as they've ever been, acting like simply the coolest babysitters any kid could ever hope for. After that commercial break, they become utter buffoons, their incompetence and failure being the butt of constant jokes (and they fail a lot). All stop, you just don't do this in a Dirty Pair story. That's a fundamental misreading of the entire series: The girls are not hopeless stooges, they're consummate professionals who are chronically unlucky. Writing them as anything else is sexism plain and simple.

This is also where the Nausicaä parallels start to become more noticeable: There's a barren desert with a handful of nomadic people vying for the attention of huge imperial powers, the mounts our heroes try to escape the duke's aircars on bear a striking resemblance to horseclaws (though they could also be Tauntauns from Star Wars I suppose) and the prince himself is an untouchable paragon of virtue. This kid is seriously pushing Mary Sue territory: He renders Kei and Yuri breathless with his goodness, nobility of character and unwavering determination. Aside from that just being insulting and wrong on principle, the major issue here is this sort of character simply does not work in the setting the episode has built for itself.

The thing about Nausicaä is that she isn't a real princess: She's an animist warrior-shaman who is trying to reforge the bond between human society and the natural world, a bond which she herself embodies. “Princess” is an honourary title people bestow upon her in gratitude, just like “Legendary Saviour”. Yes, Nausicaä is very much meant to be better than us, but that's owing to the cosmic wisdom her unique perspective affords her. She's a person all of us can aspire to be. This guy, by contrast, really is a prince: He's next in line to be king of a planet-state that's a major economic power and his inherent goodness is explicitly stated to be due to his royal birth and upbringing. So, he's supposed to be our role model and we're all meant to be in awe of how wonderful he is because he's part of the aristocracy which is...Yuck. I can't even begin to wrap my brain around how completely and fundamentally wrong that is. This goes against every single one of this show's themes and virtues.

So let's talk about the first ten minutes of the episode instead. Aside from featuring one of my favourite Gooley moments in “Stop whispering so obviously!”, which doubles as a nod to the show's by-now familiar internal meta-logic and another callback to the working class humour of “Lots of Danger, Lots of Decoys”, the episode's opening scenes do an altogether more solid job of dropping Kei and Yuri into high fantasy. Though it's explained diegetically as her fancying the idea of shagging a prince, I did quite like how Kei adopts the formal, slightly stilted style of fantasy speech when talking to the royal court (another scene that would have made more sense in the series' native language: Formal and casual spoken Japanese are dramatically different): Once again, Kei is acting undercover-She's completely riffing on the expected tropes and cliches of the setting, although that said, Yuri of all people shouldn't be so surprised to see her do this.

(And even Kei's supposed crush can be easily explained: In a typical sword and sorcery story, the hero always shacks up with the damsel in distress. As the roles are reversed here, Kei obviously expects she's going to be rewarded with a grateful and handsome prince to rescue.)

Also great is the scene at the university where the girls try to sneak into the boys' dorm to contact the prince about the need to take him under guard now that his grandfather is dead, he's next in line for the throne and the duke is after him. They make small talk on the side of the building fifty feet up about how awkward the situation is and how they're not entirely sure how to proceed. And then the dorm explodes, sending them flying into the air. The girls' espionage was first-rate; they didn't do anything wrong that would blow their cover, it just so happened that the duke's bomb went off at the precise time they were standing outside. Not only is this a perfect microcosm for how Dirty Pair plots are supposed to work, it's another way of the narrative pointing out how this is a story Kei and Yuri don't quite belong in.

The only thing really wrong here is that after this the second half of the episode happens, so we don't get any kind of development or resolution here. As a result, like the episode on the whole, the first half ends up feeling unsatisfying and like it didn't pursue every potential avenue it could have with this setup, which is something Dirty Pair usually has no problem with. One can very easily imagine a version of this story that did manage to go all the way: There's a possible examination of the differences between science fiction and high fantasy here and a defense of what sci-fi now has the power to do, but “What? We're Heinous Kidnappers!” fundamentally fails to explore this on any level other than a superficial one. Dirty Pair can't just riff on genres for the hell of it, and the moment it drifts into pure superficiality that's as good a sign as any that something has gone wrong.

Though I will say this: This episode may be bad, and it's not the only episode of this show that fails to launch either, but even here Dirty Pair remains an absolute privilege to write and think about. And I don't often get the chance to say that.

“She who lives in harmony with herself...”: Hire Us! Beautiful Bodyguards are a Better Deal

After spending the last two weeks firmly and confidently declaring what it is, what it's about and what it can do, Dirty Pair is now free to go back to gleefully playing around with other shows. And it pulls a real doozy of a meta-romp this time: For my regular readers, one way to read “Hire Us! Beautiful Bodyguards are a Better Deal” is as Dirty Pair's interpretation of the “Gunfighters”/”Spectre of the Gun”/”Living in Harmony” trilogy we looked at *way* back in 1968.

A brief refresher: Long about the same time in the late 1960s, Star Trek, Doctor Who and The Prisoner all did essentially the same story where the show's hero (or heroes) became trapped in the narrative of a Western movie where either circumstances or some external influence conspire to force them into becoming killers (well, The Prisoner didn't really as “Living in Harmony” was hastily adapted from an episode of Patrick McGoohan's other show Danger Man, but that's beside the point). The crux of those stories was that while each show in some way acknowledged the performative nature of its existence, the logic of a Western was in some way anathema to all of them, that this was a role they were not meant to play, and doing so would be tantamount to narrative collapse. As the ever-astute Jack Graham, friend of the blog and frequent commenter, pointed out under the entry on “Spectre of the Gun”, it's telling this is happening against the backdrop of the Cold War, such that the “foundational myth” of the United States is transformed into something horrific, symbolizing an inexorable predisposition towards violence and self-destruction.

