Double Decker! Doug & Kirill – 11

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…

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

3 comments

  1. T

    When it comes to the CG in this show, I’m… very, very confused as to why it’s even there. Part of me has a feeling that it’s being used to “quickly and easily” replace subpar quality animation and/or to handle scenes that are deemed too complex to be animated as quickly as the production team requires. And it works just as well as if the bad animation had been just left there – it’s jarring, it takes one (well, it takes *me*) out of the immersion, and it certainly evokes the idea of coverups for mistakes of either the animators or the schedule.

    As for the rest, I’ve been following this show along because I was a fan of Tiger and Bunny and while it’s a fun ride, I’m pretty disappointed. The plot is paper thin, the twists lack impact, the pacing is dreadful (the show meanders for most of its run time and tries to resolve a bunch of plot beats in the last 3 episodes), and the narrator is basically there to kill all the jokes before they land.

  2. a

    I may be in a minority here, but the CGI doesn’t bother me in the least. In fact, I hardly noticed.

    As for the twists this episode dished out like candy, I was (like I wrote in a past post) wrongly suspicious of Derrick as a member of Esperanza. This seems a mute point now that we know that “B” (whatever/whoever he may be) was playing everybody on both sides of the law and seems to have finished of Esperanza. My guess is whatever plans he was pursuing with using Esperanza became obsolete the moment he discovered Kirill. I was surprised at first how stupid Zabel was confronting his treacherous right-hand man without any real back-up. But perhaps he wasn’t aware, that B’s power doesn’t seem to stem from anthem and underestimated him. Interestingly enough in his first appearance in episode five, B left the battlefield after a certain time. I thought there was a time limit to his powers, but perhaps he was just juggling his two timetables. Also choking Zabel on his beloved food was a nice touch, though rather gruesome. My only complaint to the twist of B’s double identity is, that there were no real clues beforehand. Yes, we saw a man changing his face using anthem. Yes, B was absent during the kidnapping of Doug and Cooper was rather busy that episode but there wasn’t even anything which might have connected the two.

    Let’s see how all of this plays out, but I fear there won’t be a satisfying conclusion in the last two episodes. I hope I’m wrong in this regard, but there are to many plot points unresolved at this moment in my opinion.

  3. S

    I wonder if Yuri’s core has anything to do with how the boss has been acting weirdly around Yuri+coffee. Even if she’s revived though, would Max be able to accept her? And like you said, there doesn’t seem to be enough time to resolve everything that popped up this week.

Leave a Comment