Dirty Pair
a review by planetJane
a review by planetJane
When 80s anime come to mind, few spring to the forefront as quickly as Dirty Pair. The show’s aesthetic has become so associated with the 80s that it’s practically a byword for the decade itself. What this means in practical terms is that with any given episode, you’re getting neon pinks, blues, and oranges, heavy shadows, laser guns that spit brightly-colored plasma bolts, weird boxy robots, and skimpy outfits, a soundtrack stuffed with city pop and burbling analog synthesizers, and so on, and so forth.
What rarely comes up in these brief conversations about the series is anything about Dirty Pair’s narrative, or indeed anything much about its writing at all. Regardless of the why, it does Dirty Pair something of an injustice. While it’s hard to call it anywhere near perfect, it’s a fascinating time capsule of a series, rooted in the action-anime genre we now take for granted, but built around tropes and structures of a long-bygone era.
Dirty Pair revolves around the titular duo (Kei and Yuri), who are agents of interplanetary private detective / bounty hunting / various problem-fixing company 3WA. Formally “The Lovely Angels”, the two have something of a spotty reputation, and the title is their in-universe disparaging second nickname.
The show is broadly episodic in a specific way that most modern anime aren’t. Meaning that its tone and even its genre are subject to vary, bent to the purposes of whatever story it’s trying to tell this week. Early on, we get a fairly comedic episode about our heroines pursuing a cat who’s being used to test out super-steroids (“Pursuit Smells of Cheesecake and Death!”) back to back with a bizarre, psychedelic, borderline-horror episode where they’re kidnapped by an AI loosely implied to be the ghost of a dead scientist (“The Heartbeat of Criados”), and that’s followed up by a traditional action-adventure episode where the Pair come out on top at the end (“Lots of Danger, Lots of Decoys!”). This is as good an example of the show’s variety as anything. It’s a strength, to be sure. The show weaves a lot of different tales over the course of its run, and on the off chance a given viewer isn’t feeling a specific episode, they can simply wait it out until the next.
A couple things however, are too integral to the show’s material to be so easily ignored. The series’ main writing flaw is its odd treatment of the relationship between the main duo. For the most part, it is shown that for however much they might bicker, the Lovely Angels do genuinely get along and are close friends. Sometimes, though, it goes overboard, and in general we see the two tearing each other down (usually over a guy) more than is probably necessary. Occasionally, their relationship gets downright bizarre.
The eighth episode is a big offender here. To greatly compress, it involves Kei and Yuri rescuing Yuri’s childhood sweetheart from a forced labor prison. When they get there, Kei discovers that said childhood beaux is in fact, already dead, and was unable to weather the mental pressure of being forced to design and assemble weapons of war. The message the two got earlier in the episode (spurring this mission in the first place) was an automatic message tapped out by a computer that the childhood friend left behind. So far, so action show. The weird part is that Kei actively keeps this knowledge from Yuri, something the show bizarrely tries to frame as a good thing. The question of whether this is a matter of the show’s age, cultural difference, or just plain bad writing is ultimately a bit immaterial. This isn’t the only example, and while the worst offences are mostly confined to a few specific episodes (including, regrettably, the show’s finale), stuff like this is going to strike modern viewers strangely, and it does detract from what’s otherwise quite an enjoyable watch.
Still though, most of the time the show’s oddball sensibility works in its favor. There’s really nothing quite like some of the campiness this series gets up to. As an example, the twelfth episode sees our heroines combatting a super-intelligent mouse who has the ability to mind control other mice.
This mouse.Who has his mouse-queen bitten by an intelligence-draining nanobot at the story’s end, and out of grief, tosses himself from a window. You really just don’t get things like that very often anymore, and if Dirty Pair makes a compelling case for anything, it’s that this kind of weirdness makes for an uncomplicated, and occasionally amazingly dumb, sort of fun.
There’s also occasionally surprisingly clever, if on-the-nose, directoral tricks. It’s one thing to imply a character has just made a mistake--it’s another to imply it visually, and so blatantly as to have the arcade game she’s standing in front of flash the word “ERROR” on-screen.
At the end of it all Dirty Pair’s reputation as a classic is staked more on influence and ubiquity than quality per se, but it’s an enjoyable show, and it’s hard not to like. As far as time capsules go, you could do worse than queuing up a little "Russian Roulette".
And if you liked this review, why not check out some of my others here on Anilist?
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