I can’t shake the feeling that something odd happened with Double Decker! Doug & Kirill this week.  It was certainly an exciting episode – pretty much one long chain of plot twists in fact.  Maybe a little too exciting though – it’s hard to imagine the original plan was to shoehorn quite that much plot into one episode.  Then there’s the CGI – there was more of it this week than in the first 10 episodes combined, it seemed to me, and in some odd moments where you wouldn’t necessarily expect it.  I’m not smart enough to guess what the cause of all this might be – and maybe it really was just planned as a crazy episode from the start.

The hits start right from the cold open and never really let up.  The first moment of major consequence is the scene where Brian Cooper (the military dude) meets with Kirill to try and recruit him into the fold.  He lays some whoppers and both Kirill and the audience, starting with the fact that the old drunk’s ramblings from several eps back where indeed Chekov’s old drunk’s ramblings.  There are two suns in this world because the second is “Nikai” (literally “second floor), which is inhabited by humans (or humanoid aliens) who’ve resisted the military’s efforts to make contact.  The big news here (and really, we’re just getting started) is that Kirill is from Nikai himself.

That explains a lot, starting with Kirill’s savant-level intelligence and his brother’s decision to go into hiding as a woman (though Valery helpfully confirms this for us later).  Cooper keeps saying how “special” Kirill is, so one suspects we’ve just scratched the surface of what this revelation means.  In the meantime Kirill has to wrestle with the decision of whether to take Cooper up on his offer to join the military, where’d he’d get free tabehoudai in the cafeteria and a luxury car, but would have to give up the dream job he’s finally landed and the feeling of family it’s restored for him.

Eventually Kirill does decide he wants to stay where he is, but before he can break the news to Cooper SEVEN-O is called out on a major case.  Their onslaught on Esperanza (together with the military) is going swimmingly – too much so, Doug muses – and now they’ve supposedly learned the location of Zabel’s headquarters.  A raid ensues, but this is a setup – Zebal has lured them in with the intention of kidnapping Apple (which he does) and extracting the information about the Anti-AMS bullets.

Things go to hell in a handbasket quickly after Doug answers Kirill’s call and dashes off to help, and this all builds to another huge plot twist – Yuri is killed, protecting the others from one of Esperanza’s explosive devices.  Except maybe she’s not dead if they can find her core, though Apple surmises that the explosion was too large for it to have survived.  And then the next big plot twist – Zabel setting up SEVEN-O and the military was in fact B setting up Zabel.  Z tries to turn the tables on him but B being superhuman (or robotic, perhaps) deals with that quickly enough, and Zabel will never have to worry about people being rude to food again.

Not content to leave it there, Double Decker has one more big whopper to throw on the grill.  Zabel setting up the military but being set up by B was in fact the Zabel setting up the military but being set up by the military, because B is none other than Brian Cooper himself.  Whether this means Esperanza is effectively dead now I don’t know, nor can I say just who or what Cooper is – if he’s not a robot like Yuri perhaps he’s a NEXT or something like it, or even a native of Nikai himself who’s acting as a vanguard for an invasion by infiltrating Earth’s defenses.  It’s a lot of huggermugger to deal with in 22 minutes, that’s for sure, and it effectively reshuffles the deck so thoroughly that the story is effectively starting over from the beginning with two eps left.  I’m prepared to be convinced this was all planned and a good idea, but it’s going to require some persuasion to overcome my current level of skepticism…