Dirty Pair (Episode 4) - The Case Smells Like Cheesecake and Death

Kei and Yuri have a new assignment. They need to track down an escaped cat that has an experimental muscle enhancer that might give it the strength to flatten the city. Their only clue is that the cat likes cheesecake!

Dirty Pair (Episode 4) – The Case Smells Like Cheesecake and Death

What happened?

Back in their lopsided tower, Kei and Yuri are busy fixing stuff, watching wrestling, and picking up guys. However, Kei just wants another assignment and she soon gets her wish. A cat has escaped from a lab and they need to recover it. The cat, Guillaume De Malateta XIII has an experimental drug that enhances muscles. If it works, the cat could destroy the city… or maybe just correct its lean… Anyhow, they need to find the cat before anything bad happens. They have a list of all the known sightings which gives them two likely places for Malatesta to show up – cake shops.

After eating her fill of cakes, Kei sees the cat and gives chase. Malatesta has no plans of being caught, however, and goes out of his way to escape. Kei follows it into a honeymoon suite at a hotel and causes a scene. Not long after leaving Yuri does the same. They follow it to a hair bank and demand to go inside, but the workers don’t know what the WWWA is and have never heard of the Lovely Angels. Kei gets frustrated and pulls her gun to get in. While Kei and Yuri apprehend Malatesta, the workers call the police. However, another group is after the cat and soon all hell breaks loose!

Dirty Pair Episode 4 Kei staking out a cake shop

What did you think?

This was amazing. I loved that they were back at their home tower which is still leaning after the events of the first episode. That was a nice touch. On top of that, there were some amazingly funny moments. The way Kei burst into the newlyweds’ honeymoon suite to look for Malatesta was hilarious. Then, when he finally got his new wife to calm down, in charged Yuri and it just got worse.

The chase scenes were great too, and the way it ended on the unfinished road with the police cars driving back and forth as they tried to stop the road from tipping over and dropping them all was absolutely incredible. It had a real Blues Brothers feel to it and since I’m a big fan of that movie, this hit all the right notes. Of course, it was fairly obvious that the girl wrestlers were behind the cat’s disappearance, but that didn’t make it any less enjoyable.

Dirty Pair Episode 4 Lan from The Elegants

What have you learnt?

I love it when a story uses misunderstandings well. In this episode, it was the way the new wife thought that her husband had been having affairs with Kei and Yuri because of them bursting in and trying to find the cat. It was even better that he almost smoothed things over before Yuri hit the final nail into his marriage’s coffin. They are always best when you can understand why someone would think that way. As with most things, if you can sympathise with the view of the character at that moment, it makes everything more believable.

When I was younger and had first discovered the Dirty Pair manga, I ended up drawing them a lot. I drew Kei more because she was my favourite of the two and that’s still the case. It was wild that she jumped through a window chasing the cat and then caused all that traffic damage in her pursuit of the cat, but then they are the Dirty Pair. The best thing about all of this was that it wasn’t even the right cat. What were the chances there would be an identical cat that attacked one of those two cake shops at that time? It’s a bit of a stretch, but it worked because it made everything they did meaningless.