Sensor Scan: Miami Vice

Among the many, many ways Kei and Yuri shifted this blog's course and changed its mark was forcing me to drastically alter the structure of this essay. I was always planning to cover Miami Vice in some fashion here: It was an important enough show at the time, I watched enough of it and it left enough of an impact on me such that it's a not-insignificant part of my television viewing career and there's considerably more creative overlap between it Star Trek then I think a lot of people realise or understand.

But before I made the decision to cover Dirty Pair episode by episode I had planned to go into a great more detail here, anticipating a rather lengthy critique of the show's basic ethical premises and assumptions. But I don't need to do that anymore, because Dirty Pair already did that for me in the frankly stunning “No Way! 463 People Disappeared?!”/”We Did It! 463 People Found!” two-parter. Not only that, it tossed it out as an afterthought; one small fraction of a much grander and more splendid tale of love, healing, intrigue and hope because Kei and Yuri are better than all of us. So really, there's not a whole lot more I can say about Miami Vice's basic conceit and its depiction of life in the Miami/Dade county vice department that wouldn't be repeating what either I or Dirty Pair said in the context of the “463” episodes.

There's always going to be ethical questions about TV shows whose protagonists are police officers, and rightly so. This kind of genre is always one of the easiest with which to slip unto unabashedly brutal hegemony, especially given what's happened to the United States' police departments in recent decades and given the sorts of atrocities we now regularly see them committing in the news. It can be very challenging, especially for someone subscribing to the political persuasion of the average reader of, oh, let's say this blog, to warm up to a show like Miami Vice, and this is understandable and to be expected. One thing that is worth stressing, however, is that Miami Vice was nothing if not a show that committed to itself and its ethical claims and seemed to internalize every critique leveled against it over the course of its five seasons: The much-parodied colourful pastels of the first two seasons eventually gave way to darker Earth tones in later years, which better reflected the show's basic outlook. The whole thing even ultimately ends by having Crockett and Tubbs resign the force in bitter rage and disgust, feeling that everything they've done since becoming vice cops has made life provably and catastrophically worse for themselves and everyone around them.

Because that's the thing about Miami Vice-People think this show was all about bright colours, tropical scenery, glitzy high-rollers and girls in bikinis and it wasn't. In fact, this couldn't be any further from the truth of the matter: This is a deeply, deeply cynical show whose opinion on the human condition could be charitably called “nihilistic” and uncharitably called “hopeless”. I don't think I've ever seen a work of fiction whose populist perception is any more divorced from its actual content than this.

As much as Crockett and Tubbs are charismatic authoritarians by virtue of being leading men who are police officers in a (well, pesudo-) police procedural, they're also characters who, from the very beginning, are quite keenly and openly aware of the destructive nature of power structures and the role they in particular are playing in them. The pilot episode focuses on how Crockett's job as a vice cop has completely estranged him from his family, who have long since moved beyond him, and how Tubbs' got his brother assassinated in a sting gone bad back in New York. The iconic scene, with the two cops driving off into the night to a Phil Collins single, is all about how they're almost certainly heading to their deaths at the hands of a massive shootout. The first story arc (one thing among many Miami Vice does not get anywhere near the level of recognition for pioneering that it deserves) is a five episode serial about Crockett and Tubbs trying to bring down their arch-nemesis Calderone and never once succeeding in doing anything apart from contributing to massive collateral damage, ending with Lieutenant Rodriguez, someone pegged as a regular main character, getting gunned down in vengeance hit job. Although the show would mix up its subsequent serials with a more episodic approach after this, the overall despondence of the first arc set the tone for the rest of the series.

The first thing new viewers hyped up on expectations of pastels, beautiful scenery and delightful 1980s cheesiness learn about Miami Vice is that anyone can die, the good guys never win, the world is a heartless and unforgiving place, innocent bystanders *will* suffer as a direct result of your actions and nothing you do has any hope of ever making a difference.

