All of my reviews contain spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning. This review was commissioned that means I was paid to watch the series in question and review it. You may learn more about my commission policies herehttps://twitter.com/planetJane/status/1214915253047349249 When 80s anime come to mind few spring to the forefront as quickly as Dirty Pair. The shows aesthetic has become so associated with the 80s that its practically a byword for the decade itself. What this means in practical terms is that with any given episode youre getting neon pinks blues and oranges heavy shadows laser guns that spit brightlycolored plasma bolts weird boxy robots and skimpy outfits a soundtrack stuffed with city pophttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citypop and burbling analog synthesizers and so on and so forth. 880https://i.ur.com/xtZYyPg.png What rarely comes up in these brief conversations about the series is anything about Dirty Pairs narrative or indeed anything much about its writing at all. Regardless of the why it does Dirty Pair something of an injustice. While its hard to call it anywhere near perfect its a fascinating time capsule of a series rooted in the actionanime genre we now take for granted but built around tropes and structures of a longbygone era. Dirty Pair revolves around the titular duo Kei and Yuri who are agents of interplanetary private detective / bounty hunting / various problemfixing company 3WA. Formally The Lovely Angels the two have something of a spotty reputation and the title is their inuniverse disparaging second nickname. The show is broadly episodic in a specific way that most modern anime arent. Meaning that its tone and even its genre are subject to vary bent to the purposes of whatever story its trying to tell this week. Early on we get a fairly comedic episode about our heroines pursuing a cat whos being used to test out supersteroids Pursuit Smells of Cheesecake and Death back to back with a bizarre psychedelic borderlinehorror episode where theyre kidnapped by an AI loosely implied to be the ghost of a dead scientist The Heartbeat of Criados and thats followed up by a traditional actionadventure episode where the Pair come out on top at the end Lots of Danger Lots of Decoys. This is as good an example of the shows variety as anything. Its a strength to be sure. The show weaves a lot of different tales over the course of its run and on the off chance a given viewer isnt feeling a specific episode they can simply wait it out until the next. A couple things however are too integral to the shows material to be so easily ignored. The series main writing flaw is its odd treatment of the relationship between the main duo. For the most part it is shown that for however much they might bicker the Lovely Angels do genuinely get along and are close friends. Sometimes though it goes overboard and in general we see the two tearing each other down usually over a guy more than is probably necessary. Occasionally their relationship gets downright bizarre. The eighth episode is a big offender here. To greatly compress it involves Kei and Yuri rescuing Yuris childhood sweetheart from a forced labor prison. When they get there Kei discovers that said childhood beaux is in fact already dead and was unable to weather the mental pressure of being forced to design and assemble weapons of war. The message the two got earlier in the episode spurring this mission in the first place was an automatic message tapped out by a computer that the childhood friend left behind. So far so action show. The weird part is that Kei actively keeps this knowledge from Yuri something the show bizarrely tries to frame as a good thing. The question of whether this is a matter of the shows age cultural difference or just plain bad writing is ultimately a bit immaterial. This isnt the only example and while the worst offences are mostly confined to a few specific episodes including regrettably the shows finale stuff like this is going to strike modern viewers strangely and it does detract from whats otherwise quite an enjoyable watch. Still though most of the time the shows oddball sensibility works in its favor. Theres really nothing quite like some of the campiness this series gets up to. As an example the twelfth episode sees our heroines combatting a superintelligent mouse who has the ability to mind control other mice. 880https://i.ur.com/vWiA3Ew.png This mouse. Who has his mousequeen bitten by an intelligencedraining nanobot at the storys end and out of grief tosses himself from a window. You really just dont get things like that very often anymore and if Dirty Pair makes a compelling case for anything its that this kind of weirdness makes for an uncomplicated and occasionally amazingly dumb sort of fun. Theres also occasionally surprisingly clever if onthenose directoral tricks. Its one thing to imply a character has just made a mistakeits another to imply it visually and so blatantly as to have the arcade game shes standing in front of flash the word ERROR onscreen. 880https://i.ur.com/GaNniDR.png At the end of it all Dirty Pairs reputation as a classic is staked more on influence and ubiquity than quality per se but its an enjoyable show and its hard not to like. As far as time capsules go you could do worse than queuing up a little Russian Roulettehttps://www..com/watch?v=POBiNhphk8. And if you liked this review why not check out some of my others here on Anilist?https://anilist.co/user/planetJane/reviews