Great Pretender – 07-08 [Singapore Sky]

This was a tale of two episodes for me. Number 7 was an excellent stage-setter for both the upcoming con on the Ibrahim brothers and Abby’s deteriorating psychology; number 8 was a jumble of confused dialogue and crossed wires. On the one hand, it’s awesome that I didn’t find significant fault with this series until its eighth installment (and that fault is subjective to begin with). On the other, I’d have loved for the show to fly high for its entire run, especially since one of summer’s other top prospects, Japan Sinks, just pooped its pants in spectacular fashion. It’s not like Great Pretender’s flirtation with mediocrity puts it in the same league, but a spotless track record would have been neat. But what made episode 8 so spotty? For that matter, what made number 7 so good? Let’s get into it.

Every con needs a mark, and Singapore Sky has a juicy one in Sam Ibrahim, sexist match fixer extraordinaire. Episode 6 called him and his brother Clark “heirs to an oil kingdom,” but in addition to their family’s wealth, Sam owns and orchestrates Pathfinder Air Race, which casts Clark as the hero and pays his opponents to tank their flights. The only pilot ever to disobey that order was Luis “Mad Bull” Müller, whose defiance earned him a lifetime of paraplegia after his plane was sabotaged. Sam is a real piece of work, and not only for his willingness to gamble with Luis’s life – he’s also a male chauvinist, to the point of hilarity rather than villainy. Don’t get me wrong, his views on women are backwards, but outbursts like “your ideals disgust me even more than your sagging tits!” are funny as hell. I’m sure the [Die Hot] subs were localized to some degree, so Sam’s screeds may not be entirely faithful to his Japanese dialogue, but they go a long way in taking the edge off his near-murderous tendencies.

It’s Cynthia who suffers the bulk of Sam’s ignorance, since she poses as the alluring manager of an air racing team with Abby as the pilot. Cynthia’s foiled attempts at seduction are entertaining, since they reveal a violent vanity underneath her perfect façade, but Abby’s story is far more interesting. She gets four separate flashbacks in episode 7 alone, most of which are mere seconds in length, but taken together they form a tragic picture. It seems Abigail was a ballet prodigy in her youth (which explains her acrobatics in the series premiere), before her parents were killed by bombings in the Middle East. Years later, she joined a paramilitary group in search of revenge, but her unit was outgunned, and the bloodshed she witnessed back then still haunts her to this day. There’s a particular shot of a wide-eyed corpse that recurs throughout the arc – she must have stared at it for a long time, unable to move her head due to the threat of detection.

Whether she was captured or fled the battlefield, and how she ended up in Laurent’s gang of crooks, are questions we still don’t have the answers to. But even without her full biography, we can sense that Abby has been through hell. She hallucinates her parents as spectators during her first air race, and vomits due to an intense combat flashback during her second. She still carries the medal she won on the day of the bombing, now battered and missing its ribbon, as a constant reminder of her loss. Episode 7 concludes with Laurent’s analysis that “she’s looking for a place to die,” and I have to say, he’s not doing anything to dissuade her from her search. Even assigning her the pilot role for this con verges on cruelty, since bomb-laden planes were the vehicles of her parents’ death. Great Pretender is generally a breezy watch, but Abby’s personal history flies in the face of that lightness.

I love learning about characters’ backstories and using them to contextualize their present actions, so I was a fan of this development. My issues aren’t with episode 7, where we received this information, but its follow-up, which sidelined Abby in favor of pretty much everyone else. One of the only exceptions was episode 8’s cold open, which put her in a Ferris wheel car with Makoto. Bumbler that he is, the guy tried to initiate a hasty heart-to-heart talk, but the gap between his knowledge and the audience’s was insurmountable. The resulting tone was clumsy, and not just because of Makoto’s lack of subtlety or Abby’s stony demeanor – there was also a bizarre finish where he freaked out over a plane that flew too close to their compartment, or too high in the air, or something. If anyone can make heads or tails of the way this scene abruptly transitioned into the OP, I’d surely appreciate it.

It would be one thing if this episode neglected Abby’s character and gave grade A material to everybody else, but that wasn’t the case. If I had to pick a highlight, it’d be the introduction of Luis’s wife Isabelle, who did an admirable job of acting to introduce Makoto as Clark’s new mechanic(*). Apart from that fun exchange, though, whoever handled this middle section of Singapore Sky seemed to be working in isolation from the rest of the writer’s room. The biggest question mark was the running thread of Makoto’s near-abduction near the episode’s halfway point, which ended up being a mistake on Shi Won’s end. There was no payoff to this error, unless you count Laurent’s amusement at his protégé’s cluelessness. We could have skipped straight to the day where the abductors came for him in front of Sam, as they were supposed to, but even that scene had issues, which I’ll attempt to explain below.

(*Just before this scene, Clark’s usual mechanic can be heard fretting about his home in London having burned down, which frees up the position that Makoto fills. It’s reasonable to assume that Laurent orchestrated the arson to create that vacancy, which puts a significant dent in his claim to hurt only the pockets of the rich and ethically compromised.)

Here’s what I don’t understand about the plan to frame Makoto as Luis’s saboteur. Sam is certainly the one who ordered that Luis’s plane be tampered with – the entire plot of this arc rests on that idea. So when he heard from Shi Won that it was Makoto who did the tampering, he would immediately know that was bullshit. As a result, he should have grown more distrustful of Makoto, instead of solidifying their relationship. The show tries to justify this move via Sam’s “I only trust bad guys” speech, but it’s an insufficient explanation for their sudden partnership. Later, Sam willingly goes with Makoto to an underground casino, knowing that both he and Shi Won are lying about his identity. Sam is obviously money-hungry – the look that comes over his face upon learning about the casino is proof of that – but he’s not so stupid as to play along with a scheme of someone else’s design. I really hope I’m misinterpreting something here, because if I’m not, the next two episodes will hinge on a character’s willful amnesia.

There were plenty of little things to appreciate about the series in the midst of this confusion. Take the ornate background art of the high class hotel where the characters are lodging, for example, or Sam disguising himself as a beer-bellied Turkish restaurateur for his trip to the casino. But the show leaping to install Makoto as part of the Ibrahim brothers’ inner circle didn’t work for me, and benching Abby for a week was even worse. The show even tacked a shot of her youth ballet medal onto the last moments of episode 8, despite the fact that she was mostly uninvolved with what came beforehand. She did inquire as to Luis’s military background after an offhand comment from Laurent, though that seems like a setup for the show’s biggest coincidence so far – but that’s a topic for the next post. See you then.