Dirty Pair is, of course approaching this from a wildly different perspective. It's not even indebted to Westernism itself as a fundamental ideology, let alone any cultural-specific manifestation of it in the United States. Furthermore, the key thing about Dirty Pair is that everything here is performative: Not only is the series itself recursively metafictional to a frankly silly degree, Kei and Yuri are professional wrestlers, so any violence we see is tacitly meant to be read as make-believe, which is an extremely good thing as an entire planet gets vaporized in this one. So clearly, any criticism this episode will be making of violence is going to be coming from the outside in and localized to the plot of the week instead of being depicted as a looming threat to the show itself. The first place this is obvious is the setting, which, far from cribbing the O.K. Corral shootout event from “Spectre of the Gun” and “The Gunfighters” or the Hollywood Western movie trappings of “Living in Harmony”, is actually doing Cowboy Bebop and Sukiyaki Western Django about two decades early.

Like in the former, we get a science fiction world that, while it is equal parts cyberpunk and old west cliches, is on the whole not actually all that removed from our own: There are street food vendors, boutique shops, Jeeps, semiautomatic weapons and the two rival gangs are both corporate political bodies. And, like the latter, it's as much indebted to a distinctly Japanese literary tradition of wandering samurai stories as it is to Hollywood westerns. This may take some explaining for my readers not intimately versed in the history of Japanese storytelling structure: Basically, the core conceit of 2007's Sukiyaki Western Django was mashing up the spaghetti western genre (which even in name it's a play on) with the rōnin tales of the Japanese feudal period. Traditionally, a rōnin would be a nomadic samurai who lacks a master and travelled the land in search of a new lord to dedicate their services to. The most famous example of this kind of story would probably be Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo, which told the story of a rōnin who comes to a small town caught in a gang war between two rival crime syndicates, both of whom try to enlist the samurai's services as a bodyguard.

This is what Kei and Yuri go undercover to do in this episode. In fact, the setup is a total riff on Yojimbo, and this would have been a lot clearer in the original Japanese: “yojimbo” literally translates out to “bodyguard”. And the show is pretty blatant about this-Notice how the very first thing Kei does upon riding into town is stop and order a plate of noodles, which she eagerly shows off to the camera with a knowing wink. Even for this series this episode is very, very meta: Kei and Yuri spend a *lot* of time speaking directly to the audience in-show, which is something they've never done before, at least not to this extent, and they're even diegetically acting, taking on undercover identities as rōnin gunslingers and role-playing laughably elabourate and melodramatic backstories (watching Kei and Yuri constantly jump-cut into and out of character is as charming and delightful as it is a brilliant use of Dirty Pair's animation restrictions). This is what “A Piece of the Action” would have looked like if Kirk had taken the time to write fanfic of his Mob Boss persona.

But, this being Dirty Pair, there's more to this story's mash-up of Yojimbo and Hollywood spaghetti westerns then just comparing the superficial similarities. The obvious thing to do with a setup like this, and indeed what Sukiyaki Western Django largely does, is compare the archetype of the rōnin with that of the lone gunman who cleans up a one-horse town and becomes its new marshal. And Dirty Pair does do this here, but it also goes one step beyond, and this is where the show either reveals its age or delivers one of its most barbed critiques yet, depending on what your perspective is. See, the reason the planet-of-the-week is modeled off of a wild west town and features two rival monolithic entities is because this story is a direct condemnation of modernity, and not just Western modernity. The hired goons Kei and Yuri beat up look exactly like the classic 1980s street thugs, complete with the leather jackets, green wolf hair and star earrings. Those two rival crime syndicates? Not only are they corporations as I pointed out earlier, they're also the United States and the Soviet Union.

They are, after all, hoarding an extremely rare and valuable natural resource in the Newstone Ore for themselves. They're also fighting over a massive weapon that has the potential to destroy the planet if it's used, and the “solution” they come up with is basically tantamount to Mutually Assured Destruction. And, through the people they hire (the aforementioned goons, but also dangerous specialists like the rōnin Kei and Yuri are playing) they're forcing people to fight in proxy wars to consolidate power and territory. This becomes the most clear when the girls' cover is blown and Kei and Yuri are forced to fight one other, both sides striking a temporary truce to watch them beat the tar out of each other to satiate their bloodlust for lurid and violent spectacle. Any public political disagreements between gigantic institutions are set aside if it means they get to enjoy screwing over everyday people together. So, trapped in the conflict between two indifferent monolithic corporate-state powers, the Angels respond with that most Dirty Pair of concepts: Fake fighting that they sell like absolute champions. 

Dirty Pair is saying that, just as the two crime syndicates are basically the same thing, so are the US and the USSR. One may sell itself on the virtues of its free-market capitalism and the other may trumpet its so-called communism, but they're both talking bullshit and are in truth just two different flavours of authoritarianism. Two symptomatic facets of the same modernity plague that is rapidly plunging the entire world into peril. And, lest you think Japan is being spared here, think again: There's a reason this story invokes a classic story archetype of feudal Japan here and why the setting draws equally as heavily on Japanese imagery and symbols as it does anything else. Modern Japan is just as much a part of the problem through buying into the same toxic and dehumanizing ideology, and it deserves no quarter from the cleansing fire.

Which is why there was really only ever one way for this episode's climax to resolve itself: The whole planet gets blown to hell. No more proxy wars, no more jockeying for position, no more resource hoarding, no more nothing. The universe has to live or die by its own merits. It's worth remembering here not just this story's antecedent in The Prisoner, but also this show's own premier episode. Though BRIAN is a supercomputer, his role in “How to Kill a Computer” was very much the voice of the planet, or perhaps the voice of nature. His feelings of betrayal came about because of the installation of the Z-Box without his knowledge, a device textually coded like a nuclear launch button. Through the Cold War, crisis of modernity that it is, we have turned our backs on the world and forgotten how to live as part of the cosmos. In other words, those who sell their souls to modernity for promises of short-term material gain are no longer “living in harmony” with the universe.

Those are dark incantations. And dark magick must always be opposed by Angels and their cleansing light.

“Love is the law, love under will.”: Love is Everything. Risk Your Life to Elope!!

An artifice is a kind of symbol, in that it is meant to stand in for something else. An artifice is a symbol that is caricatured to emphasize certain truth-facets of the thing it represents. A spectacle is a kind of artifice, but a spectacle, following Debord, is an artifice that abandons truth in favour of the hollow simulacrum of truth, that is, falseness. Vacuousness. However, an artifice that knows itself, indeed, even a spectacle that knows itself, is an artifice that invokes truth and, in so doing, thus invokes its own true self.

