Great Pretender – 09-10 [Singapore Sky]

We’ve reached the conclusion to Singapore Sky, my least favorite of Great Pretender’s three cases thus far. I love origin stories, so Los Angeles Connection’s task of integrating Makoto into Laurent’s gang of crooks was right up my alley, and the upcoming Snow of London is a breezy revenge tale with some nice Cynthia focus. ‘Singapore,’ by contrast, is the darkest of the three arcs, with war-torn backstories and active death drives, yet it also uses more narrative cogs than its cousins. Watching these last two episodes, I felt that Luis’s involvement pushed the story beyond its carrying capacity – but that doesn’t mean there weren’t a lot of great moments in episodes 9 and 10. Let’s run them down (along with the not-so-great stuff) after the jump.

When you’re looking for props to give Great Pretender, art direction should always be near the top of the list. Not being an aesthete of any sort, I can’t explain why Yuusuke Takeda’s splashy color choices look beautiful instead of ugly, but I’ll be damned if this isn’t the best-looking anime of 2020 so far. It may be that emphasizing color over form gives artists more freedom to depict the same setting in a variety of tones down the line. For example, contrast the harshly lit waterways during Luis and Clark’s nail-biting race (ep 10) and the traditional blues of the same course during Caio Bisconti’s lower-stakes flight (ep 9). Whatever Takeda’s reasoning, the final result is a world I want to live in – though the trauma and death coming from writer Ryouta Kosawa’s corner take a lot of the shine off.

They don’t just make the world of Great Pretender a less appealing place to live, though. They also take the shine off the show itself, due to its inability to bring those darker themes home. After moving away from Abby’s backstory in episode 8, the show revisited and clarified her tragic past in its follow-up, which was a good bit of course correction. However, the depths of her hatred and reckless self-endangerment gave way to forgiveness far too quickly. Imagine losing your parents to airplane bombings as a child, and the grief-fueled resentment that might stem from that seed. Imagine harboring those feelings in your heart for years, until you finally reach the age of military service, where you undergo dehumanizing training and eventually lose your comrades on the battlefield. Imagine, years later, crossing paths with a man who took part in those bombings – who cruelly describes them as “dropping a great big deuce while he was flying past” – and making an attempt on his life, only to be thwarted at the last moment.

Now imagine shaking your head “no” when asked if you resent him, just days after that attempted murder. Does that make even the slightest bit of sense from a character perspective? No it doesn’t, but that’s the route Great Pretender took in episode 10, and I was pretty mad about it afterwards (though the following arc put the series back in my good graces). The pain that Abby has been carrying for most of her life was shunted to the side in favor of a redemption story for Luis, the aforementioned deuce dropper. He’s a tragic figure, as well: nearly paralyzed from the waist down, addicted to painkillers, and carrying the same death wish as Abigail. Wracked with guilt and misery, incapable of air racing or showing love to his wife, he’s exactly the kind of guy whose rehabilitation would make a great story. But if you have to minimize Abby’s continued suffering to do it? That doesn’t fly with me.

I’ve got to get away from this topic so I can discuss the rest of these episodes, but it’s important to note that Luis takes Abby’s pilot role in the con for the final race against Clark. Prior to this development, there were a couple shots of Luis gripping an invisible throttle in his wheelchair, wanting so badly to be airborne that he mimed the controls of the pilots above. Abby stepping aside to give him that opportunity is a dubious bit of writing in my mind, but it does complete the parallel drawn between their characters. Much better was the use of classical music that played during young Abby’s ballet recital in episode 9, and then again during Luis’s flight in episode 10. The excerpt came from “The Carnival of the Animals,” a 19th century French piece adapted for the ballet in 2003 – the same year as the Baghdad bombings depicted throughout these episodes. Whether or not this was a conscious decision, the spirited violins of Carnival’s finale nicely underscored Luis’s ecstasy at returning to the skies.

What about Sam and Laurent, the opposing masterminds of this arc? The long and short of it is that Laurent wins, thanks to a cellophane treatment applied to the windows of Sam’s VIP lounge that makes red light appear purple. No matter whether won the final race, the winner’s fireworks would appear to mark Abby’s victory, and Sam would be out 25 million dollars. This was a terribly clever scheme, the retroactive reveal of which went a long way in putting a bow on this case. There were a lot of threats to Laurent’s plan here – Abby giving her spot to Luis and Makoto not sabotaging Clark’s plane being the obvious ones – but the cellophane trick allowed the show to take those detours and still deliver a resounding defeat to Sam. He certainly deserved it, given the life-threatening tampering he’d done with other pilots’ planes in the past, but Laurent didn’t come out of this con looking particularly clean, either.

Makoto and Abby were essentially cut out of the loop by the end of Singapore Sky, at Laurent’s discretion. Sure, they went wildly off script and threatened his payday, but leaving them to fend for themselves with a shark like Sam out for blood? That kind of sink or swim mentality makes Laurent seem like a pawn pusher rather than a protagonist we can root for. The show constructed an over-the-top final scene as a means of ending on a light note, with Makoto and Abby jumping from a window and parachuting to safety as Sam hopelessly shot after them. That’s fun and all, but it left me scratching my head the first time I watched it. The only reason those two returned to the vacant casino room and put themselves in peril was that Laurent hadn’t told them the last leg of his plan. And the reason he didn’t tell them the plan was… what, exactly?

It seems to me that the writers wanted to end this arc with Luis getting back in the saddle, so they worked backwards from Makoto and Abby’s decision to go off book, which meant he had to freeze them out. Maybe I’m missing something, but if not, there’s a disconnect between the fun banter our main con artists appear to share and the unsteady relationship they actually have. The show isn’t drawing a lot of attention to this issue, but it gets away with that sleight of hand because it looks and sounds so damn good. That polish has ensured that I have fun with the show, even when it disappoints me – but I want more from Great Pretender than a good time. I want consistency of character and clarity of purpose. I want it its AOTY status to be a foregone conclusion, rather than a moderate possibility. Mostly I want more arcs like the upcoming Snow of London, which I’ll get around to blogging before too long. Until then, let’s say a prayer for the last nine episodes to air sooner rather than later.