CLASSIC Review: 50-51 The Second Time Around: Parts I & II

50-51 The Second Time Around: Parts I & II
Or, “Lupin, Whom I Loved: Parts I & II”



Brevity is usually Lupin’s ally—staying true to his origins on comic pages, Lupin is typically more a master of the quick, clever and unexpected, so even twenty-minute episodes sometimes have something like an episodic structure to them—getaway leads to getaway. I’m not entirely surprised by a two-parter as early as 1978, though—his is the conclusion of the second season of Lupin III Part II, so there are three full seasons behind them and with a movie concurrently under production, so there was not any shortage of capacity.

“The Second Time Around” does have the feeling of being an event, too. The first half is told somewhat non-chronologically, and for the first time we delve into Lupin’s past, as this story hinges around Cornelia, an old love who was the daughter of the escaped Nazi doctor Zel (though this “Boy from Brazil” actually resides in Caracas) who’s seemingly come back to life. The flashbacks take place 1972 (as opposed to the episode’s implied 1978), and we actually get a very different-looking Lupin: a green shirt (referencing the green jacket) and hair that’s, well, of its time. I think Lupin’s fourth-wall breaking response to Jigen’s quip says it best:

In any event, Cornelia was shot by her art-smuggling father, and now she’s seemingly come back to life. Despite the unusual construction and some nice sequences (the use of John Portman-esque glass elevators in the initial art theft if pretty ingenious), the first half does not really make a great argument for the second half. We have an echo of “Diamonds & Minx” with the reappearance of zombies. There’s no connection to the previous episode, and these zombies are more generic than the undead assassin of “Diamonds & Minx.” The construction gets awkward and the story starts to unravel as we reach the end of the first part, and I didn’t have high hopes for the second.



Luckily, “The Second Time Around, Part II” is a great ride—it feels as if they had a great ending sequence and needed to add a prelude. There’s an apocryphal quote from Steven Spielberg that The Castle of Cagliostro[/i][/url] is the best action-adventure film of all time, and while the famous quote is unsourced in many ways the second half of “The Second Time Around” seems very Spielbergian (in a good way): it’s an expertly-composed (especially for a TV budget) roller coaster with Nazis and occult overtones. And it’s an excellent showcase for more classically Lupin qualities—the bold seventies coloration, the story-and-action-enabling loose logic, and the Laser Age look (cf. Keith Phipps)—in many ways the aesthetic of “The Second Time Around, Part II” seems anticipates The Mystery of Mamo, which makes sense given Yuzo Aoki’s heavy involvement in both. “The Second Time Around” earns its extended length and looked forward to bigger and better things to come.

There’s sentimentality as well. A common theme in Lupin III is that Lupin’s lust ultimately ends up giving him an upper hand against his opponents. It’s not a high emotion, but as far as low emotions go lust for another person goes against lust for money or power, and is part of what makes him a “gentleman-cambrioleur” as opposed to just a “cambrioleur” (at least in the animated works). Desire, at least for Lupin, is the beginning of empathy.



Recommended?
Yes—it’s not the highest or most distinctive of Lupin’s highs and there’s a bit of stretching out of the story in the first half to make it go on for fifty minutes, but it’s still a great example of Lupin action-adventure.

Stray Observation
It’s very odd to see 1972 Lupin with long hair, especially since we already knew him in the first series and the second series is explicitly supposed to be a continuation. 1978 treats his short hair as being something like a sign of maturity, though stylistically Lupin’s short hair feels like a holdover from the sixties (and a holdover I personally prefer).

Nonetheless (and acknowledging that the Lupin franchise is not big on continuity) there is not necessarily a continuity error here—the gang is supposed to have broken up after the first series’s finale in 1972, only reuniting in 1977 for the first episode of the second series, leaving space in mid-to-late 1972 for Lupin to grow his hair out.

Next week we return to reviews of the ongoing Lupin III Part IV series with reviews of episodes seventeen and eighteen.