English Dub Review: Double Decker! Doug & Kirill “Detective in Danger!”

“…Like some sort of stupid coward!”

Overview (Spoilers Below)

So… It turns out that the Neki are a colony of humans who left it at some point hundreds of years ago when Lisvaletta (or whatever the name of the planet it’s on) became uninhabitable. At some point later, either some of those humans decided to repopulate the planet, or the Lisvaletta citizens have made their civilization in an uninhabitable world. When the Neki arrived on their colony on the sun, it turns out that there were already people living there. In order to fight them effectively, the colonists created a drug to power their soldiers so they’d have a chance. This drug was called Anthem. The colonists decided to do a clinical trial for the drug, so they sent it down to Earth to use as a street drug and gave the military the antidote, thus creating Seven-O.

During all of this, they were also looking for Kirill. The Bamboo Man/Esperanza’s B/Brian Cooper finally finds Kirill and explains all of this to him. Kirill is reluctant to help, but Cooper (who is very strong and fast due to a microdose of Anthem) forces him to. He also shows Kirill the transmitter to contact the Neki once Cooper has results. Meanwhile, Seven-O cooks up a plan to save Kirill, but his sibling is nowhere to be found.

Seven-O launch yet another assault on a stronghold, this time gathering Dereck and Kirill’s landlady as a distraction while the rest of the force (minus Doug) evacuate the scientists working in the military’s research and development facility. Detective Billingham tries to free Kirill, but Brian Cooper is too fast. They escape to the room with the transmitter, and Doug reveals his plan. He’s going to dose himself with Anthem and go into overdrive. While he’s holding Cooper off, Kirill is going to have to hit him with a modified bullet that Apple made that will neutralize his microdose. Then, he will have to use his regular anti-Anthem bullets to cure Doug before the Anthem costs him his life.

Doug barely finishes explaining when it turns out that Brian Cooper found Krill’s sibling, and holds them hostage. Kirill and Doug talk about their options, but they ultimately surrender. Brian Cooper then immediately shoots Doug. Cooper ends the episode telling Kirill that he doesn’t need him alive anymore, and leaves ambiguous whether or not Kirill is getting out alive!

Our Take

We continue our descent into Double Decker’s absolute nonsense this week with an absolute torrent of exposition that makes less than no sense. We are supposed to believe that the human colony is literally on the second Sun. Besides it being asinine, it seemingly directly contradicts what Brian Cooper said about the second world last time. Additionally, there were already aliens on the sun, so the humans need to fight them with drug-addled super-soldiers. It’s not that none of these ideas could work, but they’re stacked on top of each other again and again so that we scarcely have the time to make one logical leap before we’re confronted with the next.

Not to be outdone in the twist department by the more sci-fi elements of the series, the police procedural gets in yet another plot development that seemingly has no awareness of any of the others. Zabel was working for Seven-O. Never mind the fact that Zabel has flipped his position in relation to Esperanza and Seven-O no less than five times since his introduction, this revelation means that Robot’s killing last episode was friendly fire and completely unnecessary.

I didn’t touch on it too much last episode, because there was just so much other nonsense to talk about, but Robot was killed in the last episode by one of Zabel’s men. If Zabel was working for Seven-O (a twist I’ll admit it seems like they had at least somewhat thought through because of his strategy during the siege by the military), then why did he put kill orders on his men when he was looking for the anti-AMS bullets. It’s also possible that Zabel defected after Brian Cooper tried to kill him (it’s pretty unclear) but then his behavior during the war between the military/Seven-O and Esperanza makes no sense.

Double Decker’s flair for the dramatic has come home to roost, and we’re beginning to see what it’s cost them. It’s pretty typical for a third act to have some sort of assault sequence where the good guys get all of their buddies together for one final raid against the antagonists. Double Decker, because it twists all of its sympathetic characters evil and all of their protagonists love to engage in police brutality, can only scrounge up Dereck and Kirill’s landlady as a distraction. They seemingly have no emotional stakes in the final fight. Dereck might care that his employee’s brother is in danger, and they might do one final twist involving Kirill’s landlady (hell, maybe she’s the queen of the Neki) but I really didn’t care if they died or not.

I also found myself even more annoyed with the show on a line-by-line level than I usually am. I mentioned in the episode with Kirill’s battle cry that the mistranslations became hilariously distracting, and that persists in this penultimate episode. Without any memorable moments of chemistry or clever lines of banter to fall back on, the show is still moving with its air of awkward jocularity. Kirill, despite being the most special boy in all the universe is still impressed to the point of verbal diarrhea with Doug’s name for the anti-Brian Cooper bullet. A name which, I might add, goes untranslated.

It’s gotten to the point where I can’t even see what it is that Double Decker wants me to think is cool anymore. It was lost somewhere between the ridiculous alien civilization and the magic blood. Next week, we see that Brian Cooper is going to turn into a hulking monster and rampage until Kirill finds a way to stop him, but I could not care less. In fact, I’m almost sure that Brian’s silver bullet will be yet another thing we haven’t seen before that the show will make us feel stupid for not having recognized on sight.