Of course, part of the reason Miami Vice has the reputation it does is because of its unique look-and-feel. Nothing on United States television had looked like this before, and it's a tough case to make to say anything after it looked like it either. The two most commonly repeated stories about Miami Vice were that it was the first US TV show to deliberately look “cinematic”, thus paving the way for subsequent TV series to be more like movies, and that it was conceived when NBC head of entertainment Brandon Tartikoff scrawled “MTV Cops” on a napkin and sent that in as a show pitch. The latter is by most accounts simply untrue, although it's worth mentioning simply because of Tartikoff, who will crop up later on in the project as the CEO of Paramount who asked Rick Berman and Micheal Piller to come up with a spin-off of Star Trek: The Next Generation (Tartikoff being far from the only link between Miami Vice and Star Trek). The former is worth parsing out, however, because Miami Vice is in truth hardly cinematic, or if it is it's only cinematic in a very narrow and strange set of ways. 

Miami Vice was certainly responsible for changing how TV incorporates music, as it was one of the first shows to regularly shell out for the licenses to use current charting pop hits, which is something that movies often do and is standard practice on television now, but was unheard of when the show debuted in 1984. But what really set the show apart was its utterly jaw-dropping art design and attention to detail: Producer Michael Mann was tenacious about ensuing the world of Miami Vice evoked very specific moods and themes and was very precise about how things like colours and blocking conveyed different things. I watched a making-of documentary about this show once and I was absolutely awestruck at the amount of effort that went into every single shot of every single episode of this show for five whole years: Mann would obsess over things like the outfits the extras were wearing, how they were walking and where they were stood in relation to the action. The show would even buy up and re-develop entire city blocks *solely* for the purposes of getting a shot to look right. If it appeared onscreen in an episode of Miami Vice, you can be absolutely certain it was there for a reason and was meant to symbolize or make you feel something.

Take Sonny Crockett's infamous wardrobe, for example. The reason he wears T-shits under designer suits, leaves his collar constantly unbuttoned, keeps five o’clock shadow and wears shoes with no socks is because the guy's a broken, disheveled mess of a human being. Just look at his hair. He gets practically no sleep, is always bouncing from operation to operation and has to constantly look the part of a high-rolling drug dealer. He probably comes back home to his boat every night and falls asleep in that getup, then rolls out of bed the next day to do it all over again. And, once the show turned even darker (which was apparently somehow possible against all sense and reason) starting with the third season, his preference for whites, pinks and blues fades away to be replaced with oversized, ill-fitting dirt-brown and grey tweed. You can discern pretty much everything you need to know about Crockett just by looking at the guy, this was absolutely intentional and that it spawned a trendy fashion movement that's become the poster child for the glitzy and gauche '80s can only be explained as a case of the audience catastrophically missing the point.

MTV Cops or no, Mann was well aware this series was being made for an audience that was “...more interested in images, emotions and energy than plot and character and words”. And that's this show's real innovation and why it's so special and important: It marks the first time in US television where it became possible to do a show free to experiment on a higher level of narrative resonance, no longer weighed down by obligations to hackneyed Writing 101 bullet points. And this bears consideration in the context of Star Trek too, as we're entering the period where Star Trek is commonly seen as being mini made-for-TV sci-fi movies. When people like Rick Berman talk about how doing Star Trek in the 1980s and 1990s amounted to taking a feature-length science fiction film from pitch to screen in a week on a television budget and timetable and isn't referring just to ILM's special effects, this is the sort of thing he's talking about.

However, we need to parse out this statement a bit, because it can be a bit misleading. The truth of the matter is, from a critical perspective neither Miami Vice nor Star Trek: The Next Generation were actually cinematic in the traditional sense-Yes, they were both visually spectacular to look at, but they were both shot on video in 4:3 (or composited on video in the case of The Next Generation) with a lot of close-ups and as such they both lack a certain sense of scale Hollywood movies tend to have. These shows are only “cinematic” in the sense that art design, imagery and the way things are shot, framed and composited are now important in a way they weren't before. They're not mini-movies or even trying to ape movies: They're still TV shows, they're just a new and different kind of TV show.

