This is part one of a two episode mystery involving 463 passengers of a space plane disappearing completely out of nowhere after appearing from hyper space. Can Kei and Yuri find out what happened? Stay tuned.I am on the ending trail of these Dirty Pair episodes. This is episode 21 out of 26 and isn’t that crazy? I didn’t think I would actually be able to do this watch along, but it happening somehow and I am almost done.
Anyway, episode 21 features the mystery of what happened to flight 807 from it’s usual scheduled trip from Planet Marshal to Planet Duke. As it’s already stated, there were 463 passengers on that plane which disappeared out of nowhere. The plane landed by itself on autopilot and the only foreign object on the plane was the doll of a little girl named Melody. The daughter of the SWA Inspector Eddy Ross who is completely calm about the situation somehow. He also has a son named Arthur who doesn’t get a lot of attention, but is a wiz with technology. Kei and Yuri spend more time with the kid and learn what he can do. The appearance of the mother, Shannon Ross who is also an investigator and barely shows any attachment to the case either is interesting. With the three Ross family members in place, the episode ends with no conclusion. Only a ransom that Arthur says is wrong.
So, I have some theories on this episode’s mystery. Which I love, because this is such a wonderful change of pace from the last two episodes that were kind of meh and weren’t as well written. Instead, we have a fairly interesting mystery that considers the limits of the world itself. How can passengers just disappear? Well, I do think this is a family problem sort of episode. I mean, it’s obvious with the focus on the three Ross family members in place where the parents are more career people that don’t care about their kids that much. This also was emphasized from the only thing on the plane was the doll from their daughter. So either Arthur, the kid, was able to have the technology available to him to capture the passengers to get attention from his mom and dad OR he is working with some dangerous people to get the resources for this case and it went beyond what was originally planned to be another major incident. I mean, it’s too obvious if it was just Arthur, right?
I do talk about this from time to time, but I really enjoy the retro future technology of this show. I say this because Arthur had an entire computer room with lots of different sorts of older sets of technology in his room that connect to something. Bits of technology that look 80’s, but space aged. That goes along with things like the holographic telephones that are obviously with land lines with somewhat advanced technology. Besides some of kei’s gear like her light up ear rings that can call their space ships or tell the two when they have a case, no major mobile phones or communication devices. It’s hard to think of how that would be our future now where we are so connected with each other, but I don’t think anyone in the 1980’s even thought of cell phones yet. How wild is that? Not very, but seeing the not modern, modern get arounds to this are interesting.
This episode was good. A bit slower, but a change of pace like this is always welcome to change up the show’s formula.
Mechanical Anime Reviews 