English Dub Review: Lupin the Third Part IV “The Magician’s Left Hand”

Lights… Camera… ACTION!

Spoilers Below

Everybody likes magic right? Well… maybe not Lupin, especially when Fujiko is bound and chained to a post and has flaming arrows shot at her. This episode starts off in a frenzy, with Lupin and Luka rushing in demanding the magician to stop the show before the stunt goes off. But let us back track a little bit.

Luka is a young man, who becomes infatuated with Fujiko when she volunteers for a magic trick. Who can blame him? Fujiko is one hell of a beauty. We get to see a little bit of Fujiko’s other talents as Luka talks about how the two met. Luka also happens to be the sole heir of the great magician Tony’s 100 Secrets (of Magic). This makes him very popular with all sorts of people because they all want to know the secrets. But as we all know a magician never reveals his tricks, and true to form Luka hasn’t revealed any of the secrets for 10 years or even performed any of the magic himself. Yet nearly everyone thinks that Luka killed Tony the Magician after he had revealed his secrets to Luka.

Lupin is interviewing Luka, having already spoken to most of the circus performers. It seems that Lupin is trying to dig to the bottom of what’s going on. Eventually, Luka tells Lupin that he does feel guilty for Tony’s death, to the point of wanting to bring Tony’s magic back to life. We also find out that Fujiko is the one who gave him the motivation to get on with bringing back the magic, instead of just talking and dreaming about it. But the other circus performs get jealous once they see that Luka is practicing the magic tricks and showing his secrets to Fujiko. They kidnap her and hold her hostage, promising to release her if they Luka writes down the 100 secrets that were passed to him by Tony.

Brought back to present day, we find out that the reason that the magic trick must be stopped thatuse Luka actually wrote down a false trick and that the trick is designed to kill whoever performs it. Luckily Fujiko performs the trick flawlessly, and at the same time Luka figures out the man who killed Tony was his own son, driving him into a fit of rage. The reason why? Tony was going to leave the circus to Luka, instead of his own son. Just as Luka about to murder the ring master Fujiko stops him. Unfortunately for Tony’s son, the other circus performers heard the entire confession.

Fujiko reveals that she knew the trick was fake because when Luka passed the secret to the magic trick, he gave it to the Ringmaster with his left hand, not his right hand. She promises Luka to make a real magician. In the next scene we see him signing a contract, as Fujiko opens a briefcase of money. Before riding off into the distance. Lupin confronts her, saying that she was just in it for the reward. Lupin explains that she just wanted to awaken the dormant power inside of Luka and then sign him off to another circus troupe for a bundle of cash. Lupin then questions her “Did you take the boy? Or did you save him?” Fujiko’s response? “Which would you prefer?” and she drives away.

Once again, Lupin fails to disappoint. Now, this episode wasn’t filled with breath taking action, or even a complex plot, but I still found my eyes glued to the screen. I thought it was neat how this episode focused on Fujiko, much how last week’s episode focused on Jigen. We see once again that even though Lupin and his crew are renowned thieves, that doesn’t mean that they don’t have good intentions. Especially in this episode, I thought it was cool that Fujiko encouraged Luka and gave him the confidence and drive he needed to finally take action and start practicing magic. Fujiko’s belief in Luka, gave Luka the power to believe in himself. I get the feeling that she really had Luka’s best interests at heart, which is the reason Lupin’s final line of the episode was “She’s a great woman… that’s just the way she has to be”. She knew that Luka had the magic inside of him, but instead of pursuing his goal he just kept doing measly side-hand work, ignoring his talents and not really living life to the fullest. And now, thanks to Fujiko, not only is Luka under contract to be the star of his own show, but also has the most powerful magic of all, the power to believe in himself.