Furthermore, and more importantly, neither Star Trek: The Next Generation nor Miami Vice act slavishly beholden to representationalism, a concept which I personally feel lords over all truly cinematic works these days to the point that it's become irreducible from them. The case for The Next Generation is obvious, set as it is in an overt science fiction-fantasy world, and it also has a staunch theatrical heritage we'll look more at once we start talking about the show proper. But this is equally true of Miami Vice which takes *extreme* liberties with law enforcement protocol and, despite taking its name and inspiration from the Floridian port city, has about as much to do with the real Miami as Starfleet Command does with San Francisco. This was a source of much chagrin for many Floridians, who started to become exasperated at delirious people flocking to Miami giddy with excitement to start living it up like Crockett and Tubbs only to discover a run-down slum of a port city.

This is, it must be stressed, not the show's fault: It never once made any pretenses that it was accurately representing life in southern Florida. Because the series was about images, emotions and ideas above all else and even though it adopts the police procedural trick of doing “ripped from the headlines”-type stories later in its run, the Miami of Miami Vice by necessity has absolutely nothing to do with the real Miami-It's obviously and self-consciously a constructed fantasy world modeled after the real thing in order to tell stories about the culture of greed, excess and heartlessness that had come to define the Long 1980s. Which is the other thing about Miami Vice: Although it's a crime drama following a team of cops and is supposedly on the side of law and order, its unrepentant cynicism (another thing it shares with 1990s Star Trek) effectively cancels out a majority of the ethical concerns such a setup might otherwise raise.

Forget cleaning the mean streets of lawbreakers, simply trying to do their job day to day as police officers causes this squad to become an accessory to the most horrific of situations. As police officers (and remember this show hails from a time where police officers at least had the impression of being honest working-class characters rather then the thuggish, hyper-militarized trigger-happy hate groups they act like today thanks to the Department of Homeland Security), the Vice team is caught in the middle of an impenetrable quagmire of corruption on all sides, and no matter which way they turn or what they do everyone's gonna lose in the end. And the show's underlying message is that it's the attitude of modern society, that is, the Reagan-championed Neoconservative revolution, that's allowed all this to happen.

No, drug dealers were not high-class jet set Nouveau-riche in 1980s Miami-That's another aspect of the fantasy world the show creates to emphasize its themes. But, the point of that character archetype is to demonstrate how the world Miami Vice creates is one where those sorts of people, the affluent, the high-rollers, the powerful, are criminals. One where the Yuppie ideal, and everything tangentially connected to it, is shown to be inherently decadent and depraved. The vice team winds up fighting against the military and federal government as often as they do drug smugglers (that is, when they're not one and the same), usually with even more disastrous consequences. This is a world where toxic individualism, cronyism and greed for power permeates every level of every institution and nobody cares about anything or anybody unless it increases their own lot or furthers their own shortsighted goals. And it's a world where those truths are conveyed within and through itself, with little to no need for any other kind of narrative.

(This even ties into the flashy cars, boats and high fashion Miami Vice casually throws around: Crockett, Tubbs, Trudy and Gina are ordinary people living undercover to infiltrate the 1% and bring justice to obscenely wealthy and powerful wrongdoers. The job of a vice cop is to live convincingly in multiple lives. It is, in fact, a kind of performativity and the show acknowledges this on multiple levels.)

What all this means is that really, Miami Vice is a science fiction show, and I don't just mean in that one weird UFO episode from the fourth season where Trudy boards a spaceship that randomly lands in the everglades and James Brown is an alien. Because it's using its world to tell stories, a world that is, I remind you, consciously disconnected from real life, and is explicitly more invested in ideas and emotions than plot, Miami Vice is far closer to what we'd call speculative and genre fiction then the standard contemporary drama to which is its frequently compared. Which also makes it such a gobsmackingly brilliant grand slam that Dirty Pair should give it a nod during one of its high-water marks: In hindsight, the shows really are in a sense compliments of each other, both being postmodern speculative fiction shows focused on concepts that draw some influence from buddy cop dynamics and detective fiction.

(Indeed, Dirty Pair even arguably anticipated and addressed the notorious “Crockett gets amnesia and becomes his drug dealer alter ego” story arc five years early with the “463” two-parter, and it didn't have to fridge anyone. Miami Vice does, unfortunately, have an occasional tendency to fridge people, usually Crockett's one-off love interests. And once, extremely uncomfortably in the aforementioned case, Sheena Easton.)

