Episodes 11-12 – Lupin the 3rd Part 6

How generous of Lupin to gift us two episodes at once over Christmas! It makes sense, what with Sherlock Holmes being here, and big specials aired over the holiday being a tradition of at least one other British pop culture icon. And it’s technically used well, giving the show enough space to wrap up this initial ‘Lupin III vs. Holmes’ arc as we finish up this season of anime. Things have been spaced out enough getting here with all the one-off episodes, but most of the details key to this case still feel fresh, and they are reiterated for our benefit so the important parts can converge into some sort of conclusion. The hitch in all this extra-long effort, then, is the script’s handling of some of the more pointedly extraneous details, and the question of how they were used on this journey. That is, the satisfaction you get out of the mysteries that get solved here might depend on which points you prioritized paying attention to, and which payoffs you presumed they were telling you to hope for.

All the major driving questions of this storyline do end up answered by the time the credits roll (and there’s even a sequence after those credits to help set up where we’ll be going next). Lily’s memories, Watson’s killer, the secret of the Raven’s treasure – we ultimately find out what they all are and how they connect. And it’s a credit to the fundamentals of the mystery-writing going in here that attentive viewers should be able to guess at least a few of them before the internal reveals. For my part, I feel like I should have had Lestrade down as a suspect much earlier in this season, but I still clocked that he was acting hella sus at the beginning of this two-parter. His proximity to Holmes and Lily and the events as they unfolded matches with the kind of story structures you start to pick up on as mysteries like this (especially in the classic Holmsian vein) draw you in. That makes it an even more entertaining trick when Part 6 not only throws out a few curveballs later in the game, but builds the idea of those red herrings directly into the layered plots a lot of the involved parties are invoking.

Basically, the entire construction of Lord Faulkner and his mysterious Black Drawing Room housing that supposedly-important poster that kicked this whole thing off back in the first episode turns out to be a matryoshka of distractions to keep the eyes of us and the characters away from the eventual truths. The writing leads us on some distinct ups and downs of improbability according to Holmes’s theory of isolating the truth by eliminating the impossible. A sun-powered exploding drawing-room seems a fantastical cover for a secret safeguarded by an elite secret-society assassin, but in reality, it’s just a shroud for Faulkner’s possession of a simple ring-key that leads to a stockpile of unused explosives, while Lily’s father turns out to have been killed by the corrupt police inspector who’d been close by all along. The final irony, then, is the fact that if Lestrade had simply stepped outside of the constraints he thought the Raven had him in all this time, instead of indulging his labyrinthine power-play machinations, he might have discovered the organization’s true lack of modern power much more quickly and easily.

After some of those more outlandish episodic entries mid-season, it makes it mildly amusing to see this season’s core arc for Lupin wrap on the message of the truth being more mundane than you might have expected. It’s a classic subversion in the series’ style to find out that a massive secret evil organization like the Raven that we’d somehow never heard of until now simply ran out of power and influence partway into the ’90s, and just failed to get a memo to some of their independent operatives who kept on working as if the evil schemes were still going. Similarly, it can seem like Holmes’s plan to induce the return of Lily’s memories may be too extreme an overcorrection from his previous protectiveness, but then it turns out to have simply been one trick he was trying to run, with Lestrade instead giving himself away as a result of that old Sherlock standby trick, accidentally referencing a piece of information he shouldn’t have known at the time. The show knows we’re here for at least some of the classics, and it also knows enough to screw with us a little before the end: once we’re almost certain Lestrade is the killer, they throw his cohort Eliot in to take the initial blame. It comes off like the show trying to present a surprising twist with an explanation that specifically doesn’t land, before we find out that was just a distraction and the real twist of Lestrade’s guilt, with everyone else present setting him up to be found out, is deployed much more satisfyingly instead. That’s one point I really enjoy about particularly-plotted mysteries, in that they can even keep you guessing about your opinion of the story up until the last minute.

However, all those tricky deployments of plot elements have led to swaths of this double-length special feel like they prioritized more the smoke than the set it was supposed to be covering up. Once Lestrade and his motivations are outed, you have to start wondering why he wasn’t able to purloin Falkner’s ring-key and check out the munitions stash sooner. And the sheer number of steps the storytelling has taken since the beginning to its ultimate revelation of what the Black Drawing Room was teeters on the line between an effective red herring and a simple shaggy dog, regardless of how enjoyably explosive a climax it leaves us on between episodes. As well, there are things like the aside plot point about Holmes setting a mess of second-string thugs to gun for the Lupin gang as a distraction, which is amusing in the moment, but again becomes questionable with the ultimate revelation that everyone was basically working together and counting on each other to solve different parts of the mystery.

The biggest casualty of this kind of setpiece-before-structure writing turns out to be Albert. As I reiterate again how much I appreciate the character still being here, his presence end up amounting to not much by the end of this arc, with the revelation that provoking him to his first-episode theft-attempt was an effort to make him something of a patsy as what’s left of the Raven made its move. It leaves him sitting on the sidelines making comments but contributing little to the mysteries’ resolutions as the others close in. One gets the impression the Part 6 writers are mostly keeping him around because they’ve got future plans for him throughout this series, and I understand that with this story focusing on Lupin’s feud with Holmes, they wouldn’t want to crowd that out with any adversarial storytelling between Lupin and his other rival/ex-husband. But it just means that Albert’s presence after that first setup amounts to merely one more red herring in a story that I think already did perfectly fine at demonstrating to us that it knew how to use red herrings.

It all means that this arc finally finishes up with a few more loose ends than even the ones I think it’s specifically leaving loose for later. Even if the mundanity of the revelations is part of the point, extra elements like Albert or Eliot contribute to a glut of moving parts that could have you going “What was the point of all of that?” by the end. It feels like an engaging thriller in the moment, these two episodes having no shortage of points that feel punctuated and exciting. But taking a step back afterwards, and especially lining it up with all the previous dedicated episodes of this plot-line, you have to wonder how tightly-constructed this mystery might actually look. I get the impression that the asides, the distractions, things like those singular one-off episodes of this season are key to the tone Part 6 is going for here. And they’ve already set up some interesting further tangents they could be headed for in the next batch of episodes, with Lily formally joining Holmes as his new ‘Watson’ and a surprisingly youthful-looking Moriarty making the scene. So let’s hope reaching the conclusion as they did this way was more of a learning experience for these erstwhile mystery authors, because I am definitely curious about where they’ll be going moving forward.

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Lupin the 3rd Part 6 is currently streaming on
HIDIVE.

Chris is a freelance writer who appreciates anime, action figures, and additional ancillary artistry. He can be found staying up way too late posting screencaps on his Twitter.