This is really an episode about Doug and his quest for vengeance, but I guess we should address the Valery Vrubel thing for a bit. 

— Kirill tells the girls that he would’ve been truly shocked had his brother shown up in men’s clothing. Huh, I kinda thought Valery already was dressed like a man. Oh well.

— Deana proceeds to tell everyone to keep Valery’s gender a secret from Derick. Why? Just ’cause she thinks it would be funny. Look at her. She’s so proud of her own joke.

— Oh you guys…

— Alright, it’s time to get serious. We cut to Doug paying a visit to the cemetery. He even pours one out for the deceased, which initially made me think that the grave belonged to a man. This show likes to play with our assumptions, though. To be fair, it’s not that women don’t enjoy whiskey. In fact, two of my female friends love it (I don’t).

— Afterwards, Doug visits a former gangster by the name of Paul. Paul now has a family, and he’s trying to stay clean. Still, for a bit of money, he tells the good detective a thing or two about what he’s been hearing lately on the streets. Apparently, Good-Looking Joe is back, and Doug quickly becomes very obsessed with this guy.

— Back at headquarters, everyone thinks Zabel is dead. Yeah, about that…

— Normally, Kirill wouldn’t be so concerned about his partner, but lately, he’s noticed massive change in Doug. Let’s just say that the veteran didn’t use to be so angry.

— Kirill thus tries to ask everyone else on the team about Doug’s past, but they all seem much younger than Doug. As a result, they don’t know him that well, and the veteran isn’t inclined to open up about his past either. What is he so obsessed about? As far as they know, Derick was his old partner, so who died?

— So funnily enough, Kirill has pay a visit to an information broker to learn a thing or two about his partner. Doug’s old friend was an information broker too — an information broker by the name of Pat Morino.

— While this is all happening, Joe has no clue why Doug has it out for him. He doesn’t even remember killing a Pat Morino, but I guess that’s to be expected. Mob bosses have their hands too stained with blood, so they wouldn’t remember every single person that they’ve killed.

— Joe eventually gets to Paul, who is more than willing to sell Doug out. After all, he’s a family man now. What else is he going to do? Try to protect Doug over his own kid? Unfortunately, there is no honor among thieves, so even though Joe got what he wanted, he still beats Paul so badly that the guy ends up in a coma.

— The mob boss also tries to scare Doug, but obviously, this isn’t going to work.

— Eventually, Doug gets called out directly by Joe, and the detective can’t refuse because the bad guys have taken his old boss hostage. Kirill doesn’t want Doug to lose himself in a quest for revenge, but he’s unable to stop his partner. Apparently, the veteran has everything accounted for as Kirill ends up getting himself knocked out.

— By the time Kirill wakes up, Doug is long gone. The kid goes straight to Travis and convinces the boss that they should both try to catch up to Doug. In the meantime, we learn a few more crucial details about Pat Morino. For instance, Pat is really short for Patricia. Doug’s information broker was just a 12-year-old girl who was also a shoe shiner. Basically, she was orphan trying to survive on the streets all by herself. You’d think little kids like her would be taken in by the government, but maybe this universe doesn’t have that sort of thing. Or maybe she just didn’t want to go back to the orphanage or whatever. After all, Doug supposedly tried to convince her to get out of the information trading business, but she refused.

— Finally, Doug confronts Joe face-to-face, and the latter finally remembers having killed an orphan. Why did he do it? Simply because she had used the wrong shoe polish. Double Decker normally has such a light-hearted atmosphere, but the world it portrays isn’t really one that I would want to live in. Plus, having two suns seems annoying.

— Man, you say that like most people shouldn’t dislike poverty and class differences.

— According to Travis, Doug also tried to give Pat a gun to protect herself, but she rejected that as well. Apparently, she’s a stickler for rules… at least for cops like Doug back then. In any case, this had a profound effect on the guy.

— Anyways, it appears as though Joe and his men have Doug completely surrounded, but the guy came prepared. Kinda. The show makes you think that, but I really think his plan was really stupid. For it to work, he had to be 100% sure that Joe would try and murder him with his own gun. One of the bullets in the chamber is really a flash bullet, and this gives Doug just enough cover to turn the tables on the bad guys.

— But honestly, how could Doug really have known exactly what Joe would do? I mean, what if the mob boss had just ordered his men to gun Doug down instead? Either our veteran got insanely lucky, or he accepted that there was a good chance he might die tonight. Ah well.

— In the end, Doug gets the opportunity to get his revenge on Joe, and he doesn’t hesitate to pull the trigger. But luckily for the mob boss — and Doug’s conscience, I suppose — the gun ending up misfiring. Kirill and Travis finally make it to the scene, and all the gangsters are arrested. Doug suffers just a minor injury to his shooting hand.

— Travis later asks Doug if he had known that the gun would misfire, and Doug just smiles and says yes. Kirill had earlier claimed that the accident was really a sign that Pat wouldn’t have wanted Doug to get revenge. I guess we’ll tell ourselves anything in order to sleep soundly at night. Not only that, Kirill wants to keep looking up to Doug as his partner and mentor.

— Don’t get me wrong, though. I like the fact that Doug would’ve killed the guy had the gun not misfired. It wouldn’t have been the moral thing to do, but I guess I’m kind of tired of anime protagonists always being so squeaky clean.

— At the end of the episode, Doug pays Pat’s grave another visit. This time, he brings a long a really ugly stuffed animal. So yeah, that’s that. We learned a thing or two about Doug and his past.

— And apparently, we’ll learn a thing or two about Max in next week’s episode. Not that I mind learning more about the side characters, but I thought the show had said in a previous episode that it was time to tell the main story.