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EP. REVIEW: Double Decker! Doug & Kirill


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Zof





PostPosted: Tue Nov 27, 2018 10:58 am Reply with quote
Merida wrote:
Kirill is an adorable genius and makes a very beautiful bride!<3

Looks like the plot is about to thicken with the military guy wanting to recruit Kiriil, i hope we're going to learn more about grandpa and the reason why Valery had to leave.



What boggles my mind is they've brought up Anthem as a positive drug, keep doing so, we know Doug is augmented already. Kirill is a secret genius....

The guess is we find out Anthem started out being something positive and somehow Doug and Kirill have already benefited.
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Zeino



Joined: 19 May 2017
Posts: 1098
PostPosted: Mon Dec 10, 2018 3:37 pm Reply with quote
So I don't think Double Decker! is jumping the shark, I think it's pulling a Samurai Flamenco and going in a completely different direction then expected and once more people just don't get it.
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DenimAndLeather



Joined: 10 Dec 2018
Posts: 19
Location: Great Britain
PostPosted: Mon Dec 10, 2018 3:46 pm Reply with quote
Agree with reviewer on just about everything in this episode. The Alien thing caught me off guard and was expecting it to turn into a joke but no, they stuck with it.

The whole Yuri death was confusing, she's had next to zero development all series (she's a robot and lives with Max, that is basically all we know) so I'm not sure what the purpose of her death was other than, as said, a plot device to spur Kirill to join the Military which is a massive wasted opportunity.

I did like Bamboo Mans betrayal though, his design is too good to waste.

This is the first time in the series I came away, not disliking the episode exactly but more a sense of bewilderment at the turn of events and how tonally all over the place it was. At least I have no expectations now for the last two episodes.
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SHD



Joined: 05 Apr 2015
Posts: 1752
PostPosted: Mon Dec 10, 2018 4:27 pm Reply with quote
Zeino wrote:
So I don't think Double Decker! is jumping the shark, I think it's pulling a Samurai Flamenco and going in a completely different direction then expected and once more people just don't get it.

It's not even necessarily that - we simply don't have all info. Who even was talking about aliens? Nobody. Why can't it be say, humans who moved on from Earth and now live in technologically superior colonies? And so on.

Also, again I guess I don't understand complaints about tone/etc. Sure, the plot developments re: Esperanza was rushed and I can see how someone who actually finds the plot in pulpy buddy-cop action comedies important would be bothered by it. But I'm not one of those people. And everything else was pretty much par for the course for this show. It's not like the show never mixed drama and humor before.

In any case, this is very far from "jumping the shark" but the reviewer has demonstrated for weeks now that he simply doesn't get the show at all, and keeps criticizing it simply for not being the show he wants it to be.
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AA751



Joined: 13 Nov 2017
Posts: 72
PostPosted: Mon Dec 10, 2018 5:13 pm Reply with quote
See this entire time I had two theories- this was the matrix type world, or a virtual world that only Kirill is the real character from the real world.

Or that this was like a large Truman Show setup and everyone in this city were actors and Kirill didn't know.

Because there is constant references to 'up there'and breaking the fourth wall etc. I was waiting for that twist.

So when I find out they are aliens, I was like...welp that makes sense. Didn't surprise me in the least.
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Koda89



Joined: 10 Jul 2006
Posts: 278
PostPosted: Mon Dec 10, 2018 7:04 pm Reply with quote
Yeah I gotta agree with others, I think we the viewers and the reviewer are just seeing two different shows now, because I quite enjoyed this episode and its crazy twists and turns.

Even some of the more subtle details I quite liked, such as the little electric sheep toy Max picked up while mourning Yuri’s death.

Granted it might be that I’ve always been rolling with this show being a dumb pulpy romp, and it hasn’t disappointed in being that.
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SHD



Joined: 05 Apr 2015
Posts: 1752
PostPosted: Mon Dec 10, 2018 7:15 pm Reply with quote
Why is everyone talking about aliens, though? Nobody in the actual show mentioned aliens, as far as I remember. All they said was humans who live above. All we saw were humans. And Kirill and Mila are humans - they might be special humans, genetics will probably figure into this somehow, and they might have special powers ("Bamboo Man" is most definitely not a regular human and I'll eat my hat if he's not also from above) and Anthem is most likely involved in one way or another, but still, they're not aliens. Did I miss something?

