REVIEW: Double Decker! Doug & Kirill (Episode 9)

Episode 9: Don’t Think, Feel So Good! | ドントスィンクフェールソーグッド！

The protagonist’s awesome Engrish catchphrase gets title cred this episode, which is a nice way to jetpack back into the actual plot of the series after a slogging through slew of character filler.

Teen inventor Apple Bieber is debuts some new secret agent toys for the team – your typical secret agent fare, such as jet-powered roller skates, jet packs, and spy cams for eye scanner implants. (The agents all agree this stuff is as ridiculous and exploitative as it sounds.) Accusations of Apple being a pervert are interrupted by SEVEN-O’s next mission, assigned to them by Secretary Brian Cooper of Lisvalleta’s military – because SEVEN-O is technically under military jurisdiction. Anyway, the mayor’s daughter has been kidnapped by Esperanza. The agents devise a rescue plan, but things go awry when it becomes evident that the mayor helped stage the kidnapping for a heroic photo op. But Esperanza doesn’t play nice. Accessory to kidnapping or not, they beat the shit out of the mayor and kidnap Doug instead.

When Esperanza takes the scene with Zabel at the lead, things get predictably brutal. Their prerogative was always to get a SEVEN-O agent in their hands, because they want to know what’s in the anti-AMS bullets the agents use to reverse the affects of Anthem, and they are happy to torture out the information. As they beat, waterboard, and electrocute Doug, the rest of the agents try to locate him before he spills or croaks. Turns out, Doug is wearing the pervert-tech that Apple invented in his eye implant, so the team tracks him down. Grabbing the prototype jet roller skates and jet pack, Kirill surges to the rescue.

But as Kirill cites his catchphrase, “Don’t Think, Feel So Good!”, military dude Brian Cooper is taken aback, and wonders why Kirill knows a line from a mysterious religious poem called Nikai’s Prayer.

JET PACKING YOUR WAY TO SUCCESS

This episode veered back to the original trajectory of the series: unraveling the Anthem conspiracy headed by Esperanza. The chaotic energy of the series shot things forward, whereas that same energy has left previous episodes in a confused mess.

The show quips that it is subverting the fact that Kirill is the one who should be getting kidnapped. In all fairness to Kirill, it’s only happened once, and that incident was deliberately staged – and his fellow abductee, Yuri, had the situation completely in control. Kirill has gotten smacked around a good deal, but he hasn’t really been a liability, either. Despite even, perhaps, his own private expectations, he proves just the opposite.

Putting Doug in the role of dude-in-distress was, nonetheless, a little less expected – though it mostly gave him the opportunity to demonstrate how badass he is, by not talking during torture. More than that, it gave our delightful dumbass Kirill the chance to show off his moxie by jet-packing his way to the rescue, and scored him some serious (and much needed) hero points. The show teases at subversion again when Doug thanks him in the hospital, declaring that if Kirill had been in his position, he definitely would not have saved him.

So yeah, I’m still rooting for this pairing.

The real strength of this episode, though, is in how it utilized all of the SEVEN-O agents, and each one contributed to the rescue mission. From Apple’s tech, to Kay suggesting using Morse code on the blinking logo of the eye implant tech to communicate with Doug, or to Max and Yuri’s mobility on the field, and of course Deana’s sniping, SEVEN-O felt like a team, and each agent had, well, agency. Kirill isn’t able to save Doug single-handedly, but SEVEN-O as a team sure can.

FINAL THOUGHTS

With only four episodes left, it’s excellent that Doug was able to leverage his own kidnapping to glean information out of the bad guys – verifying what kind of information they are after, and that Zabel is their leader. The Esperanza cast seems pretty dull beyond Zabel and Bamboo Man, but with those two alone, it’s difficult to see how the series will wrap up in such a short period.

Still, this episode was a step in the right direction. As a finale bonus, it brought a twist to Kirill’s own character – or at least his background. Whatever “Nikai’s Prayer” is, it sure sounds ominous, and we know that Kirill was taught his catchphrase from his grandfather.

WHERE TO WATCH IT (LEGALLY): Funimation (dub), Crunchyroll (sub)

NEXT: Episode 10
PREVIOUS: Episode 8