Goddesses and ideas live on within words.

The pipe organ towers over Clicky Goldjeff's wedding. It is, in fact, a literal “tower”, one and the same with a skyscraper that serves as yet another defining feature of Elenore City's skyline. It appears to rise from the Earth itself, the blinding concrete and steel as much a part of the world as any natural object. Clicky, the son of a massively powerful cruise line mogul, is being married off to at least a dozen women, with the hope this will keep his “wandering eyes” at bay. The woman at the organ is Joanca, and it's in truth only her who Clicky has eyes for, and she feels the same way. Joanca proceeds to demonstrate this by firing blindly into the wedding reception as the male model waitstaff, dressed in skintight bunny uniforms, look on in stunned silence. Joanca shoots apart the chains with which Clicky was escorting his brides out by and the two elope together in a blimp.

Kei and Yuri are called in by the elder Goldjeff to retrieve his son, whom he claims has been kidnapped in exchange for a substantial chunk of his fortune. The girls feign interest in the mogul, as this is what male viewers of a female-led science fiction show expect to see and this is what Goldjeff's secretary, who is giving them a tour of the company headquarters, expects them to say. In truth, Kei and Yuri are making small talk and do not like homewreckers, as they confide to each other, and by extension us, when it's revealed the secretary is also Goldjeff's mistress. When Kei and Yuri speak to each other in private, we know they are expressing their true selves, as this has long since become a regular motif of Dirty Pair. The girls only act infatuated when they're with a potential client, and Kei only teases Yuri when someone else is watching. Or rather, when someone else is watching diegetically-Kei and Yuri never actually speak in complete privacy, because there is a camera on them at all times. This is, after all, a television show. But it's a television show written and produced by Kei and Yuri, so they write these scenes in as a form of textual metacommentary. Graffiti on the fourth wall. The Angels do this as an act of love, because they love each other. And they love you too.

Kei and Yuri regularly put on highly elabourate performances, but they hate dishonesty and insincerity. They are opposed to people and ideas who are not being true to themselves. And this episode is about contrasting their true selves, as caricatured and conveyed through artifice as they may be, with those who would deceive and manipulate for selfish reasons. Goldjeff took his secretary as a mistress because he is fixated on his masculine and patriarchal desire for power and control, which is the same vice that leads him to believe he has the right to dictate Clicky's fate, and he's willing to lie to get it. He even treats the girls the same way, declaring that because he's their client they should follow his orders without question, even though the Angels highly suspect Goldjeff is lying about Joanca from the start. In an adjacent scene, we learn the company's marketing director is willing to put thousands of passengers at risk in extremely dangerous “General Relativity Star Tours” because too much money has been spent on advertising and research and development to justify scrapping the project. He returns in the climax as the orchestrator of the trap that ensnares Clicky and Joanca, which he happily points out he did so his boss would give him a raise and a promotion.

Meanwhile, for her part, the secretary agreed to the affair with Goldjeff because she's willing to essentially prostitute herself to further her stature and position within the company. The sort of behaviour the secretary engages in here is the same thing that Avital Ronell, in her redemptive reading of The SCUM Manifesto, fingers as the one thing Valerie Solanis, troubled and otherwise indefensible as she might have been, hated above all else: A way in which she felt women abandon their rightful position of power and submit to (and thus further) patriarchy for short-term personal gain at the expense of material social progress. This is the difference between light magick and dark magick, and this is what Kei and Yuri object to as well. In fact, Kei and Yuri start out despising this entire case: Before they discover all the information that's being withheld from them, they want nothing more than to be done with the whole matter because they can't find anyone to sympathize with. They see Goldjeff and his secretary as utterly repugnant, Clicky as an absolute sycophant and Joanca as a contemptible manipulator and pathological liar.

And this is why the lynchpin scene is when it's revealed Joanca is a transwoman. At that moment, everything comes into focus and Kei and Yuri decisively make their move. And they immediately and overwhelmingly side with Joanca. There is of course that beautiful scene where Kei confidently brushes aside Goldjeff's ineffectual protestations as being “old fashioned” while Yuri backs her up, aghast at the executives' horrid bigotry and laying into them with the facts that one in ten people undergo transition. The scene is triumphant just on a surface level, as it not only makes clear being transgender is a commonly accepted facet of life by the average, non-reactionary person in the Dirty Pair universe, but the technology also exists to make transition as clean and effortless as possible: Joanca doesn't just “pass”, she's statuesque, lovely and stunningly beautiful. But this also ties very strongly into the episode's key theme: Joanca's transition is depicted as a metaphor for her fully blossoming into the person she is meant to be, nobody except Goldjeff and his secretary ever question that she's truly a woman, and even Goldjeff's objection is that she “used to be a man” because he's fixated on the past. Even a character this diegetically reactionary doesn't dispute her gender identity-That's how much social progress has been made.

There are a few other offhand references to Joanca having once been a man, but these are almost always depicted as being diegetic slips of the tongue. When they're not, it's shown as a metaphor for a person growing over time in accordance with their discovery of their true self: Certainly this is the way transition is conceptualized by at least some (though not all) trans people in the real world: As a move away from one gender identity to another that accompanies a deeper understanding of what gender is and of who the person themselves are. In a very material sense, we are not the same people we were in the past as every cell in our body is replaced every seven years, and combine this with a world where transhumanism exists and standard notions of personal identity and the self no longer apply. All that matters is that we continue to become better and more true people. And this is why Kei and Yuri suddenly decide to act, because now they fully understand what the stakes are. Joanca's reveal proves to the Angels that she is a person who is genuinely and sincerely acting in accordance with her true self, and this convinces them that she and Clicky truly are in love. A victory for them is a victory for lightness over darkness.

