There have been a few of these weird-release (by anime standards) streaming shows make it to the blog by now.  But Great Pretender is really the first one to give me the particular problem of not wanting to watch it too fast.  Normally I don’t binge series I cover here for practical reasons – that’s a lot of work.  But with Great Pretender I have the genuine desire to do so, and I’m holding back mostly to make the experience last.  I’m not a binge watcher anyway, as a rule – whenever Netflix or Amazon comes out with a new show I love, I try to stretch it out.

There’s just an awful lot this show does right.  Style to burn, interesting characters, great visuals, cast, and music.  And the plots (so far at least) really hold together.  And that’s a must for this sort of series.  A mystery series can get away with having mediocre mysteries if the cast is good enough, but with a caper show the cons really have to be able to carry their weight.  If I were ever to recommend an anime to a fan of Sneaky Pete it would be Great Pretender (or if it was a live-action drama to a fan of GP, it would be SP).

If anything niggled at me after the L.A. arc., it was that the cycle of Edamura being generally abused and mocked had the potential to get old pretty quickly.  It’s not as if he’s a saint but Makoto is more sympathetic than Laurent’s team – and certainly far more than Laurent himself.  And the Singapore arc starts pretty much on the same foot, with Makoto seeking to go straight after he gets out of prison.  He thinks he has a lead in doing so when the warden sets him up with a job as a mechanic working for the crusty but kindly Nakanoshima-san (Tadano Youhei).  But this is just another of Laurent’s cons, a long game to bring Makoto back to the dark side whether he wants to go there or not.

I’m still not totally sure why Laurent is so invested in having Makoto on his roster – perhaps that’s something that will become clear before the end, but right know I struggle to see any particular indispensable quality Makoto brings to the table.  That suggests that Laurent is mainly interested in him for the amusement in it.  I suppose that could be very interesting in its own right, but I kind of hope there’s more to it than that.  Either way this does, as I noted, have the potential to wear thin.  That’s why a story focused more around a third character is probably a good thing, and “Singapore Sky” is looking pretty Abby-centric at this point.

The warmup gig takes places in Vegas, where the gang (sans Edamura, who Nakanoshima is setting up like a bowling pin) cons a sleazy exec named Danny (Gou Shiro).  There’s a suggestion that Cynthia is doing this as a favor to Chris (Hino Yurika), though just how the two know each other is unclear.  The sting involves a fixed fight club, with Abby as the bait.  And while Abby clearly has anger management issues (I think we knew that already), eventually the con does go down and Danny does get cleaned out.

Danny is a small-timer, and this was just batting practice.  The real targets here are a pair of disgraced Arab princes, Sam Ibrahim (Komatsu Fuminori) and his younger brother Clark (Kobayashi Chikahiro, excellent as always).  The pot here is $200 million, and the brothers are earning their money through a fixed air racing circuit.  Clark always wins, because Sam decides the results in advance – though to be fair he does actually seem to be a pretty good pilot.  And it’s not totally clear that Clark even knows the fix is in.  Clark frankly comes off as more of an American trust fund brat than an Arab prince (exiled or not), and there’s definite potential for him to end up changing sides before the arc is done.  At the very least he’s more sympathetic than the other big bads we’ve met so far.

Edamame’s role here is as a mechanic – though as Laurent says, his actual skills are as far removed from his perception as his English skills are, so I’m not sure what his real significance to the operation is.  Abby’s is clear – she’s the pilot.  Which she’s rather good at, though there is a little PTSD problem which keeps flaring up as she’s flying these daredevil circuits.  Abby clearly has a very dark past – child soldier possibly, or worse.  Meanwhile Cynthia’s is to seduce Sam into seeing Abby as the next big star of his circuit, and get him to advance her to the finals against his brother.  And Makoto does play a part in this, via social media marketing (though Laurent could have hired a high school kid to do that part).

The spectacle of the Pathfinder Air Race in a stunningly-rendered downtown Singapore is really a fantastic marriage of Takeda Yuusuke’s backgrounds and some superb animation and direction.  It just looks and sounds fantastic, plain and simple – first-class anime that will still play twenty years from now.  As to the con itself it’s all potential at this point, but it does have that.  I’m interested to see how Clark’s role in all this evolves and why Makoto is here at all, but it’s Abby who seems to be at the center of the drama.  And that strikes me as a good thing.

We’re seeing an interesting dynamic developing here, with Laurent and Cynthia as the true, born-to-the-art cons – the naturals – and Abby and Makoto as the outsiders.  Abby obviously deals with her situation a lot more proactively than Makoto does, but it still seems like she’s being used.  Maybe she doesn’t care, if indeed as Laurent says she’s just “looking for a place to die”.  His unconvincing Robin Hood act notwithstanding Laurent comes off as a pretty despicable character, Cynthia less so but still fully complicit in Laurent’s dealings.  Abby and Makoto are the wild cards here, very different people but in their circumstances, perhaps quite alike.  I can see a couple potential paths this dynamic could take, given the strictures of the genre – but we’re still a ways off from seeing which one wins out.