English Dub Review: Double Decker! Doug & Kirill “And Then There Weren’t None!”

Well, after all that, it’s finally over… or is it?

 Overview (Spoilers Below)

With Doug Billingham shot by the evil Commander Cooper, Kirill and his sibling are at his mercy. He is prepared to take them back to Neki in order to harvest Kirill’s antibodies to help the humans on Neki win their war against the aliens that are the primary inhabitants of the sun. Luckily, Kirill’s sibling has prepared a second (and third) vial of the agent that neutralizes Commander Cooper’s powers. Kirill injects him, and he activates the self-destruct sequence for the secret military installation, and he runs for the modified dose of Anthem in Doug’s jacket pocket.

Doug gets up, however, and reveals that not only is he still alive, but there never was a neutralizing agent in the first place. Commander Cooper had only been given a simple shot of adrenaline to confuse him. Now that he’s double-dosing Anthem, he’s in overdrive, and Seven-O knows how to deal with overdrive. The rest of the team burst into the room and help Doug and Kirill neutralize Commander Cooper once and for all. The race is on, then, to get everyone out of the base before the self-destruct sequence completes and blows them all away.

Pink, Boxer, and Kirill’s sibling all get out with the help of Dereck, Rookie, and Kirill’s landlady. Doug and Kirill, however, are dealing with a much closer call. Kirill escapes the base onto a helicopter piloted by a still-alive Robot, and Doug is crushed under some rocks. He tells Kirill to go on without him, but the explosion knocks him into Kirill, saving his life. The team rendezvous back at the Seven-O headquarters and learn that Robot is still alive because Travis spilled his coffee on her a few episodes back and made an illegal copy of her consciousness, thereby saving her.

At the close of the season, Seven-O is reinstated, Robot is back on the team, and Kirill uses his abilities as Commander Cooper’s short-lived protégé to sweep everything under the bureaucratic rug. While things may have returned to normal for the time being, the Neki are still out there, and Kirill will have to reckon with where he comes from, but the detectives of Seven-O have his back and will be there to help him fight them off. Commander Cooper tries to survive into the next season, too, but his efforts are thwarted by a still-alive Zabel who makes sure they go down together.

Our Take

Double Decker spent thirteen weeks trying my patience, so it makes sense that since the show abandoned everything it seemed to care about insofar as plot, character development or theming went, it would love to make sure it got to throwing stakes out the window as well, just under the wire. I’m numb by now to the shows endless contortions in any direction it thinks might shock you, so the stacking of reveals that this episode put onscreen barely elicited a reaction from me. Of course, Robot is alive, she died so unceremoniously, and they were already talking about reviving her literally minutes after she died. Sure, Zabel can be alive too. And Seven-O can continue to exist, why not? (The show really sacrificed its largest potential growth moment here. With Esperanza revealed as a Neki front, a slight retooling of the premise seemed in order, but the show appears content to have their detectives root out street-level dealers next season).

It’s hard to pin down why this show leaves me so empty. I began with the premise that the show didn’t understand why it wanted to be a cop show, but the show ended up abandoning that premise almost entirely in its finale, so that wasn’t it. They did, however, only seem interested in a cop show so their action heroes could be bound by some façade of rules. It’s abundantly clear that no member of Seven-O is going to die, so at least pretending that the department itself could become the stand-in.

I also thought that it might be the theming. The show paws at anti-capitalist and LGBTQIA acceptance, but succeeds in neither. Doug is still perpetuating the war on drugs. His underage partner’s death and learning that the whole thing was a colonialist prescription drug trial means nothing to him. Seven-O is going to continue on, business as usual. Kirill’s sibling, similarly, has a cross-dressing disguise that adds up to nothing. At the end of the season, maybe we’re supposed to assume that they like it because they still wear it in the final scene at Dereck’s restaurant, but it’s not stated or even really addressed.

The twists, too, are hard to deal with. Whether it’s that Kirill’s sibling is an incredibly wealthy, cross-dressing drifter, or that Kirill himself is a super genius alien chemist, or that the reason Robot is still alive is because Travis spilled coffee on her processor the day before she attempted the only moment of true drama in the entire series, they don’t work. Double Decker trained its audience from the second episode to learn that the twists aren’t made to resonate in any way; they’re just there to muddy the waters enough that you’ll never be able to figure out exactly what’s going on. They don’t do anything for the story, other than to mask its predictability.

I’m also annoyed with the show’s bad translation issues and awkward 3D models, but none of that is really what’s wrong with the show. The true reason Double Decker! Doug & Kirill fails is the arc of its protagonist. From his time as a Nobel-prize level chemist/beat cop, Kirill Vrubel only wants to be a hero. He gets that chance by joining Seven-O, an elite drug task force filled with police with more of a regard for getting the job done than the letter of the law, and he’s sucked into a military/alien conspiracy involving his missing sibling and a drug cartel. And what he learns is that he’s… a sidekick.

Kirill learns nothing about thinking about a world larger than himself, or what it might mean that he’s one of only two of an alternate species of human beings. He doesn’t even try to think about the class politics that his partner muddles through at times. He only learns that he needs to care less about his own contributions (his groundbreaking chemistry paper, for example) and needs to serve as a subordinate to his child-endangering, devil may care partner. I can’t. I’m glad to see Double Decker go, and I hope that the studio’s next outing is a little more thoughtful.

Score
3/10