ダーティペア (TV Anime) Episode 24 Review
Dirty Pair – 24 (TV finale)

SPOILER Summary/Synopsis:

A killer is targeting beautiful women in some apartments, leading 3WA to assign Kei and Yuri to the case. After three days in an apartment less than what they are used to, Chief Gooley contacts the frustrated pair, who are pretty ignorant about the situation. Gooley asks if they’ve read the files sent over and they lie to say they have. After the communication is over, the files are found and read and Kei realizes that they are bait to draw out the killer. Of further interest in the files is that the clue “salesman” (in English) was left at one of the last crimes. As if on cue, a middle aged door to door salesman arrives selling energy knives. A few minutes later, a very attractive man arrives selling specialized bras. The bra salesman excuses himself to use the toilet but instead attempts to steal and gets busted by Kei.

After strenuous denials about being the killer, another salesman comes to the door. It is a twelve-year old boy with artificial eyes who says he hates women. The next visitor is a plain clothes policeman, who chats about the publicly known facts about the case. After watching a news report about the killings, Yuri discovers that all of the killings were in apartment buildings that were eight by eight in terms of stories and windows across. The letters left on the victim’s heads were in fact symbols for chess pieces. As such, the killings were done as part of a chess game. Figuring that out, Kei and Yuri make all the moves on a chess board and discover that their apartment will be checkmate.

Yuri decides to play a hunch and brings out some tea and sugar. She “accidentally” trips, causing the sugar and tea to get on the policeman. After this, she announces that the bird in the apartment, whom she calls Jake-bird-chan, was the lone survivor from the last murder and it would recognize the killer. Kei releases the bird from its cage and it charges the policeman, screeching its hate. The policeman fends himself from the bird, breaking a window and allowing the bird to escape. Pulling out a razor claw, the policeman attacks but is taken down by Yuri after a brief fight. In the debrief, Yuri explains that she felt the killer would switch from a salesman to something else and a cop seemed right. Using the bird’s sweet tooth, she forced the killer to come forward. With that, Gooley announces that they have captured the killer’s twin, who was also involved in the murders.

Thoughts/Review:

This episode was rather unique on a couple of fronts. On one front, Dirty Pair has always been violent to some extent. After all, Yuri and Kei are known for causing major destruction in places that they go, but usually, this is just “cartoon violence.” I suppose that the murder that happened in the first scene could be classified as cartoon violence as well, but even though the murder wasn’t directly shown, it was pretty horrifying nevertheless. That’s because you had the woman’s screams, the sounds of the knife repeatedly plunging into the victim, the shadow of the killer doing his deed, and the blood as well. I was kind of surprised at that and it set a certain dark tone for the remainder of the episode.

On the other front, Dirty Pair has always been known for fanservice. This is the first time that I recall getting detailed nudity in any of the classic Dirty Pair episodes, OVA’s, or movies I’ve seen. I imagine that there were many an otaku who nearly had a heart attack when the lovely Yuri’s breasts were detailed as she showers (let’s face it, Yuri is the hot one of the pair). I was certainly surprised that this was shown, but then I remembered that this was the final TV episode for the series. Two more episodes were originally scheduled and did get released as OVA’s. I figure that the production team decided to go out with a bang and that they did.

The story is like a parody of any number of “who done it” movies, books, series, etc. With most of the episode set in the evening and the storm outside, “a dark and stormy night” popped into my head. That said, the whole notion of twins who are serial killers who choose their victims based on the fact that the apartment complex they live in have an 8×8 grid from the outside (eight stories high and eight windows wide) AND those apartments MUST have hot, single babe(s) living in them is rather nutty. The phrase “does not compute” kept coming into my head, though I’m sure that if I really stretched myself, I could come up with some ridiculous explanation on how that could even work. I think I’ll take a nap instead.

There was some odd name usage in this episode. The weird bird was called “Jake-bird-chan.” The salesman that Yuri and Kei found to be hot kept calling them names like “Tomato-chan” and “Cabbage-chan.” *lol* Granted, using the English words buys them some cover with Japanese audiences, but as a native English speaker, the whole notion of calling some girl “Cabbage-chan” or even “Tomato-chan” just isn’t something I’d think to do. So even though I don’t think it was intentional on the part of the Japanese writers, having a character use those kind of names made me chuckle.

Not that it mattered, but I think this is the first episode where neither Kei nor Yuri wore their traditional, skimpy 3WA uniforms.

So, the TV series goes out with a bang of sorts, leaving the final two unaired episodes for OVA’s, which I will now watch.