Very interesting to have an election based episode during an important election year. I don’t think this one hits as hard due to a lot of focusing flaws.
Dirty Pair episode 14 opens up with Kei watching sappy soap operas. Ones where the women has had a dark past and the man doesn’t care. You know, classic drama. Of course, this reality is horrible and a political debate randomly shows up in the middle of the screen before the kiss. Then no matter what channel Kei turned it to, the political stayed at the center of the screen. How horrible. This leads up to Kei not only having gambling debt and the girl’s pay check lacking money, but a political debate hosted by 3WA and an assassin going after 3WA’s information vault called Pandora. We know that the assassin was hired to wipe the candidate Guilder’s past crimes in Pandora, but this episode is about Kei and Yuri figuring this out for themselves with their own side bet while discovering people who were murdered at 3WA. Wild times. How will Guilder’s past effect the election? We will soon find out. Or at least Kei and Yuri will find out because we already know.
The worst thing about this episode was the Chinese stereotyped character showing up once again. Kei owes him 5,000 credits from Mahjong and I can’t help but be pretty annoyed by this fact. Everything he says is a Chinese reference and I hate it. He only takes up two minutes of screen time and he lowers the episodes quality just by being there.
Next, I think this episode feels off for a couple of reasons. The first one is that this is 2020 and elections are not as pure as what as this show represents it. Can you imagine a future where the past of a candidate actually effects their chances of being elected? I’m not kidding here, none of those things matter in the United States. That’s a petty one. My major one is how having a political and assassin plot together makes the episode way too jumbled. I think the episode about Kei and Yuri hunting for an assassin and stopping them from going into the pandora vault alone would be more interesting. That sense of ambiguity for why he did it would make it a much better reveal. Plus, a pretty boy hiding inside the group of female security and general workers and having Kei and Yuri finding him alone would be top tier Dirty Pair episode material. Taking away that ambiguity damages it. Especially with the simple political lesson that isn’t true.
Also, I have to mention the unnecessary but hilarious horror of Pandora’s security system? Why is scaring people to the point of being paralyzed a thing? How does it work? Isn’t that a little too expensive and experimental of a thing to do just for protecting an information vault? Like, in this world, projecting a force field that is inescapable would be a much more valuable option then digging into a person’s inner fears? Still, I’m glad that it exists. Something needs to compete against the tunnel in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate factory for unspecified horror reasons and now I found it. Mission accomplished. I think? Was that a mission?
So yeah this episode was good, it just has too much going on for it to be great.
Mechanical Anime Reviews 