Lupin the 3rd: Part III 26
Lupin III Part 3 26
ルパン三世 – Part III Ep. 26

SPOILER Summary/Synopsis

Goemon fishes on the Hudson River one night and catches a skeleton. He says a prayer and places flowers. However, the skeleton grabs him and winks. Goemon returns to his luxury hotel in Manhattan, where a girl named Lilly does aerobics. She addresses him as Oujisama and says she’s fallen in love with him. Goemon flees to a rural, Japanese Buddhist temple outside New York City and begins prayers to no avail.

Meanwhile, Jigen, Fujiko, and Lupin case the luxury cruise ship owned by Kermain Jacob. He has a solid gold pinball machine, which he stole via a rigged card game. Jigen notes the pinball machine is bolted to the deck. Back at the temple, Goemon decides to bury Lilly’s body in the Japanese cemetery to no avail. As he leaves with Lilly, another Lilly shows up, having swapped out Zantetsuken for a fake so she can retrieve the gold pinball machine.

Lupin, Jigen, and Fujiko return to learn about Goemon’s ghost problem. They borrow Zantetsuken from him and attempt to steal the pinball machine. However, since the Zantetsuken on Goemon’s person was fake, the sword breaks. Zenigata has Jigen and Lupin tossed into the brig. A bunch of Lilly’s attempt to take it, only to be thwarted in thrown into the brig. Zenigata takes issue with how Jacob deals with the situation.

Fujiko seduces Jacob and gets Zantetsuken back to Goemon. He frees everyone, and cuts through all decks of the ship to liberate the pinball machine. The girls and Lupin’s gang escape in a helicopter, towing the machine. Lilly apologizes to Goemon and explains they wanted to retrieve their grandfather’s item. Lupin allows it, so he and the gang ditch into the Hudson River.

Thoughts/Review

One thing about Lupin the 3rd: Part III 26 — I don’t know if there were an actual supernatural element or not. The episode clearly shows supernatural things happening, such as the skeleton grabbing Goemon, then disappearing. Lilly literally disappears at times. She vanishes at times. And yet to appear in different outfits, Lilly and her other four, identical sisters (quintuplets, I suppose) apparently all pranced around Goemon and all pretended to be Lilly.

But the episode doesn’t make either of these things clear. For all we know, all five girls are ghosts of some kind. I get the feeling the writers of the episode want us to think that everything can be explained away ’cause “quintuplets”, even though they aren’t called that in the episode. And oddly enough, only the real Lilly shows any kind of feelings for Goemon. But then at the end, Lupin calls Lilly a cute ghost. He may have been joking about the ghost part. However, the writers may have wanted the audience to question whether or not there were ghosts in the episode.

As to the heist itself, I didn’t care about it so much. What I will say is that the plot apparently having the sisters target Goemon for Zantetsuken is a massive stretch.

Final Thoughts and Conclusion

Let me wrap up my review of Lupin the 3rd: Part III 26 with some final thoughts.

• I suppose the writers thought it was funny dressing Zenigata as a clown in New York City. But to add to his humiliation, let’s make him do Whack-a-Mole with Lupin popping out of the numerous manhole covers that are all over.
• The official translations for this series have always been bad. I’d rank them as just about Chinese bootleg subs. That aside, they adapter didn’t deal with “Oujisama” well. To avoid using it, sometimes, the adapter added text that wasn’t said, such as Lilly claiming to love old men. She said she loved Goemon-oujisama, not that she loved Goemon, and old men. Indeed, the gags of Goemon getting frustrated about basically being called an old man by Lilly is lost.
• Who knew that outside New York City, there’s a Japanese temple and Japanese graveyard. 😂

In the end, Lupin the 3rd: Part III 26 is a dumb episode. It is a shame that Goemon and Lilly couldn’t be a couple.