Funnily enough, my headline this week is the same is last – I really feel like something weird is going on with Double Decker! Doug & Kirill.  The last couple of episodes have seen an explosion of really terrible CGI character animation at random moments (which can only spell a major budgetary or – less likely in this case – scheduling crisis).  The plot has moved like two tectonic plates rubbing against each other, building up tension with very little actual movement and then spasming forward earthquake-fashion.  Maybe everything was planned this way from the beginning (though even the start of DD was strange, with two eps dropping a month before the season started) but something sure smells odd right now.

Whatever the case may be, we’re stampeding through a mountain of plot in these last few episodes.  And the thing of it is, this actually is a pretty good twist – maybe a bit credulity-stretching but this isn’t a show that’s going for documentary realism.  In the wake of the disastrous (for Esperanza, especially) SEVEN-O has been sent home – ostensibly because with the organization distributing Anthem crippled they have no reason to exist, but more likely because they’re under suspicion for a massacre of Esperanza members.  Travis eventually disappears altogether (Chekov’s Travis, perhaps – something Yuri-related?) but not before sending Doug a gift that will come of use later.

We pretty much already knew that both Kirill and Cooper were aliens – Kirill for certain – but technically speaking they’re actually colonists.  Cooper being an infiltrator is a bit of a twist, but it was pretty clear he wasn’t a normal human doing what he was doing with Anthem’s help.  As for why Kirill was so important to him, it’s because Kirill has an antibody in his blood that can neutralize the effects of Anthem – which was originally a drug used by the Nikai-dians to make genetically-enhanced “GMS” supersoldiers.

So it turns out, I guess, that the human race on Earth is basically a kind of massive Tuskegee Airmen atrocity being carried out by the Nikai military to try and do what they believe Kirill’s blood can do.  That’s certainly a whopper of a twist but it basically works for me, apart from the fact that it’s playing out in at least two of thee fewer episodes than it probably should be.  As it stands we have Kirill once more in the damsel-in-distress mode, effectively a prisoner of Cooper, and the SEVON-O gang stripped of their access to police equipment and authority.  That means poor Derrick is pressed into service – and his beloved retirement bar has to turn into a weaponized roach coach to make Doug’s plan (hatched only because Zabel has survived and turned on B) remotely feasible.

Yes, Doug is risking everything to save Kirill – and that doesn’t surprise me a bit.  Doug is a fascinating character (as it Kirill, actually), and for all his effortless cool it’s clear he’s a man who values loyalty and friendship above all else.  The Doug-Kirill relationship is a good one but really feels as if it has enormous untapped potential that could have been tapped had Double Decker had two cours to work with (as it probably should have, based on the pacing).  I buy that Doug is dead even less than Yuri, but it’s a good cliffhanger to take us into the finale.  That finale has an awful lot of heavy lifting to do (I have Sunrise has been saving budget for it at the very least), and how well it pulls that off is going to have a lot of say on this series’ success as a whole.