In fact, I would have actually liked Dirty Pair to engage a bit more with Miami Vice, because Kei and Yuri posses and understand something that Crockett and Tubbs were never quite allowed to: Utopianism and hope. In spite of its breathtakingly gorgeous cinematography and location, Miami Vice, while always thought-provoking, remains unceasingly dour. You're kind of left feeling like there's no way out of the existential hell the show surrounds you with and that your life and ambitions are futile and meaningless. Dirty Pair provides the counter to that: Through love, compassion and enlightenment we can all strive to better ourselves, help each other in the world in our own small way. I would have really enjoyed seeing a proper Dirty Pair riff on this show, set in a futuristic fantasy Miami stand-in that really took all the imagery and vibes of Miami Vice, kicked it into the stratosphere, brought the cleansing fire, ran giddy through it and gave it all a happy ending and sense of hopefulness. I guess that's the utopian in me.

Because I have to say, in spite of its quirks and foibles, I've always had a soft spot and affection for Miami Vice. It was one of the few shows of its kind to genuinely hook me and keep me invested all the way to the end. The world it creates, unrealistic and unrepresentative as it may be, has always fascinated me: It's one of my absolute favourite fantasy worlds in all of visual media, and is probably largely, if not directly, responsible for the visions of neon-tinged urban tropical port city metropolises that have seen better days that still haunt my imagination to this day. The acting is just as good as the production values: Though Don Johnson and Phillip Michael Thomas trend towards the showboating and their characters were the breakouts due to being charismatic leading men, another thing people tend to forget about Miami Vice was that it was a really well-done ensemble series as well. Saundra Santiago's Gina and Olivia Brown's Trudy were always depicted as equal to their male squadmates and each had numerous episodes and story arcs dedicated to them. And then there's of course Edward James Olmos as Lieutenant Castillo, whose performance of a stoic, yet passionate and dedicated man with hidden depths is mesmerizing, and in whom I see shades of William Adama to come.

And it has done some material good: Although the show's Miami bore no resemblance whatsoever to the real Miami, the production team set aside $1 million per episode to help their generous host city's at the time struggling economy and infrastructure, and it did have a calculable impact on Miami's tourism industry. Although that said, the gentrified, resort-choked tourist trap that is Miami today can't really be seen as anything other then a net negative, and now the show looks even *more* inauthentic as the Miami you can visit today really shares nothing in common with its television counterpart. Whatever simulacrum of that world might have existed at one point or another is now gone forever. Whether or not Miami Vice can be fully blamed for that though is up for debate, and it's here that the real problem of basing its fictional setting on a real place becomes clear: Undiluted science fiction doesn't have these kinds of problems because nothing in it could even remotely be mistaken for a real person, place or situation. Though on the other hand, “real” science fiction must also always face the stigma of potentially never truly being taken seriously: I wonder if even something as popular, iconic and influential as Star Trek: The Next Generation will ever be remembered as the kind of television milestone Miami Vice is.

Which it is. It's a show that's as important as it is misunderstood, and one I do recommend spending some time with if you get the chance. Like most TV shows, it has about two-thirds more episodes than it really needs, but that's hardly a slight on Miami Vice in particular and when it does work it's something quite unique and special. It won't necessarily be the most fun evening of television you'll ever have, but I have a feeling it might just be one that gets you thinking and leave you with lasting memories.

“...and in this our love is everlasting.” Dirty Pair: Affair of Nolandia

“Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.”

-Carl Jung

Though historians and completionist fans of the TV series were undoubtedly happy to have them, the episodes released as With Love from the Lovely Angels were not what paved the way for Dirty Pair's future on Original Video Animation, nor were they even the first Dirty Pair OVA stories to be made. For that, we must travel back to December, 1985 and Sunrise Animation's experiment-within-an-experiment: Dirty Pair: Affair of Nolandia, the first proper Dirty Pair movie.

