ダーティペア (TV Anime) Episode 21 Review
Dirty Pair – 21

SPOILER Summary/Synopsis:

Yuri and Kei find their vacation plans thwarted by an urgent mission — Flight 807 from Planet Marshal to Planet Duke arrives with all 463 passengers missing. Yuri and Kei work with Inspector Eddie, who’s daughter Melody was on the flight and who’s doll was the only thing found on the space plane to indicate anyone had even been aboard. Yuri and Kei meet Arthur, the son of Eddie who lives with his father while his sister lives with their mother. Yuri thinks Eddie knows more than he’s letting on but doesn’t press too hard on the subject and they leave Mughi with the boy.

Taking Lovely Angel to fly the route of Flight 807, they are nearly crashed into by a craft bearing the mark SR1000. However, before Yuri and Kei can pursue, the craft is gone, displaying professional elusive tactics. After their flight, Yuri and Kei are no closer to understanding what might have happened, so they pour over the passenger list and crew. Yuri is “elected” to stay with Arthur while Kei checks out a local establishment where she sees a car marked with SR1000. She finds the person who’s vehicle that is, but the woman gets the drop on Kei. The woman turns out to be Shannon Ross, Arthur and Melody’s mother and another investigator.

Returning to Eddie’s office, Kei and Yuri are not happy to see that Shannon and Eddie are both bull headed and have decided to run separate investigations when a co-operative investigation would make things go faster and smoother, especially now that a message has been received demanding ransom for the missing passengers. Leaving the office, Yuri again expresses her concerns over Arthur’s odd behavior when it comes to this case. Yuri thinks that Arthur could be behind the disappearances. They spot him taking off to go play and stop to have a chat. However, that is interrupted by a driver in an air car that tries to run them over. They take Arthur back with them where they discover a new message from the kidnappers demanding even more ransom, something Arthur refuses to believe.

Thoughts/Review:

You know, I was a little surprised to see the “tsuzuku” message at the end of the episode, marking that the story would be continued into the next episode. Guess I’ll be watching another Dirty Pair episode sooner rather than later.

Anyway, this was rather an interesting episode. I got into the mystery aspects of the story and following Yuri and Kei’s investigation. That said, I smell a rather cliched explanation coming up. As I see it, young Arthur and Melody hatched a scheme by which they thought they could bring their parents back together and possibly live together as a family. I can follow the kid logic in that a kidnapping would bring both parents out to work together. It brought them both out, but not together. Arthur’s reaction to the second ransom message suggests that he made a deal with some person(s) to pull off the kidnapping and that being a kid, he believed them when they promised that it would be a fake kidnapping when in fact, they were in for the money all along.

We’ll see if I’m right or not, but that’s where this feels like it is going.

Things are pretty much by the books when it comes to the plot and as such, there’s not much else to comment on there. The only other notable moment came from an unexpected comedy moment when a Yuri damages a flowerbed in front of a house when she saved Arthur. The young girl who opens the window and discovers this, only to yell for her mother make me laugh for some reason. I guess it was funny to me because I didn’t expect it to happen, especially since this episode is pretty devoid of humor. Well, there was the fan service moment, but I didn’t find that funny.

The U.S.S. Enterprise from the original Star Trek gets a cameo. ^_^

Well, nothing to do but move to the next episode.