Also, yes, the fact that there was something "off" with this world and things were definitely not exactly what they seem to be had been hinted at for pretty much the entire show, most obviously in the cop reality show parody. If someone hadn't caught on by now that's not really the show's fault.

(Personally, at this point I'm kind of imagining a situation similar to Juuousei, where there are humans who live "above" in technologically advanced colonies however they're slowly dying out for reasons unknown; they send their criminals to an Earth-like prison planet below where they're left to fend for themselves and create their own society through generations. spoiler[Eventually it's revealed that the whole thing is actually an experiment in genetics to create a genetically superior human to save the species. However it turns out that with time the people on the prison planet have pretty much evolved into a new subspecies who will survive in the new world, while their "cousins" above whose original home planet was Earth and couldn't adapt to living so far away from it in space slowly go extinct.])
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Merida



Joined: 21 Feb 2012
Posts: 1945
PostPosted: Tue Dec 11, 2018 1:33 am Reply with quote
SHD wrote:
Why is everyone talking about aliens, though? Nobody in the actual show mentioned aliens, as far as I remember. All they said was humans who live above. All we saw were humans. And Kirill and Mila are humans - they might be special humans, genetics will probably figure into this somehow, and they might have special powers ("Bamboo Man" is most definitely not a regular human and I'll eat my hat if he's not also from above) and Anthem is most likely involved in one way or another, but still, they're not aliens. Did I miss something?


Nope, the review mentioned aliens and everyone just seems to roll with it...

I'm usually not one of those people who whine about reviewers, but in this case he just seems to be pissed off that the show didn't go in the direction he expected it to take and is now trying to find fault in everything...the only complaint i might partially agree with is Yuri's death, but i'm not convinced that we've seen the last of her. But overall, i'm still enjoying this
show a lot.
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Gina Szanboti



Joined: 03 Aug 2008
Posts: 11306
PostPosted: Tue Dec 11, 2018 6:25 am Reply with quote
Merida wrote:
the only complaint i might partially agree with is Yuri's death

That they "killed" her, or how they played it off? Because when I read this - "Kirill even goes back to the running gag about not realizing everyone knew she was a robot as they're discussing mourning her!" - I was again wondering if we watched the same show.

I can't figure out what Christopher wanted them to do here. Kirill's reaction was perfectly in character, not a joke. He thought she could be saved if he revealed her "secret," and no one made fun of him for still thinking it was a secret. Would it have made sense for him to keep silent to avoid the "joke"? Then we'd hear complaints about "why don't we just reboot her?" never being addressed. But if someone else had brought it up, then they'd have had to actually do the joke of him being shocked that others knew all along. That would've sucked.

While I'm on this, I really liked the conversation when he was warning her to be careful about not needing rest. She could've filled him in, but chose not to, while clearly being touched by his concern for her. I think that's part of why she sacrificed herself for him.

"Doug still implicitly accepts Kirill's alien self..." Anybody know what this meant? He didn't tell Doug anything, so how was he implicitly accepting what he didn't know anything about?

After this episode, I'm getting the impression that the people from Nikai are the source of the rise of NEXTs. Does that fit the timeline with T&B?

So nope, I didn't see any shark jumping either. Maybe just a little swimming with those giant fish the newspapers keep talking about...
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Merida



Joined: 21 Feb 2012
Posts: 1945
PostPosted: Tue Dec 11, 2018 10:00 am Reply with quote
Gina Szanboti wrote:
Merida wrote:
the only complaint i might partially agree with is Yuri's death

That they "killed" her, or how they played it off?


That they killed her mostly because it would have been nice for her to get a bit more development and it seems unnecessarily cruel to Max to lose someone important again.
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AholePony



Joined: 04 Jun 2015
Posts: 330
Location: Arizona
PostPosted: Tue Dec 11, 2018 5:51 pm Reply with quote
When they said there was a spare body, I knew Yuri wasnt dead. I thought she had enough development up to this point even though she didn't get much screen time, her interactions with the team were enough for me. I also don't think this is "a case of the show killing off a queer character". They killed off the only character you could literally blow up and have them "survive".
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SHD



Joined: 05 Apr 2015
Posts: 1752
PostPosted: Tue Dec 11, 2018 6:44 pm Reply with quote
Merida wrote:
That they killed her mostly because it would have been nice for her to get a bit more development and it seems unnecessarily cruel to Max to lose someone important again.