This is reinforced by the scene immediately preceding where Joanca seems to betray Clicky before Kei reveals she's being mind controlled by the secretary: During that brief scene, Joanca was quite literally “not herself”, which was the major clue that something wasn't right. Furthermore, it is mirrored in the climax when Clicky confronts his father and goes after Joanca, refusing to let him control his life and impose his reactionary and hurtful beliefs on him any more. Kei tells Clicky that he is finally “acting like a real man” because he is taking his life into his own hands and refusing to let allow himself to be controlled by the unfeeling whims of patriarchy. This also explains why Clicky looks and acts like a teenager throughout the majority of the episode in spite of him supposedly being 22: This is his story of finding his true self, and just as Joanca grew into a woman this is his opportunity to grow into a man and reclaim that title from authoritarian hegemony. He and Joanca are the heroes of their story because their actions are governed by love and compassion, not power and self-interest.

The can be no growth without change, and this is something the Angels understand on a very deep level. Joanca's transsexualism and Clicky's story of personal redemption are metaphors for positive change, and the forces against which they are pitted are equal parts retrograde and stagnant.The General Relativity Tour, which is explicitly stated to be a terrible idea originally abandoned and then dug up again for selfish reasons, sends cruise guests on an anti-voyage where they are prevented from growing or changing as massive amounts of time passes in the outside world and the entire universe shifts around them: A fitting invention for a person such as him. And, of course, it becomes the ultimate threat to Clicky and Joanca in the climax. Indeed, Goldjeff's control over this hegemonic doomsday device and his strong connection with it, along with the fact he has an actual undersea supervillain dome city peg him rather obviously as a Bond villain. Dirty Pair is saying someone who has that much hate in his heart and is dedicated to it so fervently isn't just evil, he's cartoonishly evil.

But then the Lovely Angels show up at the last second, and while they don't manage to avert the launch, the cleansing light of their narrative magick changes its meaning. Clicky follows Joanca into the rocket, so they'll be together in the end after all. But then, Goldjeff suddenly has a change of heart and finally comes to understand how much pain he's caused, confessing to Kei and Yuri that all he ever wanted was to make his son happy. So he follows the couple too, partly as an act of penance, but also because, through apologising and being honest with the girls and himself, he's earned the right to follow his son and daughter-in-law. Forgiveness is another reoccurring motif in this episode (note how Clicky jokes with Joanca that he'll “forgive [her] just this once” in the car and how Joanca tells Kei and Yuri she'll “never forgive [them]” before they realise they're on the same side), and now that these truths have been revealed and spoken, forgiveness and healing can begin. This is a kind of love that transcends age and era, and is available to anyone who discovers their true path.

Kei and Yuri have changed the mark. The General Relativity Tour no longer symbolizes stagnation, but a holding pattern for people who are ahead of their time. Once again, the universe isn't quite ready for the truths Kei and Yuri have revealed, and won't be so long as people like the secretary, the marketing director and the man Goldjeff used to be continue to exist. But, when their tour is up in fifty years, perhaps things will be different. And if they aren't, as Kei says, the Lovely Angels will be waiting. Yuri rolls her eyes and says “we'll be grandmas by then”, but this reveals more than her author insert character was letting on.

Throughout the episode there's a reoccurring joke about textual Yuri's apparent fear of aging: Kei teases her relentlessly for her cucumber face pack when they're talking with the secretary's Joanca hologram in their hotel room and snaps at her for snarking during the climactic sequence. But what text!Yuri fears is not growing up, but growing old: Becoming part of the heteronormative and reproductive futurist hegemony she fights against. And this is why text!Kei sets her at ease in the denouement when she says “the Lovely Angel grandmas” will be waiting when Joanca, Clicky and Goldjeff return in fifty years. If Kei and Yuri do “become grandmas”, it won't matter because their true selves are agents of positive material change. They can never grow old and become retrograde because it is not their will to do that. They have a higher purpose, and following that will keep them young forever.

This is also true on a different level: Adam Warren's comic adaptation of Dirty Pair establishes that the Angels actually exist in physical bodies genetically engineered to be perfect, rendering them unable to age and impervious to conventional damage. Although this is a character detail unique to his version, it's a theme worth examining and one I think holds some interesting ramifications in the subtext of the other versions, especially as this is a universe where we already know transhumanism exists. Regardless of whether or not Kei and Yuri are diegetically immortal, they are still effectively transhuman: They exist on a separate narrative plane, observing and shaping the plot instead of being part of it. Why do they do this? Because Kei and Yuri are utopian ideals. They are not characters in the standard sense-They truly are divine agents of positive change. As “Lovely Angels”, Kei and Yuri are our higher selves and thus part of us, and it's our job to discover and internalize the individual manifestations of the truths we see in them. And in this story, they are Clicky and Joanca's Holy Guardian Angels who come down to help them accomplish their own Great Work, which is love.

For me, this is the moment Dirty Pair finally arrives in full. This is where my take on the show shifted from “unexpectedly pleasing diversion” to “genuinely one of the best things ever”. What was the point of all that meta-cosmic fun the show has been dancing around with for the past few weeks? This. It allows the show to do this. This is what utopian fiction is for. This is what speculative science fiction can do. This is what Dirty Pair can do. This is what only Dirty Pair can do. Because here's the big secret: We're not looking at Dirty Pair in the context of Star Trek: The Next Generation. We're looking at Star Trek: The Next Generation in the context of Dirty Pair. Because this is the point where Dirty Pair doesn't just beat Star Trek at its own game, it demolishes it: A decisive championship title victory by submission hold. This is the new bar. We've found our true higher selves. Nothing will ever be the same again. Dirty Pair is the greatest action science fiction series of all time. And love is everything.

“A Hard Day's Night”: Lots of Danger, Lots of Decoys

As a genre, science fiction, especially science fiction that is in some way descended from Golden Age Hard SF, seems largely focused on the machinations and inner workings of giant, authoritarian, monolithic institutions. Be it some futuristic extrapolation of the army, the navy, the intelligence sector, the police or huge, sprawling technoscience corporations, science fiction seems one the whole unsettlingly comfortable with mulling about the halls of power, likely owing to the genre's futurist roots. Remember, James Blish, a member of the influential group of sci-fi writers the Futurians and the guy who novelized the original Star Trek series, thought, somewhat bewilderingly, that Pfizer would usher in a Trotskyist revolution so long as we pledged support to them and bought their products.

