ダーティペア Episode 05
Dirty Pair 05

SPOILER Summary:

Kei and Yuri are on a rented space ship traveling to Planet Antares. Yuri is trying to read while Kei, floating around, is playing music by Bobby Huey, and clearly excited. Apparently, he finally has a song that makes it to #1 on the charts. Yuri has had enough and shuts off the music. She and Kei go back and forth on turning on and off the music until Yuri wins by turning the ship’s gravity back on. Kei isn’t amused, saying that Bobby would have been happy she was playing his music. Kei met Bobby and started dating him. Yuri looks at a picture of the two on the beach and doesn’t see what Kei sees in him. Kei has a date that evening and is to meet Bobby at the Cafe Flamingo at table 7. Yuri’s heard Kei say this so often, she mutters the same thing under her breath. Because of Kei’s date, Kei opted to not use Lovely Angel but rent a ship instead.

The ship gets a strange message saying “Execution Countdown” and a timer. The ship is then heavily buffeted as a large, glowing object suddenly appears in their flight path. They hear a loud voice say “die” and they expect to crash into the ship, but it apparently warped away at the last second. They do a scan for the object, but find nothing. It is a mystery, but they proceed to Antares and land. Kei is frustrated that the airport staff won’t allow her and Yuri out of the designated area because they arrived in a rented ship. Yuri, who’d been patiently waiting and reading, steps in and produces the 3WA ID. The staffer recognizes them as “Dirty Pair,” which annoys both of them, but he lets them through.

Kei goes to the hotel to change while Yuri wanders through the city. Yuri gets a mental blast, hearing the word “die” again and sees the countdown briefly. She then finds herself under attack from some automated craft. At the same time, Kei is under attack and using her weapon, she tries to blast away at the giant claw that’s trying to get her through the walls of the hotel. The floor gives way and Kei and a maid find themselves falling as Kei flees. Kei, still in her underwear, comes out to a main street where law enforcement are now responding to this attack. She manages to steal a police vehicle to elude one of the automated craft, where she eventually manages to destroy it, but loses the police craft in the process.

Meanwhile, Yuri is also fleeing and notices that her attackers only come close but never hit her, which is unnatural. She races back to the spaceport on foot, and gets back to her ship where the droid Namo is waiting. She takes off, but is dismayed to remember that the ship has no weaponry. Again, the attackers press their attacks, but make sure not to do anything that would kill Yuri. As such, Yuri finds Kei and rescues her before fleeing the planet. The attacking force follows them from the planet and gives chase. Yuri tells Kei that whomever is behind the attacks clearly wants them alive. As such, she stops their ship and allows the pursuing craft to catch them.

They are taken back to the white, glowing object, which stops glowing. Kei and Yuri have a bad feeling as they recognize the craft, which is an old hazardous materials space station named Creados. As their ship is taken inside the station, Yuri starts to rethink her idea of letting themselves be captured. Kei remembers the facility was shut down due to major problems, leading Yuri to quip that someone reopened it just for them. Yuri has Namo run a search on who might be behind this as Kei is frustrated over being being late for her date. Namo comes up with the name “J.S. Creados,” but he’s supposed to be dead.

The discussion comes to an end as the automated craft begin to dismantle their ship. They get into space suits and escape before the ship is destroyed. Outside the ship, Kei and Yuri find themselves separated with Namo ending up with Yuri. Kei doesn’t respond to Yuri’s calls until she mentions a hot guy, which bring Kei around. Namo has additional information for the separated pair. Apparently Creados was addicted to a drug known as Probaetana. Kei and Yuri had taken down a major drug network three years prior and apparently Creados blamed them for his troubles. So before committing suicide a year and a half ago, he set up the station to be his final revenge against Dirty Pair.

Kei realizes they need to destroy the main computer but both she and Yuri find themselves trapped on top of separate automated attack craft. They are taken to the center of the station where Namo’s attempts to access the attack craft is rebuffed, knocking him offline briefly. When he comes back online, he ejects his core memory disc and gives it to Yuri. She’s puzzled by this, but before they can figure it out, the machinery says “die” to them a few times and causes them discomfort. Kei’s not keen on dying since she has a date. Since Namo is a new creation, Kei figures that Creados can’t have accounted for the droid in his automated death trap. Since Namo’s core memory is preserved, they can use Namo’s self-destruct device to destroy the station’s main computer. That’s what Namo had in mind when he gave Yuri the core.

Kei directs Yuri on how to detatch Namo from his small legs. Yuri then manually fires Namo to the central computer where the self destruct goes off, destroying the computer. With the computer’s control mechanism gone, the automated attack craft stop and Kei and Yuri are free. However, Kei’s determined to make it to her date, so she hops into one of the craft and leaves Yuri behind, to Yuri’s irritation.

Thoughts/Review: I was actually interested in this episode, despite the fact that in the end, it was much ado about nothing. The writers spent the time with fanservice, both with Kei in her underwear and with the various action stuff, but also managed to work the mystery part pretty well. However, when the episode was done, I thought, “OK. So what was that about?” Then I remembered that Dirty Pair isn’t about deep stories, but just some adventures. They don’t have to have a point but just provide action and a little bit of humor, along with Kei and Yuri’s friendship/partnership. In that, the episode succeeds.