Well Joker Game managed to pull a twist I didn’t see coming and what makes it rather amusing is that it did it unintentionally. For you see it took the entire episode for me to figure out that I wasn’t watching the antics of another spy of the D-agency only to figure out that this was in fact another spy from another spy agency. The wind agency who have a motto completely opposite of that of the D-agency. We now have an arch enemies for our team, whom are willing to go to any length to accomplish a mission. be it using blackmail or murder. So to put it simply, wind agencies spies act more like actual damn spies. I did think that for once it looked like D-agencies spies were being spies for once only to have the rug pulled under me and have him to be revealed to be an evil spy. This sure makes the D-agency a massive bunch of hypocrites in the first episode when they laughed off Sakuma’s honor code in the first episode. I guess we are supposed to cheer for the D-agency for being morally upright spies and boo the evil wind agency spies who resort to any means necessary to get the job done. It’s all black and white, even though by nature a spies job is morally grey the writer resorts to this simple clash of good and evil with no middle ground.
The story this week is simple. The spy needs to find evidence to implicate a British diplomat is involved with the military and passing on information. However he hasn’t made any communication whatsoever and it’s looking that he’s in the clear. The spy of the week decides to blackmail the butler into drugging the guards and letting him in to investigate the safe. After investigating we see another example of Joker games immensely poor writing as he somehow figures out that the man has been sending out messages through a hollowed out umbrella his wife takes with her when going out. All because of a relatively normal comment about asking her to take the umbrella he bought her with her. This isn’t the stop of the silliness as when the man and his wife come down to investigate at the moment they turn the door handle our spy somehow stuff the documents back in the safe, replaces the painting and gets outside the house. Um…somehow.It really wasn’t made clear just how he managed to get outside. It just shown him in the house one minute and then bam! He Houdini’s outside. All while checking the umbrella on the way I suppose. If Joker Game expects me to take it seriously then it really needs to stop pulling stuff like this. Spies are not Batman and only Batman could pull off such a feat without question. Speaking of which another thing was brought up this episode which is equally ridiculously. Namely that the spies of D-agency were trained for only a year. Due to my habit of skipping openings after seeing them once I happened to forget that detail but now having seen the superhuman level of the D-agents I must point out just how absurd that is.
A year ladies and gents. A year to turn ordinary human beings into perfect people who know everything about every and the deductive reasoning of Sherlock Holmes with the power of precognition. In a year a single man managed to teach a number of people the kind of skills that would require several year college course just to learn one of these subjects. This guy should give up the spy business and just go into teaching kindergartners. After a year those kids would have the knowledge of a college professor. Perhaps I should have seen the danger signs of the writing sooner. The presentation remains insultingly simple as the man comments about him not letting his guard down and very obviously shifts his eyes to look at the safe hidden behind a painting. A stranger tries to spy on the man by standing outside looking in through the gateway because that’s how you can learn information. By being completely obvious. Meanwhile super spy uses his magic eagle vision to spot that the man doesn’t have a tan on his head from across the garden on the second floor. Thus he must be a military policeman as that requires a hat for the job. And not say a construction worker, firefighter or postman. Maybe the guy fell asleep while tanning with a towel on his forehead? Quite honestly I am just losing all interest having made it this far into the series. This should be a turning point for the show as we now have a main antagonist but the only thing I am concerned about is whether I will be able to tell whose on which side.
~AidanAK47~
The main problem I’ve had with the series this entire time was distinguishing the characters from one another. The character design for almost all of the characters are so similar that I can’t tell who they are. Just like the spy in this episode, he looked a lot like the spy from the d agency that is standing at the very left during the intros. Which is why I’m guessing you called that reveal towards the end a twist. The lack of character development due to the episodic format might be a huge reason for my inability to recognize characters. I usually dont have any problems with remembering character names and can usually match a name with a face, but this anime makes it really hard because they really only introduced the characters in the first episode and it was like a 20 second scene.
A brief comparison I guess would be Baccano! which had WAY more characters each with different back stories from different timelines but the character design and how each character was developed made it really easy to remember names and faces.
The no killing part isn’t related to morals or hypocrisy, they don’t kill in order to avoid attracting attention. Murders will always become public and cause way more of a stir than anything else.
I really want to know what happens in part 2 now. Judging by the episodes I wouldn’t wonder if another D-Agency spy would appear in episode 9 who plays the role of the current spy’s enemy. There are only two other spies without own episodes (if you don’t count Miyoshi who had some screentime in episode 2) and four episodes to go. I guess the last two will be some double finale, maybe even the last three so the other spies could appear in episode 9 and 10 unless the finale will involve more than one spy.
I kinda wish this series had a Germany episode though. It’s a bit of a wasted potential having a WWII show without German or Russian settings. But maybe it’ll happen later.
I’m going with he’s actually the D-agency spy, infiltrating the other group of spies to bring them down along with all these other people. Joker Game loves itself too much to give anything else attention.