ダーティペア (TV Anime) Episode 22 Review
Dirty Pair – 22

SPOILER Summary/Synopsis:

With the latest ransom demand asking for more money and something called File-E, Eddie knows this to be a real ransom demand despite Arthur’s protests that this is not real. Yuri and Kei convince Arthur to tell what he knows. Since his parents (Eddie and Shannon) were going to get a divorce, Arthur and Melody didn’t want this so Arthur talked a pilot named Clocker into helping him with his scheme. Arthur faked a passenger list for flight 807 so that the flight took off empty and Clocker provided the communications with the control towers to complete the perception that Flight 807 was real. Flight 808 was the real flight.

Eddie leaves to check on Flight 808 after Yuri and Kei are informed that File-E contained a lot of information on a criminal ring, which Clocker and his co-pilot were part of. Eddie learns that Flight 808 never made it to Ocean Rive, its intended destination. Thus, the kidnappers have Flight 808. As Kei and Shannon investigate a scrapyard on a nearby space station, Yuri goes with Arthur where Arthur attempts to hack into the SWA computers to find out where the criminals have Flight 808. A further communication from the crooks sends Eddie alone to meet them with the cash and File-E.

Kei and Shannon fail in their mission at the scrapyard and are now going after Eddie. Yuri reports their success (with the aid of Namo) and they set out to the scrapyard to find the missing space plane. Meanwhile, Eddie lands and meets Clocker and his co-pilot, who have no intention of letting Eddie leave alive. Eddie manages to get away with a wound when Kei and Shannon arrive on their ship to give Eddie cover. However, they are soon captured and Kei buys time while using her earring communicator to inform Yuri that there’s a bomb on the plane. Back at the scrapyard, Yuri find the disguised space plane and evacuates the passengers and gets rid of the bomb. She then moves in to surprise attack Clocker while Mughi takes out the co-pilot. Yuri and Kei chase Clocker before being chased themselves until they trap Clocker in a scrap crusher.

With the case solved, Eddie, Shannon, Arthur, and Melody are reunited. After Eddie has his wound treated, he and Shannon are in a park somewhere watching their kids play and discussing what will happen to Arthur for his serious computer crimes. Kei and Yuri drive up, dressed for vacation, and turn over a copy of their report to 3WA for the two to sign. In the report, Kei and Yuri make no mention of Arthur, thus officially, Arthur played no part in the crime. With that, Kei and Yuri are off to the beach for their long awaited vacation.

Thoughts/Review:

It wasn’t hard to guess Arthur’s part in this whole scheme, though the fact that he had such an elaborate hacking role to fake a flight was something I didn’t quite expect. I did predict accurately that Eddie would have teamed up with some folks he trusted but whom were bad cookies and that the reason for his hijacking plan was to get his parents back together. I guess it worked since they are together at the end of the episode and Shannon addressed Eddie as “anata” (~”darling”) when she spoke to him. That suggests that they are going to give their marriage another go.

I did have to laugh at Eddie’s hacking tools. Granted, this anime was done in the mid-80’s, but it is supposed to reflect a future where space flight is common and there are many habitable planets as well as space stations. So it is always amusing to me when an 80’s-styled car is used, or in this case, a computer that looks more like a TRS-80 upgrade complete with a phone modem — the kind where you take a phone handset and place it into the modem cradle. *lol* I’m not sure how I would have viewed this in 1985 when that kind of modem technology was king, but I remember sci-fi stuff from the day showing futuristic data communications that didn’t involve a phone handset. ^_^;

Another thing that made me chuckle was the whole File-E thing. They give the crooks a disc with the data on it and even today, such a thing comes off plausible (DVD, Blu-ray) though maybe less plausible considering they are supposed to be in the future. That aside, the funny part is how Clocker takes the data disc and acts like it is the only copy in the world. Now, even in 1985, I would have been laughing about this because even back then, there was a such thing as backups where data is archived in case of catastrophic happenstance that causes loss of said data. So I guess the idea that this disc contained only a copy of the data never entered the crook’s mind (or apparently Eddie’s) and that’s likely because the writers hoped people would look at it like it was a single-copy paper file rather than a data file.

Well, these little things are part of the fun and nostalgia of watching a classic like Dirty Pair.

Still, the episode was entertaining despite all its flaws and the confusion of the whole scrapyard part of the story. Seriously, either that old man that runs the place was in on the scam or is the dumbest person alive. Otherwise, how do you get a giant space plane into the scrapyard, disguise it while keeping the passengers on board (apparently, though I was never quite clear on that aspect) and keeping the yard workers in the dark?

Only two more episodes in the TV series to go.