The way I see it, it would have been nice for her to get a bit more development, but she wouldn't have gotten it anyway. She's got as much development as Deana, Kay or Max did, and that's as much as a side character gets in a one-cour story. If there's anything else it can be handled in secondary materials, or even fanworks if one leans that way... but I think it's unreasonable to expect a story of this length and type to spend any more time on developing secondary characters.

This is not an ensemble cast, this is a show with a main/focus character (Kirill) a sub-main character (Doug) and a very limited number of episodes. Maybe if the series was two cours it would have had time to give Yuri more focus, but it's not and so this is what we get. Hell, much of even Doug's characterization at this point comes from relatively subtle things like body language, the way he speaks (the voice acting continues to be stellar), the state of his home, the way he goes about doing certain things, etc., rather than him being in actual story/plot focus... and he's in the actual title!

And as for being "unnecessarily" cruel - that's why it was necessary, for the audience to care. Sophie or Apple or even Kay or Deana could've died and it wouldn't have had this sort of weight plot-wise. Kirill had a special connection to Yuri and we, the audience, also did. So she gets to go. ("Go", anyway. I wouldn't be surprised if she came back one way or another.)

For what it's worth, I also don't agree with the "killing off the queer character" complaints. Yes, I understand the issue, but sometimes characters die because it's convenient, not because they're queer... whatever that means for an actual robot, anyway. We needed someone in Seven-O that Kirill really cares about to die, and it couldn't be Doug because, well duh. So it gets to be Yuri, someone whom Kirill is also close to, and whose loss the audience will feel more keenly than if it was Deana or Kay or even Max.
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Brack



Joined: 15 Oct 2005
Posts: 281
Location: UK
PostPosted: Thu Dec 13, 2018 5:19 am Reply with quote
Given where the episode title comes from (the Japanese title of You Only Live Twice - "007 Dies Twice", Lupin III and Kamen Rider have also borrowed it), they definitely want you to be thinking that Yuri's not dead yet.

It's a case where the reference is lost in translation because it had already had a slightly off translation from English in the first place.
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John Thacker



Joined: 28 Oct 2013
Posts: 1006
PostPosted: Sat Dec 15, 2018 10:44 pm Reply with quote
SHD wrote:
The way I see it, it would have been nice for her to get a bit more development, but she wouldn't have gotten it anyway. She's got as much development as Deana, Kay or Max did, and that's as much as a side character gets in a one-cour story.


I'd say that Max got more character development, but some people weren't happy about that either. She did certainly get more development than Travis or Sophie, or Apple, or even another character with a recurring joke Derick. Not every character is going to get an episode, and for some characters it works fine. It's difficult to really do a strong backstory episode for an android in a single episode, anyway. It wouldn't have worked any better than Max, and it would have been worse simply because there's a lot more questions you have to answer about an android for it to be meaningful.
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Gina Szanboti



Joined: 03 Aug 2008
Posts: 11306
PostPosted: Tue Dec 18, 2018 10:04 pm Reply with quote
Quote:
I feel like each of these steps gets further from the social issues of classism that the story was trying to tie drug use into from the beginning.

So basically the complaint here is that the story and its main theme didn't turn out to be what you'd imagined it was at the start. How dare they!

It did tie drug use and social class together and made some comments about that, but that doesn't mean that's what the whole series was about. It was just a part of the world building.

Quote:
this portion feels like a shortcut to get the other Detectives up to speed and position them for the big blow-out finale.

Uh yeah? And? What would you have preferred, they spend two episodes on detailing how Seven-O managed to get up to speed on what was going on, in a way that didn't feel like a shortcut? It wasn't all that important how they learned the details, just that they did (or we'd never hear the end of it), so the series did it as economically as possible.

I know the job is to be a critic, and this series is far from perfect, but the weird things you've chosen to nitpick seem like you're looking for shortcuts to your paycheck. oO


I still think Yuri probably downloaded herself into a backup somewhere before she got asploded, but I guess we'll find out next week. I think I'm ok with either outcome.
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