This is, suffice to say, equal parts untenable and unacceptable.

There are exceptions to this trend. The first two Alien movies, arguably The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Red Dwarf, bits and pieces of Doctor Who at various points in its history. Star Trek itself tends to go back and forth on this: Though the point of the franchise is very much that the Federation is anything but an unambiguous group of good guys promoting a utopia and how our crews operate under that knowledge, this fact seems to have been lost on a worrying number of creative teams and this isn't as emphasized as frequently or as strongly as it really needed to be. Raumpatrouille Orion is better, though that crew is still a bunch of ace pilots. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind was anything but this, but invoking Nausicaä in this case does feel a bit like bringing a nuclear bomb to a knife fight.

Then there is, of course, Dirty Pair. Kei and Yuri may job for the 3WA and United Galactica, but they have a much higher calling than that and, by virtue of being professional wrestlers operating by cyberpunk logic and the way this show has been portraying them, we're very much meant to read them as working class characters. Even so, the series hasn't done a story overtly about this yet, and this is what “Lots of Danger, Lots of Decoys” is about.

In some ways, this episode is “The Case of the Backwoods Murder” for Kei, with the Angels taking a job that puts them in contact with a childhood friend of hers who gets mixed up in the mission in some form. What this allows us to do is get a rare look at Kei's backstory: Though the Sunrise anime and the light novels are of course two separate continuities, we can assume Yuri's backstory is roughly similar here to what was described in “The Case of the Backwoods Murder”. In this episode though, we learn that our suspicions regarding Kei were correct: She grew up on a more urbanized planet and probably lived off of the streets. After Kaia, the leader of a fleet of space pirates who are after the precious gem the girls are tasked with escorting, introduces himself as someone from Kei's childhood, Yuri even openly supposes he's one of Kei's “delinquent friends” from “back in the day”.

As for Kaia himself, he's another in a line of subverted romantic foils for the girls. Like we saw with Sydney a few weeks ago, Kaia goes out of his way to peg himself as potential love interest for Kei, but he's exceedingly less subtle about it, to the point it manages to interfere with the way his backstory is conveyed. He even introduces himself right from the beginning as Kei's long-lost childhood friend, tacitly setting himself up to play a predetermined role. But this time Kei shoots him down right from the start: No sooner are we introduced to Kaia then Kei confides to Yuri (and us) that he's what in modern parlance would be described as a “massive douche”, and that he's the kind of guy who thinks that because he's attractive every woman wants him simply for existing. In other words, Kaia thinks he's “God's Gift to Women”, if you will, and you can imagine how well Kei and Yuri take that. Kei does nothing but smack-talk and insult Kaia for the rest of the episode, but it never connects with him: It's as if he's reading from an entirely different script and doesn't realise what show he's on.

This comes to a delightful head in the climax when, figuring out they have the real gem amongst a fleet of decoys, Kei rewires the shipping container as a bomb and sends it over to Kaia's ship, as Kaia asks her to come with him. She gives a big, emotional monologue straight out of any pulp serial or cheesy drama about distances and lifestyles keeping people apart and how her giving up the gem is symbolic of her love and his victory and how he should think of her every time he looks at it. And it's total and complete bullshit, as Kei flags it as a feint to us from the start and then proceeds to laugh maniacally as Kaia's entire starfleet, which appears to be roughly the size of a solar system is obliterated in the ensuing conflagration (Kaia's OK, of course: As Kei takes care to reassure us, a “little thing like that” won't do him in. Once again, don't forget it's all play-acting). So, Kei's speech becomes a textual “decoy”, Kaia's self-absorbed bravado and machismo becomes a metaphor for a preponderance of tropish, patriarchal writing, and the Angels think the best attitude to take towards something like that is to blow it up.

But the workaday feel of “Lots of Danger, Lots of Decoys” isn't limited to what we learn about Kei's childhood as a street rat. The Angels are on an expressly mundane mission this time, even compared to tracking down a lost cat in “The Chase Smells Like Cheesecake and Death”: All they need to do is transport the gem, valuable in a certain kind of precision mining, from the 3WA headquarters to an deep space excavation. The girls are basically truck drivers here, hauling cargo on a cosmic highway, and the show does an amazing job conveying what a world where this kind of job exists would feel like. The distances here are ridiculous: The mining operation is an entire galaxy, and they can't use warp drive because it would have an adverse effect on the gem's harmonic resonance, which means the girls are basically traversing the intergalactic void in a straight line on impulse. Thankfully faster-than-light technology seems to be more advanced in the Dirty Pair universe than in the Star Trek one and this is a distance achievable in what seems like a few days instead of a literal eternity.

But what this manages to do is simultaneously evoke feelings of cosmic wonder and mundane drudgery: We're awestruck at the scale of the journey the girls are undertaking and left to wonder about how many countless indescribable sights Kei and Yuri can see if they have the ability to explore at this level, and yet the journey still feels like what it is-A mind-numbing truck drive from one point to another. I love the little scene before Kaia shows up where the Lovely Angel is in mid-flight and the crew is just passing their time: Yuri is reading and listening to classical music, Kei is exercising and practicing her martial arts and Mughi is baking a cake, which is a heretofore unknown kind of adorable not possible to measure with current technology. Dirty Pair gives us a world that manages to capture our imagination with inspiring science fiction vistas while also reminding us of the grit that exists in any fantasy world extrapolated from, and designed to talk about, our own.

And then there's the final scene, which is just a fist-pumping moment of perfection: Kei and Yuri play Gooley like a flute, totally taking advantage of his tendency to dismiss, belittle and unjustly blame them. As far as I'm concerned, it's a contender for Gooley's best moment in the show (though I'm also quite partial to “You idiots! from “The Chase Smells Like Cheesecake and Death” and one bit in an episode coming up). The boss is a hardass who doesn't live in the same world as his workers and doesn't understand them, as it frankly should be (well...it shouldn't be, but it should be in fiction about jobs and work in capitalistic systems). Kei and Yuri may be forced to work in an unfair world and for a system and institution with at the very least questionable ethics (severely so, as we'll soon find out), but they can't be held accountable for this any more than they can for anything else, if for no other reason than, as the protagonists, they're allowed to transcend, reclaim and reappropriate it.

