I didn’t abandon you, Great Pretender – my cigarette heist just took a few weeks longer than expected.
After spending half of my previous G.P. post complaining about fake deaths and farfetched scenarios, in waltzes this trio of episodes to redefine the meaning of the word “contrivance.” Building a massive replica of the Suzaku Association’s headquarters on a deserted island was funky enough, but the mass administration of sleeping drugs required for Oz’s plan verged on parody. There’s also the blood bag stuffed in the lining of Makoto’s suit, which his father used to stage his death within seconds of learning about it. And why the hell are Eddie, Sam, and James Coleman doing business with Edamura – one of the guys who robbed them of everything they had over the course of the series? Really, these last three episodes felt like a fun celebration of Great Pretender’s short history rather than a gripping conclusion, but that’s the line I’ve been walking with this show for a long time now. To machete your way through its jungle of tropes and twists with logic is to miss the point. Still, I wish that the characters had been serviced more carefully by this finale.
Cynthia and Abby already got their arcs in the sun, and Laurent’s recent backstory binge gave him a clear motivation for this three-parter: get revenge on Liu. This was the show’s rationale for going full Heist Mode and focusing almost entirely on Makoto. He’s my least favorite of the four principal characters, though, and these episodes did little to change that. The kid is always going off script based on a need to moralize or vent his frustrations, and he does the same thing during the climactic scene of episode 22. During the critical moment of the series’ biggest con, he yells at Laurent for manipulating him and his dad for abandoning him – which is foolhardy enough on its own. What’s worse is that his dad steals his sword (did I mention Makoto was poking a sword into his estranged father’s vest during all this?) and appears to kill him in cold blood. But then, in episode 23, it’s revealed that all of this was a stunt to justify the gunfight that forced Suzaku and company out of the room, even though Oz hadn’t accounted for the sword being real. (I can hardly account for this plot being real.)
Essays could be written about the incongruity of this scene within its larger context, both emotionally and environmentally. For example, why did the show retroactively treat Edamura’s spiel as a legitimately cathartic moment, despite the fact that it was a massive misdirect? Why did all the career criminals in the room allow an irrelevant freakout to divert their attention from the briefcase containing a billion fucking dollars? But I’d rather skip elsewhere, because like I said a couple paragraphs back, to pursue this line of logic for too long would miss the point. What’s the point, then? I think it’s that Edamura finally pulled one over on Laurent, Ringo Starr style – that is to say, with a little help from his friends. Oz was in on the sting, plus Eddie Cassano’s guys certainly took the blond bastard by surprise. The student has surpassed the master, believable character arcs be damned, and that’s something worth celebrating.
You might be asking yourself whether there was anything I wholeheartedly liked about this last set of episodes. Overwhelming negativity at the very end wouldn’t bode well for my appreciation of the show overall, so thankfully there was plenty of stuff to love about Great Pretender’s conclusion. The first thing that comes to mind is the impossible scale of episode 22’s last scene, with Akemi, Ishigami, Liu and Chen descending to the bottom floor of the fake office building and watching as it crumbled behind them. Did any part of its construction, not to mention the perfect timing of its collapse, make sense? No it didn’t, but it was awesome nonetheless. When I watched that sequence for the first time, my eyebrows blasted into the stratosphere from the force of my skepticism, but my lips were curved into a thoroughly satisfied smile all the same. Giving the villains an escape route by notifying Akemi’s son of her castaway status undercut Laurent’s long-awaited revenge, though; the scene where he whispered “all is well” and tossed Dorothy’s ring into the sea was only moderately successful as a result.
Speaking of Dorothy’s ring, how about that post-credits scene? The love of Laurent’s life is repping the amnesiac lifestyle, living as the adopted daughter of an elderly couple on a Pacific island somewhere. Her ring finds a way back to its owner in the mouth of an enterprising fish, and she puts it on to generate the series’ final image. I’m okay with the idea that she’s still alive, partly because all the other deaths during Laurent’s backstory were fake, so adding one more to the pile is hardly a betrayal. Far harder to swallow was the scene of Laurent posing as a member of the Secret Service as the next U.S. president gave his inauguration speech, then giving someone a phone call: “You must be dying of boredom by now.” The implication here is that he’s recruiting somebody (probably Edamura) to pull a con on a Donald Trump analogue, which is among the craziest sequel pitches I’ve ever seen. Whether or not that sequel materializes hardly matters – what’s important is that the show stayed committed to its ethos of “spectacle over sense,” even at the very end.
Since I’m jumping between elements of the conclusion at this point, I also liked the “where are they now” montage for the members of Laurent’s crew, all linked by a jazzy adult contemporary insert song. It’s a fitting vibe for the group, who struck gold with their final job and are ready to move on with their lives. My favorite part of the montage was seeing Kudou complain about his family situation to Shi Won at a street barbecue place, because it provided one of the best laughs of the whole show. Her advice for the heartbroken Kudou upon learning that his daughter had left to live with his ex-wife? “Forget her.” It wasn’t just her bluntness and comedic timing that were on point here – that simple attitude and dismissal of familial love did a lot for Shi Won’s character in a very short span of time. Even during her flashback turn as one of Dorothy’s best operatives, she was never much more than a supporting player, so I approve of this last ditch effort to dimensionalize her.
Looking over what I’ve written here, it seems as though much of what I liked about these three episodes came near the end, and I think that syncs up with my moment-to-moment viewing experience. Even though its cast wasn’t Great Pretender’s strong suit, I felt something for all the characters as the story started to wrap itself up. Makoto was a frustrating dude to watch for the vast majority of the series, but I also felt his personal frustration at various points throughout the show. He had a hard life, marked by parental betrayal and death, and the always enigmatic Laurent pushed him to his breaking point more than once. Abby’s roughness and Cynthia’s free spirit were carried forward from their respective arcs to their final appearances, and Oz got a redemptive graveside moment with his wife to close out his story. The belabored setup of episode 21 and clogged climax of 22 may not have been my favorites, but the ending brought it all back home. And for an anime as stylistically and narratively hectic as Great Pretender, there’s not much more you can ask for than that.
Tune in later this week for my final review, plus the assignment of an all-important numerical evaluation! Just kidding, scores are for plebs (but I’m gonna give one anyway).
As someone who has seen far too many fake deaths from One piece, I have to say insm annoyed that the writers on this show pulled the same fuckkng trick many times. You can only use fake out deaths so many times before the audience start to feel frustrated.