In the history of the series, Affair of Nolandia is frankly every bit as important as “How to Kill a Computer” and The Great Adventure of the Dirty Pair, and yet for some reason it tends to go frustratingly overlooked by fans. In spite of what its release date and medium of choice might have you believe, this is not an epilogue to the recently-concluded TV show, this is something consciously and manifestly different. Affair of Nolandia can trace its roots back to the same place as the very beginnings of the first series, but walked a markedly separate path to the screen. The story of how it came to be and what it helped bring about is just as interesting as the story it actually tells, and it reveals a lot about how prescient this franchise has always been.

During preproduction of the first series, it was decided very early on, for better or for worse depending on your perspective, to take it in a noticeably lighter and more irreverent direction then its source material. Though Haruka Takachiho's novels are definitely humourous, they're also quite explicitly science fiction with an emphasis on world building and ideas. For whatever reason, though I strongly suspect it had something to do with Sunrise in a sense always knowing how niche science fiction (at least this kind of science fiction) tends to be, the TV show was designed from the beginning to focus quite heavily on slapstick, anarchic parody and self deprecation.

That's not to say it wasn't intelligent, it obviously was, it's just that as a consequence it traded in things like lengthy exposition and cohesive constructed worlds for heavy subtext, symbolism and a structure so unabashedly episodic that the one time it wasn't was a big clue things had gotten serious. Sunrise knew that while this tonal shift would give the show more broad-strokes and mainstream appeal, it was also going to very probably alienate a huge portion of people coming to it from the novels. So, all while the first series was being produced by one team, Sunrise gave a second team the assignment to make an OVA movie completely unrelated to the TV show that would overtly cater to the novels' hardcore science fiction fans. That film became Dirty Pair: Affair of Nolandia.

The first consequence of this is that although it trends far, far closer in tone and style to the novels then anything in the TV series, just like “How to Kill a Computer” before it, Affair of Nolandia is quite clearly establishing an alternate continuity of its own entirely distinct from that of either them or the TV show: A pattern that would hold for every subsequent Dirty Pair anime release. With the exception of the second series produced exclusively for OVA in 1987 and 1988 and the failed reboot of 1994's Dirty Pair Flash, (neither of which were in continuity with each other or with anything else), there would never again be a single, cohesive continuity for Kei and Yuri's stories.

Sunrise goes out of its way here to make this movie stand on its own, and this leaves an immediate and lasting impression. Even the girls have undergone subtle, yet noticeable, personality shifts; feeling far more adult, worldly and competent then Sunrise has shown them before while still being affable, quick-witted and jokey. They occupy a perfect midpoint between their novel and TV show depictions, and combine the best elements of both. But with the partial exception of the Angels themselves, absolutely nothing here is recognisable to someone who might only know Dirty Pair from the TV show. There's no Gooley or Elenore City, and the girls' home base is once again the Lovely Angel itself, which looks much closer to how it does in the novels. On that note I have to say I prefer the ship this way: As much as I love the Chibi Enterprise, this just looks sleeker and cooler. In fact, this particular interpretation looks a bit like the Naboo Starfighters from Star Wars Episode I, but, you know, in a good way. Also, while Nanmo is still here, Mughi's fur is black instead of brown, a nod to his novel counterpart, and he's furthermore considerably less of a cute animal sidekick, which is, again, appropriate.

Getting back to Kei and Yuri themselves, they get an altogether more realistic and mature design to go along with their more multifaceted and complex personalities, another sharp contrast with the deliberate cartoonishness of the TV show. And though their costumes look superficially similar to what they wear on TV, they too are slightly different and imbued with blink-and-you'll-miss-it symbolism: This time, the girls are clad in their own birth signs-Though Piscean Yuri retains her familiar Yellow, her lucky colour in Japanese astrology, Kei gets a striking Violet Blue, which symbolizes her Sagittarian heritage. It's details like this, combined with the lovely way the girls are portrayed here, which I'll talk a bit more about later on, that make this depiction of Kei and Yuri really memorable for me, and an honest-to-goodness contender for the definitive one. When I go back and re-read The Great Adventure of the Dirty Pair and The Dirty Pair Strike Again today, it's this version of the Lovely Angels I picture in my mind, not Yoshikazu Yasuhiko's actual illustrations.

