Joker Game – 04

I am starting to get a little worried about Joker Game. After a very strong start it’s gone down in quality once it revealed it’s episodic format. This episode marks the lowest point of the series so far though I still don’t think of it as bad. Rather than focus on a member of the D-agency, this episode instead is about a newly appointed officer who is tasked by a superior to track down a spy in the military police. I do prefer this over focusing on the spy members as in the last episode they have proven to be far too overpowered to be interesting. Here we have a vulnerable man chasing after a dangerous suspect but sadly this story turns out to be far less interesting when things come to light. In truth this episode was basically a retread of the second episode in that it turns out the superior officer was completely corrupt and staged an attack to keep his illegal dealings from coming to light but the execution was far worse. This episode plays out like a mystery but never gives the audience a chance to figure out what is going on. The mystery itself is dull and not a lot actually happens. Our red nosed protagonist is given the job, sees a bombing, talks to a reporter who gives him a photo and then follows a man into a hidden casio where he spots his superior. However despite not doing much of anything, red nose is able to perfectly deduce absolutely everything that occurred and recount it back to his superior. As red nose goes on about how his superior became corrupt and began stealing opium from the evidence lockers I sat there wondering just how he could possibly know that. The episode never showed him paying a visit to the evidence locker or how he figured out that the man who was killed was actually investigating the superior. Did he learn it though the files the murdered man left behind? In that case why would the superior give him those files in the first place? There’s just a whole lot of answers coming straight out of nowhere and I think that if the show took the time to actively present clues instead of having our protagonist just lay it out for us would have made for a more engaging plot.

Then after our protagonist of the week points out his superiors illegal dealings and suggests that he get himself court martialed, the superior goes full comic book villain and calls in a soldier to kill him. Now really mister red nose, just what answer did you expect him to give you? “Oh yeah, damn you caught me. Don’t worry, I will go and hand myself in now. Good work.” You basically repeated the same thing Sakuma did except for making sure to have a plan to protect yourself should things go south. I sighed as the superior started gloating and shouting about how totally corrupt and evil he was with a psycho smile and manic laughter. One would think he would restrain himself in case there were actual policemen in the police station who could ever so easily hear him declare that he was selling opium and staged a terrorist bombing. The dumbest thing of all was that thanks to him mouthing off about killing the transvestite boy in the bombing, the soldier that he called in to shoot red nose instead shot him. As it turns out he was in love with the transvestite boy. Which leaves me to wonder just what was the point of all this. The episode seems to suggest that this was all the plan of one of the agents to get rid of the corrupt superior but all that agent did was hand red nose a photo and lead him into the hidden casino. If you are suggesting that he managed to predict how all this was going to happen before it went down then I call bullshit on that. I don’t care if you are some super spy or batman, nothing so dependent on luck and human factors can ever go exactly as planned. Even if it was all just as planned then I am certain you could have thought of a less risky plan. After all why did you even bother getting red nose involved? He didn’t do anything at all and you could have just informed the soldier that he killed his lover and there you go. Problem solved. I rag on this more than I expected but the presentation is still bugging me greatly. The dialogue, the framing, the storytelling….it all seems to assume that you can’t put two and two together and figure out things yourself. Everything is shoved right in your face with little restraint. For a veteran viewer such as myself I find it extremely patronizing like being given a jigsaw puzzle and then the giver assembling the puzzle for me because they thought I wouldn’t be able to figure out how a jigsaw works. One last thing, why did everyone have creepy smiles in the first scene? That was just weird.

~AidanAK47~