Kei and Yuri are workers for the light.

“From One Heart To Another”: Criados' Heartbeat

And the first thing they do is completely torpedo each and every one of our expectations.

“Criados' Heartbeat” is unbelievably subversive, even for this show. With its ominous countdowns, imposing and mysterious antagonist and seeming dramatic, game-changing plot twists, this is the kind of episode most shows would save for their season finale. And Dirty Pair casually tosses it at us five weeks in with another twenty to go. But we'll get to all that later-This episode works on a multitude of different levels, so let's take a look at the most obvious one first. One thing old school science fiction buffs like about Dirty Pair is its musing on trans/posthumanism, typically in the classic cyberpunk sense of body modification and upgrading or augmenting the human form through emergent biotechnology. This is the most visible in Adam Warren's Dirty Pair adaptation for Dark Horse comics, but it's a theme the franchise on the whole is known for, and, it's worth noting, one it hasn't actually looked at before now.

This manifests, obviously, in Criados himself, a literal mad scientist who, upon committing suicide two years prior to the events of this story, transplanted his consciousness into the computer core of a deep space automated hazardous waste processing facility. It doesn't look like he did a particularly amazing job of it though, considering he's become consumed by rage and has dedicated his existence to hunting down and killing Kei and Yuri, who he blames for his death after they shut down a drug smuggling ring he was involved in. And he's brutal about it, tormenting them with horrific imagery via psychic projection and sending out entire starfleets to track them down and drag them to the space station, which is a meant for the disposal of dangerous toxic waste unfit for human exposure and actually called the Graveyard of Ships. Criados is clearly unhinged and evil and, given what we know about the loose cautionary tone pervading much of Dirty Pair, it's possible to read this as a criticism of the kind of augmentation he attempted on himself.

But that's not what I think this episode is actually trying to get at with this theme. As a character, Criados is, in fact, a revelation: It's only mentioned very briefly when the girls are going over his biography, but Kei does state he had a particular fascination with the supernatural and life after death, which he, of course, managed to attain in the end through his transhumanist experiments. Combine this with his power of telepathy and his interest in hallucinogenics, which is what got him busted by the girls in the first place, and it starts to sound a lot more like Criados is a kind of futuristic shaman who was able to heighten and focus his own pre-existing power and abilities through technology. This alone is a breakthrough in speculative fiction: In the Blade Runner post I expressed concern about mainline transhumanism's apparent ignorance and dismissal of humanity's connection with the larger universe, meanwhile, in Dirty Pair, even Criados gets this, understanding transhumanism through his prior exploration of spirituality, and singlehandedly solving one of the biggest questions of mind and consciousness in the process.

And this understanding turns Criados into a truly formidable figure of immense power: He is an absolute menace and a genuine threat to the Lovely Angels, and is the first antagonist who can truly compete with them on their level. He possesses all of the girls' narrative powers, except twisted and honed into terrifying weapons. He's telepathic, but he projects it as an invasive and debilitating image-based assault. He leaves a trail of destruction wherever he goes, but, unlike Kei and Yuri, when he does it it's *very* deliberate. He's even capable of rewriting the narrative of Dirty Pair: When I first saw this episode I was a disappointed that all of Criados' backstory seemed to be pulled out of thin air in a throwaway exposition dump, and I remarked it would have worked better as the end of a story arc because it felt like a sequel to a story that didn't exist. Upon rewatching it though, I realised that's exactly what it is. Criados is so powerful and so frightening he can bend the show to his own will, calling forth a story revolving around him out of nothing, which is something only the Angels were able to do before.

This is why Criados is so dangerous: The last handful of villains have in one way or another been pegged as evil twins of the Lovely Angels, most obviously the Elegants, but King too. Criados, though, is the one who's actually come the closest to besting them, and this makes him genuinely nightmarish. While Lan and Jerry were the girls' doppelgangers as far as the plot was concerned, Criados actually has mastery over postmodern cinematography. King did too, but he was only able to attain a textual level of enlightenment (if you recall, there were very few scenes of King looking directly at or out of our camera). Criados is on another level-His perspective has granted him an understanding of the true nature of reality, and he would use this knowledge to wipe it out. Even before the girls show up in this episode, we get to hear Criados' ominous voice while intrusive countdown timers and error messages constantly pop up everywhere, shattering the diegetic coherence and artifice of the narrative. Criados is literally trying to force the universe to crash, and it's well within his power to do that.

In this regard, the threat Criados poses is that of a narrative collapse, which is usually defined as a story that has the potential to destroy the narrative and prevent any future stories from being told through a catastrophic and irreparable disruption, hence the name. In fact, “Criados' Heartbeat” would seem to be an almost textbook example of a narrative collapse right up to its final moments by teasing us with a major plot twist: The death of Nanmo. In a narrative collapse story, the restoration of the status quo can only occur with a blood sacrifice, and this would certainly suffice-Being in many ways the biggest differentiation between the anime and the light novels it's based on, killing off Nanmo would in a sense mark the end of this version of Dirty Pair. But of course, Nanmo is a robot and can't actually die. While she does activate her self destruct sequence and prompts Yuri to fire her body at the computer core thus destroying Criados and severing his connection to the space station, she removes her memory disk first. As Kei points out several times, Nanmo can very easily be rebuilt if they have that disk, which contains all of her essential programming, in essence, her personality and consciousness.

So Nanmo's supposed “death” turns out to be anything but, and this means she becomes a mirror of Criados himself and the episode's transhumanist theme. What this shows us is that it's not his experiments with technologically augmented ascendent spirituality that doomed Criados, but his obsessive self-absorption, anger and desire for revenge. Where Criados went wrong was not the fact he was a shaman, but the fact that he was a shaman gone bad and was never able to fully process and come to terms with the visions he experienced. And, in a way, perhaps Kei and Yuri did him a favour by killing him, thus allowing him to return to the cosmos to start again. Incidentally, this has the added bonus of averting our narrative collapse: By fighting transhumanism with transhumanism and having Nanmo very clearly not die, the girls have regained control of their narrative. Even here they're able to dance out of trouble (a big clue things will turn out alright is Kei's behaviour-Note how her biggest concern is not her and Yuri dying or the end of the universe, but that she's going to miss her date). Kei and Yuri didn't cheat narrative collapse, they beat it. They collapsed a narrative collapse.

