Great Pretender – 13-14 [Snow of London]

We survived the wait, everybody. Great Pretender episodes 15-23 are live on Japanese Netflix, and the raws are already floating around online. Now we just have to wait for the fansubs to start rolling in like last time, and… What’s that? The guy who made all the previous episodes available hid his torrents and went underground?

Well, damn. This might be the last Great Pretender post on the blog for the foreseeable future. I’d say “better make it a good one,” but that sort of hinges on whether these two installments closed out the Snow of London arc in respectable fashion. Not to spoil the final verdict or anything, but “serviceable” is the word that comes to mind, rather than “respectable.” Hit the jump for my thoughts on why that is.

In my review of episode 12, I praised the introduction of Cynthia and Thomas’s romance for its small touches, like the paint that frequently stained the latter character’s hands and face. Their attraction was a simple one, so these bits of visual intrigue gave the relationship some much-needed character. Episode 13, then, maintains a lot of these small details, but is also saddled with the job of portraying their breakup. Theirs is an ideological parting – Cynthia can’t stand to watch as Thomas falls under Coleman’s spell, producing forgery after forgery and losing his individual spark in the process. When he shows up to their date with an expensive suit and a hundred dollar haircut, it’s clear that he’s become a man of the world, rather than the dreamer that Cynthia fell in love with. Their conversation bears that out, and before the dessert menu can arrive, both the date and their relationship are finished.

Not even two minutes later, the same couple returns to the same restaurant in the present day, but this time the roles are reversed. Cynthia has become a career criminal, a fact that Thomas, now on the straight and narrow, labels “a bad joke.” It’s a smart bit of plotting to flip their positions, but Great Pretender doesn’t exactly make the most of it. I’d have liked to see Cynthia and Thomas take the scenic route on the way to understanding each other’s new circumstances, but the show had the opposite instinct. In fact, it gave in to one of its silliest tendencies and once again inserted Makoto into a situation where he doesn’t belong, prodding and pushing the former lovebirds closer to each other with empty words. Thomas has dedicated his life to buying back his forgeries as a form of atonement, yet Makoto is able to convince him to create one last fake so that Cynthia will return to her former self (without providing any sort of rationale as to why that would happen). And after the job is finished, he tells Cynthia, “You and Thomas are the same people you used to be.” Trouble is, the show just finished flipping both characters on their heads in the move to the present day.

It’s not as though Great Pretender frames Makoto’s idealism as a consequence of his youth or inexperience, either. He’s actually supposed to be the show’s moral voice, which is why he’s always boasting about the honest life he never ends up living. It’s something I’ve gotten used to while watching this series, but here it cropped up in a particularly intrusive way, interrupting the reunion of two adults with messy pasts and putting their reconciliation on fast forward. This wasn’t the only error that the show committed in the Cynthia/Thomas story, either – the insert song “Someday” was used haphazardly in episode 13, which subtracted from the rift that had grown between the couple. The lyrics deal with the end of a romantic relationship, so to play it during a flashback to Thomas’s first forgery was a good bit of foreshadowing, hinting at the cost of his partnership with Coleman. But to play it again in the present during his duplication of Snow of London, which he’s doing for Cynthia’s sake, transmits a conflicting message. I suppose this is yet another case of an anime stretching its music budget as far as it can go, but even if you set aside the song’s thematic implications, hearing it twice within the same episode was overkill.

Right, that’s a lot of complaining for one post. Time to get to episode 14, which concluded its arc nicely, if a bit too cleanly. While the show was occupying itself with Cynthia and Thomas’s love story, James Coleman managed to become even more of a weasel. Making Abby sit on his lap, showing her off to Laurent as a power move in their little spat, manipulating Farrah into quite literally doing his bidding – such a hateable character isn’t easy to craft, so the show gets full marks there. He even huffs about the lack of tact in the cloakroom at a damn mafia auction, not realizing that somebody of his moral fiber is in excellent company among lifelong criminals. It’s this auction where Laurent and company’s plan to juice Farrah for 70 million pounds goes down, only it undergoes several serendipitous shifts as the episode plays out.

The first of these is Abby’s recording of Coleman badmouthing his sugar momma, which opens her eyes to his two-faced nature and puts him on the hook for any bids he might make on Snow of London. The second is how fortunate Cynthia was that her mid-auction stunt didn’t cost her 99 million pounds, which was her final offer in a bidding war she instigated between herself and Coleman. The cons in Great Pretender usually have a rogue agent (Abby allowing Luis to take her place during the final air race in Singapore Sky, for example), but these were the highest financial stakes yet. What made that risk slightly less insane for the audience were the flashbacks to the good times she shared with Thomas, which played on screen as she made bid after extravagant bid. This was the moment where Cynthia’s renewed connection with Thomas felt most authentic, rather than any of the prior prompting from Edamura. She wasn’t just exacting personal vengeance on the man who wrecked her relationship once upon a time – she was honoring Thomas’s work by raising its price to a level they once dreamed of, but never thought possible.

It was a beautiful gesture – or at least, it would have been, had Makoto not switched the real painting for the forgery in a fit of sentimentality. Sure, Thomas worked really hard on that imitation, but that doesn’t mean it’s worth giving a creep like Coleman the real Snow of London (even if he did end up broke and alone because of it). Actually, forget the big bad – the people who were truly hurt by Makoto’s impulsiveness were the landlord and his daughter from the start of this arc. They went from possessing one of the most valuable works of art in the world to displaying a known knockoff, all thanks to their former lodger. Sure, he kept them in business in the short term, and the show wrote off their loss with a quick “I like the forgery better” from the landlord’s daughter, but man, did Edamura fuck up bad in this episode. I know ‘audience surrogate’ characters are important and all, but this one is a little too ordinary for a heist series, at least from my perspective.

What’s done is done, however, and the story ends with Cynthia and Thomas parting amicably and Laurent back on the beach where he began in episode 11. After making a halfhearted pass at his redheaded partner and receiving a breezy rejection, he laments the “path of sorrow” that all men must walk. Classic Laurent – except he then pulls from beneath his shirt the sapphire ring from the ED and asks aloud, “Don’t you think, Dorothy?” Given that ring’s importance in the cat’s journey home during the ending sequence, we can assume that Dorothy is the name of the woman in the ED, and that the upcoming nine-episode arc will involve her in a major way. It feels like Laurent’s seemingly carefree nature is about to come crumbling down, and I can’t wait to see what form that story takes. Whether the fansubs start flowing in a matter of days or we’re forced to wait until part 2 gets a worldwide release, you can be sure I’ll cover it here. Until then, thanks for reading.