Joker Game

Episode 8

As we enter the final third of Joker Game's first season, we're finally presented with an overarching plot for the D-Agency to overcome, rather than the purely episodic adventures we've had up to this point. It's a welcome surprise not only because these new villains have popped up on D-Agency's home turf, inside the Imperial Army where we first started out, but also because these baddies re-open a woefully unexplored conflict we first saw hinted at in the show's first episode: Spy-vs-Spy. That's right, the "joker game" is now being played between supposed allies. We don't just have double agents to worry about, we've got double agencies too!

We begin this two-parter with the most menacing member of the D-Agency yet, the cliff-nosed stepford smiler Gamou. He's a big fan of chess, and lucky for him, so is the British consul he's keeping tabs on, a burly and bushy-stached fellow named Graham. Since the title of this arc is "Double Joker," we're already on the lookout for double agents, so we get one almost immediately when Graham sends his dutiful servant Chou (it's a butler named "butterfly"!) out to tail his gaming rival, just to make sure he's not up to any funny business. Fortunately for Gamou, Chou is not a military man, which means like most other Japanese citizens at this point in history, he's extremely broke. He receives money from Graham for his loyal service and "information" on Gamou, but Gamou also has the butler on the ropes for a massive gambling debt, so the real useful information is whatever he can cough up about the secrets old Graham might be smuggling out of the country. That means we're watching a double agent on a small scale do the butlery for another double agent on a larger scale. At least all this espionage is for the D Agency's benefit, and thanks to all those previous episodes, we can be sure that Yuuki is stockpiling info for the benefit of national security, not in an effort to sabotage other countries. At least, that's what we think is happening, but the truth in this episode's chilling final minutes turns out to be far more sinister.

As handsome and cultured as he is, there's something oddly suspicious about Gamou's behavior from the get-go. Not only is he mostly bullying another guy into doing his dirty work for him (through extortion and violence!), he also seems to delight in playing up his own powers of observation for the guy he's supposed to be spying on. None of this makes him evil or even bad at his job, since you could argue he's maximizing human resources and cementing the trust of his target through these actions, but Gamou's attitude and tactics are definitely different from what we're used to seeing from the more independent and invisible D-Agency boys. After some roundabout spying, coercion, and even burglary, Gamou finally arrives at the information Graham is about to leak to Great Britain. It seems the old man knows something about Japan's "Grand Strategy." The episode leaves things vague on that front, but I can only assume this means Graham has figured out about Japan's formal alliance with Germany and Italy as a core member of the Axis Powers.

So after using a sticky solution to narrow down Graham's potential accomplices, Gamou thanks his own accomplice Chou by stabbing him through the kidneys in a dirty alleyway, adding insult to injury by trapping him with his own desperate need for money. "Kill without hesitation," he says, "Die with honor." This is the motto of the Imperial Army's newest spy initiative: the Wind Agency.

Yeah, it turns out we weren't following a D-Agency mission at all. The Imperial Army has officially had enough of Yuuki's decision to completely eschew military men from his program, to say nothing of how he implements his minimalist tactics for domestic security above all else. Much as they hate the inherent "cowardice" of espionage, the military's higher-ups have accepted it as a necessary evil for winning the information war, but that doesn't mean they have to do things Yuuki's way—even if they do plan on using his men. Gamou was the real "double joker" all along, but his new boss at the staunchly imperialist Wind Agency isn't interested in playing a "double joker game," so he's instructed Gamou to share all his intel with the D-Agency too. What began as a rogue initiative in a country at war with itself has now turned into a battle between ideologies for the future of the war effort. It's D-Agency vs. Wind Agency, and their target is Graham's partner-in-treachery, a man named Shirahata. So we'll see what side Gamou's really chosen and how these two agencies differ in training and tactics next week. Episode 8 was all just setup work.

On that note, aside from its totally melodramatic twist that the Imperial Army has decided to take its ball and go home rather than play along with the not-sufficiently-fascist Colonel Yuuki, this episode of Joker Game mostly left me feeling like I didn't really want an overarching plot out of this show after all. As the introduction to a civil war between spies, episode 8 is intriguing, but it's still all moving parts and trivial details, bereft of the emotional or thematic investment that the one-episode adventures provided. This cat-and-mouse business could be more compelling if we cared about the players more, but Joker Game's biggest weakness is still its lack of characterization, so a series of chess moves around the occasional info-dump isn't really compelling when we have no real investment in Gamou or Chou as people. Gamou just seems like kind of an unpleasant jerk, but because he's still a D-Agency boy, I'm still holding out hope that he might have been playing "unreliable narrator" at the end, meaning Chou might not be dead. Regardless, I'm eager to see how the game changes, now that we've got two Jokers in the deck.

Rating: B+

Joker Game is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Jake has been an anime fan since childhood, and likes to chat about cartoons, pop culture, and visual novel dev on Twitter.