Yes, as I said earlier Golden Kamuy is most certainly the best show of the season. But the battle for second is much closer, and while I waver on the matter a lot, every time I finish an episode of Double Decker! Doug & Kirill I’m pretty convinced it’s the one. There are way too many people sleeping on this series (as usual with good ones that don’t check the usual boxes) – it’s not just good, it’s excellent. If Gridman is the one that came out of absolute nowhere for me, Double Decker is the overperformer – the one that was on the radar, but not expected to fly so high.
Unlike Golden Kamuy, which has an endless array of gears (though it’s heavily ridden overdrive this cour), Doug & Kirill basically has two. But they’re so totally different and it does both of them so damn well that it really doesn’t need more than that. For its first four episodes this show was abjectly absurdist and silly and great fun, but two of the last three eps have been deadly serious – gritty cop stories about as good as anime has produced since the first season of Psycho Pass. And uniting them is the tremendous sense of style that this series never loses – it’s one of the best-looking anime of the year to be sure.
After a brief postscript to last week where Deana insists the group hide the truth about Kirill’s brother from Derick (I hope that gag doesn’t drag out too long) we do, finally, get to find out who Doug’s first “partner” was – but the story is a little different than expected. She wasn’t a cop, but an information broker named Pat – and a 12 year-old girl at that. She worked as a shoeshine and Doug always tried to get her to quit her dangerous side job, even in the end trying to give her a gun – but Pat refused to take it on the grounds that a cop should never give a gun to a civilian. And one day she ended up dead, riddles with 13 bullets, a victim of the Esperanza boss “Good-looking Joe“.
One thing is clear in this episode – Doug is a smart guy, but not necessarily a good cop – at the very least, he isn’t someone who always follows the rules. He’s never gotten over this, and while Kirill tries to intervene to prevent Doug from going down avenues a good cop shouldn’t Doug clearly won’t be dissuaded. Doug refusing to let this drop causes an old informant named Paul to end up in the hospital and Doug’s old boss, Dennis, to end up as a hostage of good-looking Joe – from whom he buys his supplies of the drug (heroin?) he’s addicted to.
Getting the peerless Miki Shin’ichiro to play Joe is just another feather in the cap of Doug & Kirill. He delivers every line in this episode like he’s on fire, packing so much cruel humor and braggadocio into Joe that you feel like you know this guy personally. I have to say, even if he came up with a pretty solid plan (thanks to help from Apple, which had the possibly not-accidental side effect of knocking Kirill out of commission for a bit) this was not Doug’s finest hour. Going to Good-looking Joe’s den alone was a bad bet any way you cut it, and Doug was lucky to walk out of there alive.
Here’s the crux of the matter, though – it’s Travis’ question to Doug “Did you know the gun was going to misfire?”. Travis is willing to suspend disbelief because he’s loyal to his squad (whether “I choose to believe they’re all moral people” is true or not), and Kirill comes up with a suitably Kirill-like fairy tale explanation for why Doug knew. But the truth which you and I both know is that Doug was fully expecting that Lady Joker to fire. Does that change the way Travis or Kirill feels about him, or we as viewers? That’s for everyone to decide on their own I suppose – but Doug remains one of the more interesting and complicated anime characters of the season, and that makes Double Decker a much more compelling series.
JJ
November 7, 2018 at 4:42 amI’m actually going to go one better – this is the anime I look forward to the most this season.
As you said, this series’ impeccable sense of style wraps everything together.
Yukie
November 8, 2018 at 4:14 pmSame here! I’ve been busy and have a lot of unfinished summer anime, but I’ll always watch Double Deckers on schedule.
It’s the biggest surprise of the season for me, because I actually didn’t enjoy T & B (I can’t remember if I dropped it around the 5th episode or in the near the end of the first cour). In fact the only thing I remembered about T & B were the CGI sequences and the fancy art style, and I remember finding it difficult to focus on the plot since I found it boring (#unpopular opinion). But then again, I guess T & B and DD are really different in terms of plot and tone.
animealex
November 7, 2018 at 6:23 amThis was the second best episode of this series as of now. Episode five wins for me and Doug’s plan to overwhelm (and kill) Good Looking Joe stretched my suspension of disbelief a little bit to much. But everything else was stellar. Also I may be slow on the uptake in that matter, but only now did it click for me, that Doug is a very, very dangerous man.
Interesting side note: Someone has swapped the dental records of “Z” and the luckless prison guard. I’m wondering what the fallout will be, when the truth of Frank Zabel’s survival comes to light.
My only fear for this series is, that the main story won’t be wrapped up to my satisfaction with only five episodes remaining.
Guardian Enzo
November 7, 2018 at 6:44 amI worry about that too, though it’s six remaining. DD is paced like a 2-cour series so far.
elianthos80
November 11, 2018 at 12:16 am@Enzo: somehow I had completely missed this being a single cour series. NAYYYYYY D,:
Anyway, I am among those who end up watching this as soon as it’s out. It’s became the one failsafe enjoyable spot of this anime season for me.
lalu
November 10, 2018 at 6:52 amI’m really enjoying this series so far even though I was pretty sceptical at first seeing how such “stylish” shows with a lot of chaotic energy don’t always work for me. But this has been a really nice surprise, I’m enjoying the characters a lot and the story so far has been pretty good too. I still can’t take it too seriously (and I think we aren’t supposed to either) but as you said so very perfectly in another post: this series is fun. It’s entertaining and I’m actually looking forward to each new episode.
Though I do have to say that this last episode did feel a bit rushed to me. Like I don’t thibk it would have been enough to fill two whole eoisodes but one also felt a bit short. I guess 30 mins would have been kinda perfect. Like this it went a bit too fast for my taste at sone points where I didn’t feel like I could fully “feel” the revelations and some parts seemed more like they had to happen than like a natural flow.
Still, that’s complaining at high niveau and I loved how they kept with the whole negative connotations of Doug’s revenge till the end. Cause I agree that he fully intended to kill Joe and even if it didnt end like that because of higher intervention aka gun misfunction they disn’t just pull some last minute “he just wanted to scare him from the start” but kept Doug as a man who is very good at some parts of his job but also has some serious flaws and definitely isn’t all goo. And that’s something I really appreciatr because it makes a character just so much more interesting.
(On that note I also really appreciated that Kirill took matters in his own hands and kept an eye on Doug, tried to find information but also confronted Doug directly without beating around the bush. He might be naive and clumsy at tines vut he isnt completly incompetent. And he cares.)