And it's not just our leading ladies; Affair of Nolandia is a truly inspiring and evocative work all around. This film is utterly fantastic in every sense of the word. It looks every bit as much of its time as the TV series, but it does so in altogether different ways. Now, when I say this, I don't at all mean it looks dated or passe: I think there's a unique...feeling is the only way to describe it...about science fiction from this period, especially Japanese science fiction, and it's something I have a genuine fondness for. It's hard to explain, and there's really only one other work I can think of off the top of my head that evokes something similar to what this movie does for me: The Star Trek movies don't count and don't have it. Star Trek: The Next Generation might have it very early on, but I need to rewatch it and I'm inclined to categorize it as something else...something running parallel with the divide between the mid-1980s and late-1980s.

But both this movie and the first Dirty Pair series have it, though Affair of Nolandia has it in spades owing to they way it so completely captures the imagination. Everything here feels vast and hauntingly beautiful, from the opening gaze deep into a starfield that seems to go on forever to Nolandia itself and even the Lovely Angel, which feels equally expansive and lonely at different points in the story. There's a sense of melancholy, nocturnal elegance and quiet introspection about the entire world, which is a perfect fit for the story Affair of Nolandia is telling us. And it's all summed up magnificently by the unforgettably bittersweet yearning of the theme song “Love Everlasting”, which takes the motorik of “Space Fantasy” to the logical limit by doubling down on the electronic percussion and pairing it with atmospheric touches of synthesizer backing reminiscent of twinkling starlight and Yasuko Maki's gentle, contemplative vocals. This is proper late night space trucker music, as is only befitting of the first real time Kei and Yuri are overtly set adrift in the intergalactic void.

If it seems odd I've made it this far without addressing the plot or the symbolic associations in its subtext, its because Affair of Nolandia also marks a turning point for the franchise in terms of narrative. This is an incredibly visual film, and it relies on imagery to an extent no previous Dirty Pair work (including the novels) has. Aside from the production value just being on the whole better given this is an OVA release, art design, though it's always been important in Sunrise's Dirty Pair, is definitely elevated to a higher stature here then it perhaps has been elsewhere. Affair of Nolandia wants you to look at the stories that its world is telling you, and in that regard the editing is something to behold. It's incredibly artistic and imaginative, and there are times it's borderline psychedelic in the actual consciousness-expanding sense of the word.

On top of everything else, there's a real sense of wonder and imagination here that sci-fi constantly tells us is its specialty as a genre and that it very rarely actually delivers on. The images of the creatures living in Nolandia forest still stick with me as I write this, and that part of the movie alone conveys more imagination then the overwhelming majority of Star Trek ever did. This doesn't mean, however, that the actual mystery plot is banal and uninteresting: Affair of Nolandia isn't Blade Runner and doesn't phone that part of the narrative in. But what this does mean is that it that standard plot structures are no longer as central to Dirty Pair as they might have once been, which also means, ironically enough, that in spite of its fealty to them, Affair of Nolandia also casts off one of the last remaining aspects of the franchise it inherits from Takachiho's novels that keep it beholden to pulp sci-fi storytelling. We can now tell stories about and through images and ideas without always having to link that all back to either some murder mystery or bit of comic showboating.

As for the plot itself, Affair of Nolandia is most commonly read as being extremely cynical and much “darker” and more “somber” then the other Dirty Pair animes, save arguably Flight 005 Conspiracy. But I don't think that's really the case. Except for maybe one admittedly pretty unsettling scene, I don't think this film is dark and moody at all. In fact, there's a great deal of comedy here that wouldn't feel out of place on the first series, except it's tighter, more refined and woven better into the fabric of the larger piece then was always the case on TV. Rather, what I think Affair of Nolandia actually manages to be is a more adult Dirty Pair story (On multiple levels-I should probably warn people watching it for the first time on my blog that there are more then a couple moments here that are definitely NSFW): This is a story that is unabashedly musing on notions of love, power, responsibility, dreams, visions and the fundamental nature of reality. Kei and Yuri set the tone from the very beginning, as they open the movie with an honest-to-goodness philosophical discussion about that which exists, that which doesn't and that which comes from someplace else, with Kei even explicitly stating people can make things real by transmuting dreams into physical form.

