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| From https://i.ytimg.com/vi/KwuYDcQ6o-Q/maxresdefault.jpg |
Director: Joji Furuta
Screenplay: Tomohiro Suzuki
Voice Cast: Kōhei Amasaki as
Kirill Vrubel; Satoshi Mikami as Douglas "Doug" Bilingam; Atsumi
Tanezaki as Yuri Fujishiro; Aya Endo as Sophie; Chika Anzai as Katherine
"Kay" Rochefort; Daisuke Namikawa as Bamboo Man; Rikiya Koyama as
Travis Murphy; Saori Hayami as Deana del Rio; Takuma Nagatsuka as Apple; Tesshō
Genda as Brian Cooper; Tsuyoshi Koyama as Derick Ross; Yō Taichi as Maxine
"Max" Silverstone; Yōji Ueda as the Narrator; Yuuki Fujiwara as
Valery "Milla" Vrubel
Viewed in Japanese with English
Subtitles
I wish I could like Double Decker much more, but what
starts off with good humour and enough resources to work with does turn into an
incredibly generic show by its ending, in thirteen episodes having a moment
near the end where someone realised they wanted an ongoing story and hastily
crowbarred a finale on rather than the funny sci-fi cop show that is Double Decker's better aspects. This is
a shame as, from the creators of Tiger
& Bunny (2011) and possibly set in the same world, Double Decker at its best feels like a piss take on American cop
shows and films if Crockett and Tubbs were part of a special drugs section of
the police where said drug, Anthem, if it doesn't kill you causes drastic
mutation.
Undeniably, the show starts off
on a good footing, a futuristic world which seems to have ingested British
culture as there are pubs and cybernetic double decker buses on the roads, all
set around the group Seven-0 who deal with Anthem cases. In the midst of this
setting ordinary cop Kirill Vrubel, on his off-day looking for his landlady's
cat, stumbles into an Anthem bust and, due to an embarrassing public display
involving pretending to be from the future (completely naked as a result) to
help a Seven-O officer named Doug Bilingam, gets fired from the police but does
become a Seven-0 member on an invitation.
I can thankfully say Double
Decker is on the side on giving its protagonists personalities alongside snazzy
costumes, though the ones here are just as good. Double Decker has a lot to admire in terms of how, for its comedy
and that the head of Seven-O, Travis Murphy, is portrayed as both an idiot and
also a pig who tried to put together a group of "Angels" to match his
"Charlie", the show has a predominately large cast of strong and
memorable women set also male protagonists as goofballs, an ensemble of capable
figure who yet have their quirks. Kirill, who is noble but an idiot, Doug as
the laid back and at times an arse, insanely young tech head Dr. Apple, and the
aforementioned Travis Murphy make up the male members of Seven-O. Then there is
Maxine "Max" Silverstone, shaved head former boxer with a warm heart,
partnered with Yuri Fujishiro, an actual robot who Kirill perceives he has to
keep her secret for, Deana del Rio, the pink haired and fabulously dressed gun woman
with a hair trigger temper, partnered with Katherine "Kay" Roshfall, meek
and by the book but with the curious issue that she gets angry drunk on
non-alcoholic beverages. Add Sophie Gainsbourg, Travis' mild mannered dispatcher
who puts up with his lustings for her blankly, and you have legitimately
entertaining figures to work from.
Hardcore references are there too
but don't consist of the whole point of the show, merely that if you get them already
funny jokes are funnier. The exception is that the show does reference famous
album covers and band aesthetics for visual gags which don't make up the whole
show (i.e. framing a visual piece of exposition around the look of the Sex
Pistols' famous Never Mind the Bollocks album); the rest are about cop shows
and American action cinema, which still work in that in this world, everything
is over the top but the usual cop show plot points usually get punctured at the
same time. An example I won't spoil, but the best example of this streak of
humour, is the cliché surrounding Doug's former partner, playing up to this
trope for the first few episodes only to gleefully deflate it when the truth is
blithely revealed.
The show even when you don't get
these references manages to spin a lot of fun from them, the best for me being
Episode Six whose first half if a parody of American reality shows like Cops (1989-), with blurred faces and
the look of a TV show as Seven-0 members are recorded for television dealing
with a drunk, inter-spliced as part of a major plot point for one character for
a clever and fluid sense of plotting. There is a larger plot, that Seven-0 are
against a major Anthem smuggling group named Esperanto, and there are serious
stories, like Episode Ten being about terminally ill patients suddenly becoming
healthy or dying violently, but the real virtue of Double Decker is that its mainly a farcical cop action with
characters who you sincerely like. The best moments of the actual show
thankfully do work; it takes itself seriously when needed, but I found the most
rewarding moments being those which completely undercut clichés with the slow
agony of a deflating balloon. The narrator also has to be mentioned as, rather
than a bipartisan figure, he will contribute his thoughts, having to constantly
undercut comments onscreen and including details like Doug being an
"asshole" at times without hesitance.