Speaking of Kei's (and Yuri's) attitude, one last thing worth mentioning is the way the respective personalities of the Angels are depicted here. If there's one criticism to level at this story, it's that this seems to have retroactively become the blueprint for a lot of what the pop perception of what Kei and Yuri are like, and that's not quite a good thing. Kei spends a lot of this episode seemingly not depicted in the best of lights, acting really hotheaded, obnoxious, impulsive and reckless. Yuri, by contrast, sits around alternating between serene competence and exasperation. I think this was perhaps the start of Yuri being seen as the “mature”, “responsible” and “professional” half of the pair, which is as inaccurate as it is misleading and dangerous.

That said, this is the fault of later, careless and cursory readings of the show rather than the episode itself. Note how the moment Yuri tries to go solo and take matters into her own hands she nearly gets everyone killed, how Kei is the one who comes up with the plan to defeat Criados because she understands Nanmo and how, as I mentioned above, the relative lightness and joviality of Kei's demeanour telegraphs to us from the very beginning that Criados isn't going to win. The point the episode is trying to make, I think, is that the Lovely Angels need to be taken together or not at all, and it is in truth splitting up Kei and Yuri that would kill off Dirty Pair faster and more decisively than any amount of cosmic horror and metatextual narrative collapse. But then again, one of the biggest strengths of Dirty Pair is that this can never happen.

What “Criados' Heartbeat” is definitive proof of is that Dirty Pair will never succumb to the temptation of being self-consciously and po-facedly “epic”, in spite of its science fiction heritage. Criados wanted everything to “Die!”. Kei and Yuri want to not just survive, but to live, and that's the message they bring to us, perhaps above all else. Even though it features explosions and carnage left and right, Dirty Pair is about love and hope, not conflict and destruction. And that alone means it can never be collapsed or killed off.

Live.

“We're on a mission from God.”: The Chase Smells Like Cheesecake and Death

It would be one thing if all Dirty Pair did was ramble through different film and literary genres parodying and riffing over them in the process. It's reliance on Long 1980s postmodern cinematography notwithstanding, that would not be an especially novel concept. What Dirty Pair needs to do is to carve its own niche within the televisual landscape of the era: Not just making witty commentary, but delivering its own unique message about what science fiction means in this day and age. The books are very upfront about declaring that it's Kei and Yuri's purpose to usher humanity into a new era, by fire if necessary, but the anime does seem to prefer building to this ultimate revelation a bit more methodically.

We will, of course, eventually get there, and sooner rather than later. And while “The Chase Smells Like Cheesecake and Death” at first seems like a complete romp, this episode is in truth another step towards that (I mean, it is a complete romp too, but it's more than that). This is another great example of how postmodern cinematography and knowing constructed artifice can be used to emphasize different narrative truths, and be a bloody fantastic evening of entertainment to boot. The comparisons...Well, they're obvious, aren't they? There's no way this is anything other than a knowingly wry and comprehensive send-up of The Blues Brothers. For those unaware of that particular movie (for shame), The Blues Brothers is a 1980 comedy film by John Landis, John Belushi and Dan Akroyd based on their Saturday Night Live sketch of the same name. Both concern the titular Blues Brothers, a blues revivalist band fronted by Belushi's and Akroyd's characters Jake and Elwood, who grew up in a Catholic orphanage and form a blood pact by cutting their fingers with a guitar string said to belong to Elmore James after being introduced to the genre by the orphanage's janitor.

The film sees Jake and Elwood breaking parole to reunite their band to perform a benefit concert at the orphanage they grew up in, which is facing foreclosure. They go on a cross-country quest, which Jake constantly reminds us is “a mission from God”, to locate their old bandmates, all the while being hunted by the police as part of a ludicrous car chase that lasts essentially the entire movie. The climax is a thing to behold, with Jake and Elwood screaming through a downtown metropolitan area in the “Bluesmobile” trying to shake their pursuers, whose ranks have been bolstered by the addition of a Neo-Nazi group and a country band, whom the brothers somehow managed to also arouse the ire of.

And, true to form, “The Chase Smells Like Cheesecake and Death” is about three-quarters car chases throughout the neon canyons of Elenore City, with Jake and Elwood replaced by Kei and Yuri and the Bluesmobile replaced by two slick motorcycles. Dirty Pair even manages to *one up* The Blues Brothers in this respect because the police here have futuristic hovercars and go after the girls in *three-dimensional traffic* before the epic showdown on an incomplete section of bridge held aloft by a helicopter. That climax, by the way, is an absolute comic and narrative triumph: It manages to have three simultaneous fight scenes, choreographed synchronized car crashes across five lanes of traffic and at least three different subplots coming to a head all at the same time in the span of a few minutes. It is nothing short of poetry in motion.

And it's not just that one scene: The whole episode is a work of art. Consider the sequence near the beginning of the episode, when Yuri returns to the apartment with the groceries. The TV show doesn't make as big a deal of the girls' psychic connection as the books do, barely even mentioning it, but this scene conveys it loud and clear without words through visual symbolism alone. Watch how Yuri tosses Kei the apple, which she catches backhanded, and then notice how this is mirrored a few seconds later when Kei throws away the apple core and Yuri intercepts it with the dustbin without having to even look. Kei and Yuri are so in sync they can anticipate each other's moves before they even act. Aside from the beautifully elegant framing and structure, I just think its delightful that we get to open on the girls chilling in their apartment talking about their favourite TV shows, hobbies and love lives: It's a fantastic moment that proves the Gods of Destruction are people too and while (sometimes literal) world-shattering catastrophe is just another Tuesday, there's more in the girls' day than just that.

