The word that keeps coming to mind for me with regard to Double Decker! Doug & Kirill is “fun”.  And truthfully, there are way worse things one could say about a series than that.  If one was looking for a Tiger & Bunny connection I could see being disappointed, because I can’t really find one – not just in terms of the story but the tone, too.  But apart from that I think this series is really delivering.  It’s balls-out committed to its own irreverence, and has just enough grit so as not to feel insubstantial in spite of that.

The notion that this week’s episode would focus mostly on Doug’s old partner Derrick was kind of a feint, though he did factor into things a bit and I suspect he’s going to have a major role to play before it’s all said and done.  Derrick, as it happens, left the force and now owns a bar – though there was apparently a deeper reason why he did what he did, which he reveals later to Deana “Pink” del Rio (Hayami Saori) but not to the audience.  Stay tuned for more on that in later eps.

As for Pink, she is indeed the de facto star of the episode – along with K, who me spent time with last week.  Pink is part of the group called “Travis’ Angels” along with Fujoshiro Yuri (Tanezaki Atsumi) – she’s actually a robot, though Kirill seems to be the only one who didn’t know – Sophie Gainsbourg (Endou Aya) and Maxine “Max” Silverstone (Taichi You).  That’s certainly a dated and absurd American pop culture reference (not to mention a wildly sexist relic from another era) but somehow it seems to fit the Double Decker aesthetic to a T.

It’s Pink who grabs the spotlight for now, though.  She’s SEVEN-0’s rogue cop, with no use for the rules or a partner to force her to stick to them.  Travis ends up assigning the by-the-books K to hang with Pink on an undercover investigation of a host club, and the two predictably clash at every turn.  Eventually K ends up going to her old sensei Gary at the drug enforcement division for help, but he turns out to be crooked and ends up blackmailing K into setting up Pink and helping him trade up out of the Anthem trafficking (and murder) racket.

There’s certainly some cop-show violence on display here, but the silliness is so ingrained in this series’ DNA that it’s hard to take any of it too seriously.  Eventually Pink does wind up seeing the good side of K – who as it turns out reminds her of her old “partner”, who happened to be a dog.  We also learn that Doug is kind of an asshole courtesy of the narrator (though let’s be honest, it was kind of obvious), which apparently (according to the narrator) puts on the character pieces in place for the plot to lurch forward.  I don’t recall ever having been told that quite so explicitly, but Double Decker seems to be a show that isn’t too worried about anime convention.