Which makes the fact that three
episodes that should've been part of the main show came afterwards as bonus OVA
episodes a bit of a creative failure; one of them, the doldrums of Seven-0's
dull days with the backgrounds of the female cast revealed, should've been
included, and the hot springs episode furthers the main takes a notorious cliché
of an episode for an anime and least gives it some added humour as, as is
becoming a peculiar discover for me, apparently murder mysteries set in hot
spring resorts is a trope I have seen anime shows within the last few years. Usually
to take the piss out of as it also requires dramatic exposition having to be
told at a cliff side, even driving to one just to do so.
Double Decker has also been put
through the ringer for how it's handled transgender politics. This segment
needs SPOILER WARNINGS to discuss
properly, in which the problem surrounds the plot point of Kirill having an
older sister who has returned back into his life, only with the caveat that she
is soon revelled to actually be his older brother, never explicitly stated as
being transgender which is a detail that does have to be based in mind, more of
a case here that she prefers dressing and acting as a woman in public rather
than desiring to be a trans woman. The bigger issue with Double Decker is that it putts its foot in its mouth in some ill
advised and tasteless jokes, plot points (like the hot springs episode) which
play upon characters potentially reacting badly if they find out the woman they
have a crush for is revealed to be a cis-man, and the concept of
"Deadnaming" (referring to a trans person's original gendered name)
which I have to be presume is more of a taboo in the West than apparently in
Japan. There is a clearly an issue with cultural differences at hand; for all
the progressive moments in anime and manga to do with LGBT issues, there are
moments where Japan clearly has issues it still needs to go through, attested
to known issues of LGBT discrimination still in the country, and with a sense
that for the moments where Double Decker
tries its best it also stumbles miserably.
As someone with close family who
are transgender, this issue is now more pertinent for me to be aware of in art,
and here its more the case that the "gay panic" jokes just come off
as dumb and un-needed. Pertinently again this is an issue as the show does show
when it does it well, as in an episode about Max's teenage years, where she is
revelled to have been once a shy glasses wearing and long haired schoolgirl in
high school who got her modern look through a far more progressive and sincere
plot nuisance - that the guy she had a crush on was actually either transgendered
and was someone who preferred to dress as a woman and, even if they were
rejected from the school prom, went to that event with her dressed in her
shaved haired masculine dressed self for the first time whilst he went as a
woman in prom dress, all part of cementing her hatred of them in an episode
where a school prom becomes a hot bed for potential prom Queens being deliberately
attacked. It's a tender moment which shows, if the production didn't fall back
on content which has become less defendable for Western anime fans, the show could've
avoided this entire controversy and show this better moment of heart1.
For myself the bigger issue in
terms of Double Decker in terms of
quality, beyond this controversy which has undercut the view of the series for
many when it premiered on Crunchroll,
is that it spends half its length with its breezy mix of drama and humour that
only to believe it needs to tie itself up but doing it badly, rushing forth
only in the last few episodes with a plot trajectory that is completely
predictable not matter how much it tried to even subvert it. Considering how
slickly made the show is2, it almost felt rushed how it lead to its
conclusion, an example of a show that might've actually benefitting from being
over twenty four to six episodes like was a common occurrence in the past. Entering
anime fandom in the 2000s, twenty plus episode long series were more common,
even to the point (ironically) there were cases of shows that should've been
half their length, but this is a curious case that that length of time, even if
the middle episodes between episode ten to fifteen (as usually was the case)
might've procrastinated with tangents, would've actually benefitted this style
of show, which feels like its emphasising the comedy and character more for
three-quarters of its length and leaves the Esperanto plot undernourished.
Also, Double Decker makes a terrible decision in dropping in a plot point
about another planet, and characters from it, which is distracting and
obfuscates from the point of the show being about cops. Even if it leads to why
Anthem exists in background narrative, it'd far and away less interesting than
leaving Anthem an unknown McGuffin and letting the cop parody be taken further
than it did. It also makes a problematic issue that show has been challenged
about already actually more of an ill conceived creative decision the longer
you think about where the plot point transpired from.
As a result, the show's an
unfortunate disappointment, leaving my mind in memory in complete honesty as
time passes, all with a sense that it squandered its best aspects. Even if the
OVAs do temper this with a nicely needed return to the comedy, you still have
the issue that, alongside containing as much of the issues the show has been
accused about in the main series, they are just extra material that can't
really compensate for the mistake of the finale.
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1) There's also a potential issue
of teasing characters as gay which doesn't get followed up, just for an
emotional titillation, suggesting that Max is also possibly in a romantic
situation with her partner Yuri, , in how their end credit moment is the pair
about to embrace for a kiss. Admittedly, if the pair is meant to be
romantically connected, it makes the interaction, both in a major event later
on and, living together, how Max and Yuri's non work life plays out, very
intriguing, between a potential romance (or at least a platonic love)
regardless of one of them being a robot and that it does add layers, alongside
the fact that Max the fighter is still with a flower filled home with home
brewed tea, the nerdy teenager we saw in flashback becoming a brawler and
providing a lot more nuisanced characterisation.
2) I admit I found the fact the
character designs were in 3D dimensioned models, when I noticed it, was frankly
disconcerting even if Double Decker
altogether is a higher quality production. This is a more common technique but
I will still have to adapt to it especially in moments like this which are very
noticeable.
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