This sublime, effortless tightness and sense of playfulness is everywhere in “The Chase Smells Like Cheesecake and Death”. It can hit us with a brilliantly mad concept practically every single cut that somehow manages to top the last brilliantly mad concept it hit us with each time without missing a single beat: Runaway house cat infused with an experimental anabolic steroid that can level buildings and has a penchant for cheesecake? Check. Mughi's intelligence network of alley cat contacts? Well, that's just to be expected, isn't it? A literal hair bank where patrons can store samples of their hair follicles for posterity? Why not? At this point anything goes, and yet never once does the show's constructed universe seem to lose focus or coherence. As random and bizarre as all of this is, it never feels like randomness for the sake of randomness: Somehow, it all seems to fit together through its own unique sense of internal logic. The show simply bounds from peak to peak never once letting up its stream of bonkers genius or tripping up in its pacing.

(Also note how the framing and timing work together to tag Kei and Yuri as in some sense outsiders: The opening scene with the construction workers goes on even as Yuri jogs by oblivious to their conversation. Kei and Yuri exist on a separate narrative plane from the world they're interacting with.)

But although the basic structure of this episode immediately calls to mind The Blues Brothers (as well it should-The bad guys' henchman are even the spitting image of Jake and Elwood, I mean it's exact), this story is nothing so mundane as a parody of The Blues Brothers with Kei and Yuri. If that's not what it is though, what is it? And why invoke The Blues Brothers so heavily in the first place? Well, our first clue is that while the imagery is very John Belushi, the actual humour is more John Cleese. Cleese's famous and groundbreaking sitcom Fawlty Towers, which he co-wrote with Connie Booth, is particularly well-remembered for its intricate and meticulous structure: Each episode would have a multitude of seemingly minor and irrelevant subplots woven through the fabric of the main plot, ever-so-slowly and methodically growing in severity before they all join together in a gigantic comedic title wave that crashes down on the characters in a spectacular fashion. Fawlty Towers also derives much of its comedy from misunderstandings, people talking past each other and situations snowballing to such a degree they become completely out of anyone's control. It's also worth noting how the show has basically one sympathetic character, Connie Booth's Polly (Basil Fawlty fans, remember “sympathetic” is not equivalent to “likable” or “fun to watch”), whose commendable and endearing efforts at keeping the peace tend to be met with even more disaster.

While The Blues Brothers uses a similar “seemingly minor events snowball to the point they're uncontrollable” structure to Fawlty Towers, it's nowhere near as drum-tight about this. That Jake and Elwood start out as convicts has always puzzled me a bit, as it gives the police a reason to be after them from the beginning, whereas I think it would be funnier if it was another misunderstanding. Also, I've always found the way the film builds to its climax to be almost *too* logical-It never quite reaches that peak of sublime comic exaggeration for me. In this regard, “The Chase Smells Like Cheesecake and Death” is far closer to the Fawlty Towers style of snowballing plot then the Blues Brothers one. Though she poses an imminent threat, Malatesta is ultimately a very minor project for the girls: I mean, rescuing a lost cat is *the* cliche activity for public servants to do. But, because this is Dirty Pair, it becomes this epic, overblown disaster that entangles the entire city. This is *especially* clear in the wedding scene, which, is, as far as I'm concerned, an utterly flawless series of sitcom gags that's on par with anything John Cleese and Connie Booth wrote. It's a masterpiece.

And yet it's not entirely accurate to call this a pure Fawlty Towers plot, or even a Fawlty Towers plot mashed up with The Blues Brothers. What this episode is in truth is something that, while it invokes both works, is utterly unique unto itself. Why would Dirty Pair be doing this? Because it's making the claim that this is an intellectual tradition it can be a part of. It's taking a look at what defines a Dirty Pair story, drawing comparisons to other works the audience might be familiar with, and showing them not only how Dirty Pair is the same kind of thing, but how it can do this kind of story in a science fiction setting and what unique advantages that science fiction setting can bring to it. And there are some: Being able to effortlessly leap between completely bonkers concepts without giving us too much time to think about them gives “The Chase Smells Like Cheesecake and Death” a huge advantage over The Blues Brothers as it can take that basic structure and kick it into warp drive, making it potentially infinitely more funny than it would be if it was constrained by real-world logic and physics. Just as it's been doing for the past few weeks then, this is another example of the show defining itself and coming into its own.

But in my experience, humour tends to work best if its targeted at something, preferably an authoritarian and hegemonic structure. Dirty Pair knows this too, and while it's still having fun, it's fun with a purpose. And this is why the villains need to be Kei's professional wrestling idols. Their name, the Elegants, carries an obvious double meaning: They're not only the evil mirror counterparts of Kei and Yuri, the Dirty Pair, but they're also an evil version of the real-life Beauty Pair, who were the original inspiration for the Angels themselves. With this, the show takes its first real step forward from the series' original conception: Because as beneficial as our Soda Pop Art heroes can be, the fact remains they're always going to belong to a capitalistic, corporatist system that's not really working for the benefit of humanity. The Elegants only care about themselves, and would betray their own family and fans for their own desire for more power and fame And that's a betrayal that's at once cuttingly brutal to Kei and Yuri, even if it is a betrayal that they, like us, knew was always a possibility in the world of Soda Pop Art. But even so, it's a betrayal they can not and will not stand for.

This is also the final level on which the Elegants become an evil mirror of the Angels: Lan and Jerry (whose names even sound like “Kei” and “Yuri”) are “elegant” because they hire a bunch of henchman to do their dirty work for them. They always stay offscreen, unwilling to get their hands dirty until they don't have any choice in the matter. Kei and Yuri, however, are, as we know, the Dirty Pair. They jump right into the fray. They make a mess. And, though things will inevitably appear to be superficially worse off after the girls show up, they always leave the universe a better place then they found it. They may be messy and not at all elegant, but they're not only more fun than Lan and Jerry, they're more sincere and demonstrably better people. And, in beating the Elegants in a wrestling match/action setpiece, literally beating them at their own game, the Angels attain the next stage of enlightenment by both acknowledging the form and place of their birth while also rejecting the shackles they would be burdened by had they stayed there.

Kei and Yuri have reclaimed themselves, and there's absolutely limit to what they can do now.