With the crash-and-burn finale of Yesterday o Utatte, Great Pretender takes up the mantle of spring’s best series.  Unless of course you consider it a summer show (I did put it in that preview) – it obviously doesn’t fit the traditional anime distribution mode anyway.  Whatever you call it doesn’t matter much, it’s really good.  And unlike Yesterday it doesn’t really have any red flags – there’s no obvious reason to suspect Great Pretender won’t be really good all the way to the end.  And we won’t have to wait all that long to find out either.

Without a question this is a dark ride, and if anything “Singapore Sky” is much darker even than “Los Angeles Connection”.  Part of that is the central role of Abby’s past, but it goes deeper than that.  For Makoto, who on some level is still trying to live a life he can be proud of, working with the likes of Laurent and Cynthia is a minefield.  I was disappointed, frankly, that he didn’t react more violently to the sabotage of the plane belonging to Caio Bisconti (Inoue Yuuki).  That he didn’t is a sign, I fear, that his soul is already lost (or getting close).  Their targets may be bad guys, but the “heroes” of Great Pretender are bad guys too.

That incident comes as a result of Sam taking advantage a little too liberally of the underground casino that’s been set up to set him up.  Looks like Sam has cash flow problems, and his pattern of behavior here has the look of someone for whom desperation has undermined caution.  Even in the service of a larger con the kind of money Sam is taking Team Laurent for is painful, and that’s where poor Caio comes in.  But hey – this is an innocent kid who could very easily have died because of the sabotage Laurent ordered, Cynthia enabled, and Abby executed.  I don’t think the seriousness of that should be minimized – this is no Robin Hood brigade of justice.  These are crooks trying to get rich off other crooks, no better than that.

Abby is kind of in an amoral zone at the moment, though that doesn’t excuse her behavior.  Her past comes into focus here – a child of Iraq, whose parents seemingly died in the bombing campaign of 2003.  After that, a child soldier who nearly died herself in an attack against Coalition forces and was captured.  How exactly she got from there to being Laurent’s blunt instrument isn’t clear but to be honest I don’t think it’s especially important.  I think Makoto is interested in Abby because he sees that she’s not really “one of them” – that there might be some element of herself still alive inside her.  She and he are different than Laurent and Cynthia, as I’ve said before, and Makoto knows it.

Her interest in Luis is complicated, to be sure.  The idea (supported by a Google search) that he might have been part of the raids that killed her parents certainly sparks the lust for revenge in her mind.  But I think, just as Makoto sees something kindred in her, she sees something kindred in Luis.  Even if they were on opposing sides they carry the scars of the same conflict, and he’s someone who’s been betrayed (perhaps by his wife) – something else I suspect Abby has in common with him, though we don’t know that for sure yet.

This is really impressive stuff, through and through.  These characters are complicated people, living in a world where morality is confused to the point of being indecipherable.  When you combine the sort of world-building you see here (I’ve never been to Singapore, but now I sure feel as if I have) with character writing of this quality and tremendous production values, you get an anime that’s quite special.  And Great Pretender would be exceptional even if its production and distribution were conventional (though I suspect its budget would be nowhere near as big).