This turns out to be particularly telling foreshadowing, as the girls' mission is to protect a mysterious young girl named Missinie, an ESPer like themselves, who has gone missing in the impenetrable forest of Nolandia, the only habitable area on the surface of the gas giant Ookbar. Missinie has the power to create intense and disorienting psychic illusions, and there's a price on her head as there are several parties in positions of extreme power who have an interest in her abilities. Beat for beat, this feels like a distilled, condensed version of Takachiho's first two Dirty Pair novels: Kei and Yuri show up for what seems like a mundane mission, they get the cold shoulder from local authorities who clearly have something to hide, it's slowly revealed there's a lot more going on then it seemed at first glance, Kei and Yuri gain the upper hand by making contact with a higher and more enlightened form of consciousness that recognises them as its equals and everything ends in a spectacular action scene. That's not to say Affair of Nolandia feels derivative, however: The contrary, what's so special here is how it manages to do all this while still feeling fresh and new, demonstrating the malleability (and ultimate superfluousness) of this type of plot.

In terms of heady symbolism, Affair of Nolandia is as out-there and metaphysical as Dirty Pair has ever been: While Missinie is on the one hand creating illusions, its through them that she can fully express herself, speaking most fluently through images and memory. As Yuri says, this is how she “opens her heart”. Missinie, like the Angels, is a performer and an artist, and her psychic abilities represent the power to create worlds out of visions and emotion. We also get to see the other side of this in the film's one genuinely dark scene, where Missinie projects her fear into the horrific illusions she makes Kei suffer through before she comes to understand her and Yuri and their peaceful intentions.

The movie is unquestionably relentless about showing us Kei's nightmares (and it should be noted how many of them revolve around losing, or losing touch with, Yuri), and I could see this putting off people accustomed to the more lighthearted tone of the TV show. It's properly close to Commander Riker's psychic torture scenes in “Frame of Mind”, to the point I wonder if Brannon Braga or director James L. Conway had seen this, and I think this may actually be worse. It's also crucial that this happen to Kei, as Yuri, being Yuri, lacks a certain level of interiority it's easier to see in Kei. It's also possible to read this as another example of the girls' metafictional reality as to Kei, Yuri is not only a real person who is her soulmate, but someone that she, through her writings, projects a set of ideals onto. The scene is so creepy and effective that it actually brilliantly subverts the film's narrative coherence: Like Kei, we're left never quite knowing what's real and what isn't after that, but, in a world that actually is literally a mindscape, does it really matter? Do descriptors like that even hold any meaning anymore?

With a name like “Ookbar” I can't help but draw parallels with Jorge Louis Borges' short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, about a diegetically fictional country called Uqbar manifesting itself in the diegetic “real world” and how this is the first indication that a group of scholars and thinkers has pooled their thought-power to transform Earth into a new world of their own, known as Tlön. There really are a striking number of similarities between Uqbar and Ookbar: While Missinie has the power to create illusions and alter people's perceptions of reality, she herself is a product of Orun's genetic engineering experiments to forcibly impose his will on the universe. Nolandia, a verdant forest in the middle of a gas giant, is referred to many times as an impossibility, and ties into Kei and Yuri's opening discussion about how things are not real until we make them real. Even Ookbar's capital city on the plateau really shouldn't be there, and this proves crucial to the climax. In the words of the estimable Angry Video Game Nerd, Ookbar is *literally* a “planet where everything that never existed got thrown away”.

