English Dub Review: Double Decker! Doug & Kirill “OVA 3 Detective Buzz-Cut and the Steamy Murder Mystery Case!”

Gender-bending continues at the hot springs.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Kirill’s landlady walks in on him packing for a field trip to a hot spring with the rest of Seven-O. She teases him for overpacking before he gets on Dereck’s bus to head out. On the bus, everyone is off in their own worlds. Travis is upset that his assistant Sophie declined to come on their outing, but little does he know she is having her own vacation on Travis’ dime. Dereck is getting ready to declare his love for Kirill’s sibling, Mila, but he is still unaware of her complicated gender expression. And Apple is trying to figure out how to express his love and/or gratitude towards Doug for always treating him with respect.

When the group arrives at the resort, they learn that there is group mixed bathing in the hot springs, and—of course—Travis is all over it. Meanwhile, Doug is more preoccupied with the underwear thief that is loose somewhere on the resort grounds. Pink immediately starts drinking, which puts her at odds with Rookie who is determined to stick to a resort schedule she made up for the trip. Things get off to a raucous start with a ping pong tournament. Apple is determined to win so that he can trade rooms with one of the losers, forcing them to bunk with the sex-crazed Travis. The girls want to win so they can get separate rooms, but before a winner is declared, Rookie shuffles the group along to their next activity.

At dinner, the group partakes in some karaoke until Pink passes out. The girls go to take care of him while the men go to bathe. Doug accidentally flings some of Kirill’s fancy soap into the women’s bath, while the Constable tries to ask Doug how to tell Dereck about Mila. Not long after that, Dereck is discovered passed out in the women’s bath. The detectives first suspect Travis who was trying to break the women’s bath so that they would be forced to use the mixed bath, but he is soon acquitted. Doug takes the reset of Seven-O out to the seaside to reveal the mystery of who put Dereck down.

Doug reveals both that he was the culprit (though he blames Kirill) and that Mila was assigned male at birth. This turns Dereck off of Mila, but they agree to remain friends and coworkers. The rest of the gang decides to do everything they can to stick to Rookie’s schedule after learning that she was worried about not having any non-work memories with the rest of the crew. The gang even catches the panty thief, who actually turns out to be six brothers who became addicted to the thrill of robbing hotel guests of their underwear. The detectives, free of both personal baggage and criminals, are finally able to enjoy their well-deserved vacation.

Our Take

Double Decker has shown, through all three of these OVAs, that its lack of slavish adherence to the, frankly, the non-sensical plot of the main series is the best move that the show could have made. When the show is allowed to focus on the interpersonal relationships of the characters, the show’s ridiculousness feels more at home. Indeed, the entire dynamic of this wacky dysfunctional office feels more apt than dangerous, as it does in the main series. The show is smart too, by filling out the relationships between characters who rarely interact during the show proper, so that future interactions in the second season may be colored by these extra-curricular adventures.

What is less promising, however, is that this lack of focus on plot has left a large hole in the show to be filled, at least somewhat with queer-baiting. I’m not really sure why the show decides to do this, but it has become a hallmark of all three of these OVAs. We have a few things that are pretty standard, especially for a hot springs episode. The ladies, in the penultimate scene of the episode, compare breasts in the bath, and the men do something fairly similar towards the beginning of the episode. While this kind of thing rarely signifies any queer behavior in the main series when it comes to women, Apple ogling Doug does make me wonder if there is going to be something to that in season two.

The main issue of gender and sexuality this time around is, of course, Mila and Dereck. They care about this enough to have made it crucial to the main plot of this episode, in addition to making Kirill’s gender identity the main concern of last month’s. It seems as if Kirill and Valeri (as Mila was born) are both explicitly men, as confirmed by the characters themselves and the narrators, but both get a thrill out of cross-dressing. Mila, though, has said it is more than that and that they feel more comfortable dressing as a woman than as a man.

It’s very difficult to tell how much of this is the original creators having a strange understanding of gender and how much of it is American puritans sanitizing the show’s original content. What I am sure of, however, is that the whole thing does feel pretty weird. It’s wonderful that a show like Double Decker wants to talk about issues of gender, but I think it could do with a bit more research before it comes with these issues front-and-center. Pink thinking that Mila’s gender is a funny prank to keep away from Dereck and the other character’s expectation that Dereck would feel tricked by Mila is really not a great take for the show to come through with.

While this does make the episode a lot harder to watch, it doesn’t make it completely un-entertaining. Most of our characters are given something fun to do while at the hot springs, the second half becoming a low-stakes murder mystery is fun, and it really is great that the show only mentioned its ridiculous mythology for a few seconds at most. I’m not the biggest fan of Double Decker, but I’ll take hot springs over street dealers any day of the week.