AD Police Episode 3 - The Old Bill
![[Exiled-Destiny]_AD_Police_Files_Ep03_(C9485117).ogm_snapshot_10.07_[2020.01.22_22.49.37].jpg](https://forums.animeuknews.net/data/attachments/12/12243-531dae930e3de10b2f3fdccbfa0f534c.jpg "[Exiled-Destiny]_AD_Police_Files_Ep03_(C9485117).ogm_snapshot_10.07_[2020.01.22_22.49.37].jpg")
This is basically the entire show in a nutshell.
And so
Another Story of Bubblegum Crisis reaches its conclusion. This episode is the one most heavily based on the
25:00 manga, but even within the short runtime, it's much more fleshed out (no pun intended), giving Billy a definite backstory that underlines his sheer ordinariness, and arguably making him a more sympathetic figure. I think this is also the most downbeat episode. Caroline at least had all her mental faculties and could still express herself as a person; Billy is like the most cautionary elements of cyberpunk transhumanism taken to their logical conclusion, so utterly divorced from his former self that he can no longer relate to being human. His plight could have been influenced in part by that one bad guy in Robocop 2, but I think the story here expands on the theme a lot more.
Most of all though, the relationship Billy Tongue Biter has with his Frankenstein-esque creator is particularly ripe. I'm not quite sure where it sprang from (it's really not in the manga at all - Billy's creator was originally a man), but so much of this series seems to be based around very specific male fears about female sexuality, and that really reaches its peak here. The veinglorious Takagi is a mother figure to Billy, having created his current shell and nursing him along while he’s away from the battlefield, but she has also made him her love doll; getting a kind of quasi-sadistic sexual gratification from grinding up against his unfeeling robot form in their private lab, before seeing fit to dispose of him when he has outlived his usefulness. Also note that Leon fails to defeat Billy in their confrontation - it falls, once again, to Jeena to put him out of his misery.
According to wiki with its usual lack of a citation,
AD Police was intended to have a longer run, only to become a victim of the legal spat between ARTMIC and everyone who was not ARTMIC. I'm not sure how I feel about that one - I'd have happily watched more of Leon and Jeena's sleazy exploits, but it also feels fairly complete to me as it is. The bucolic final scene with Billy being laid to rest in the cemetary, surrounded by his friends and colleagues, perhaps suggests a degree of hope for the future, but even it is undermined with a certain irony; the cemetary is atop the AD Police tower and Billy is being buried in an artificial park high above the ground, leaving him divorced from the earth yet again.
For all the gun-rattling and sexy androids, there's a real air of melancholy all the way through the series and I think that's largely what defines it for me above anything else.
Thinking about the music over the end credits in this series, I take it that the tracks I'm hearing are Manga's selections rather than the original music. The song that ends episode 1 is really rather good, though; it ties in well with the episode's major theme, too.
I'm not 100% certain, but I don't think Manga changed any of the music for this one - pretty sure the Lou Bonnevie vocal tracks are the same in both versions.
Tellingly, it's this episode (the best of the three, in my opinion) that has its visuals used for Manga's disc art, as well as a clip of it being used for one of their trailers for the series.
If memory serves, this is the only episode where Masami Obari is credited, I'd guess he had a hand in Billy's rampage in particular.
But is some footage cut from Manga's release, does anyone know? Billy is suddenly missing his left arm in the part where he strikes Leon. That said, his right one just randomly drops off before he's killed by Gina.
Again, it's hard to tell - AD Police badly needs a new transfer, the existing ones are painfully dark - but I'm guessing the implication is that Billy discards his gun arm after it runs out of ammo? Either that or it was damaged by Dieork, as he's the last person to shoot Billy before Leon.
For anyone seeking extra credit, The
Dead End City manga provides a couple of bonus adventures, including Jeena taking on a gang of terrorists in a
Die Hard-style tower block firefight, but even though Takezaki's art is really quite excellent, it doesn't add a whole lot in terms of story. Wiki suggests the manga takes place between episodes 1 and 2,
which might explain the change in Jeena's cyborg arm, Leon ends up having to smash it off when a computer virus tries to invade her, but the way it ends does feel like a kind of conclusion to the series overall. Then again, that in itself could have been a late-game decision to provide some closure, once they knew the anime would not continue. Dead End City was printed in English by Manga as
AD Police and, while the UK edition lacks some bonus content found in the Japanese version, it can be had used for peanuts if you're interested.
25:00 is also easy to find and, unusually, was printed with English text beneath the Japanese, so just get that from wherever.
Much like
BGC, in addition to the manga, there were two drama CDs which may cover story ideas not animated. To my knowledge, neither has ever been translated, but going on what little I could find out,
Takoyaki Western involves a boomer entertainer and looks as if it may be a more humorous outing in the vein of
25:00, whereas
Dragon Trip intriguingly seems to involve a virtual reality fantasy RPG, featuring cover art showing Leon in knight's armour and Jeena in kabuki-style face paint. Of the two,
Dragon Trip is probably the one to look out for - it has music by Susumu Hirasawa!