And just like Borges' story, Affair of Nolandia is about how different people give their dreams and ideas material form. But where Borges seemed at times concerned more directly with a kind of totalitarianism that could rewrite fact, Dirty Pair looks more frankly at the role of the Ideaspace in our everyday lives. Missinie seems malicious at first, but she's in truth a scared child projecting her own fear outward and giving it form. Orun at first seems like a straightforward capitalist obsessed with consolidating power, and he is, but he's much more than that as well. There's no real money to be made in the experiments he's doing, certainly not when compared to the potential prospects of the phony Uranium mine he's using as a cover story. No, what Orun wants to do is will the universe into perpetual war and conflict as proof of the power he thinks he wields: He's a psychopath consumed by dark magick. There's a very firm feminist critique here too, as Orun's attitudes are shown to be catastrophically destructive on a grand scale and implicitly part of patriarchy and male supremacy: Look at how his right-hand man is a hyper-masculine cyborg programmed for nothing more then sheer violence and how it's Samara who is ultimately redeemed as she comes to recognise the reclaimed divine femininity of Kei and Yuri.

And it's once again Kei and Yuri, women-become-goddesses and goddesses-become-women, who stand in contrast to the other characters, at first quietly, and then defiantly. Their love for each other and for the world governs their every action here, from Kei's adorable flirtatious tease in the opening scene to the absolutely heartwarming act they spend living alone together in Nolandia forest when the Lovely Angel crashes, which is what convinces Missinie they're of a kind and only want to help. Because while Nolandia may have had artificial origins, it's now part of the shared natural consciousness and must be treated with the same respect and care as the rest of nature. Unlike the manipulative Orun and the scared, confused Missinie, Kei and Yuri know how to communicate their love through images: The way this movie realises their psychic link, one of the extremely rare times this is explicitly shown in Sunrise's animes, is a genuine work of art that speaks volumes about who Kei and Yuri are and what they mean to each other. Through this level of understanding, Kei and Yuri birth worlds and tell stories in the mindscapes they share with one another.

And it's this same attitude of complete understanding and sublime self-actualization that leads to the dazzling back half of the movie, an absolute roller coaster of masterful action sci-fi full of compelling chases and dynamic fight scenes expertly blended with comedic interludes and dramatic pathos that never once feels inappropriate or misplaced as the Angels roar back into town on the winds of change. With Orun by this point firmly established as a truly despicable character, he makes a terrific heel and I really did find myself rooting for the Lovely Angels like this was some futuristic wrestling match. Yuri's unwavering dedication to chase down and punish Orun for his evil deeds is one of the single greatest sequences in the franchise and, because Affair of Nolandia saves its moments of large-scale property damage for just when they're the most important and appropriate, it's triumphantly satisfying and cathartic when the bad guys finally do go up in flames in properly spectacular fashion. Though the Angels may be guided by the larger universe and they don't force change through will as Orun tried to do (because that would be patriarchal), they still very much act on what they feel to be right in the moment. For “agents” of the cosmic oversoul (did anyone else notice that wordplay before?), that's the surest path to material progress as is possible to find.

(Kei and Yuri are frankly perfect here across the board: I might point out that Yuri seems to get a lot more exposition and dramatic speeches then Kei, but Kei isn't ever demeaned for this and it seems fitting considering Yuri has always been a more aloof and bookish person and this isn't actually out of character for her given her depiction in the books. And anyway, I feel I've been unfairly down on Yuri a lot recently and she truly does get some *amazing*, and entirely deserved, moments in this film. For this reason, on top of everything else it does so beautifully, if you're looking for one single work that best summarises the entirety of the franchise to serve as an introduction, I have no hesitation in recommending Affair of Nolandia as a terrific starting point.)

So perhaps then one way to read the final scene where Ookbar's capital city collapses into its atmosphere as the Lovely Angel warps away is as a commentary on how trying to weaponize ideas is ultimately self-destructive. The final shot serves as a more than fitting capstone for Affair of Nolandia on the whole: It's a defense not only of the redemptive reappropriation that Dirty Pair has always tacitly engaged with and that keeps it a relevant beacon of hope almost thirty-five years later as of this writing, it's an earnest and heartfelt statement about the role love and understanding play in enlightenment. And while Kei and Yuri are left alone with themselves and their thoughts, as it must always be, their act of love remains with us long after they drift off together into the night. Kei and Yuri dreamed the world together, and decided to share it with us. And we found it full of love, hope and starlight.

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

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

Regrettably, Sunrise do not adopt the sensible solution.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What a strange episode to go out on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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