A Love Letter to 2016, part 4: why Joker Game killed me…

If you’d told me before its eleventh episode aired that Joker Game would be part of my end-of-year review, I would have said you were crazy. And then I would have had to eat my hat almost the very minute the episode finished.

** WARNING ** SPOILERS AHEAD **

It’s difficult to explain exactly why that episode had such an impact on me. Given how stories typically depict the spies ‘on our side’ as being near indestructible, I think I just could not believe that we’d see the spy known as Maki (or Miyoshi, for those who remember him from the double episode-opener) simply killed off in an unfortunate accident.

But that wasn’t all. As I noted earlier in the year, I felt Miyoshi’s death mostly through Yuuki’s own reaction. That brief pause before he gently closed the eyes of his subordinate spoke volumes of the grief hiding underneath that hard exterior.

This was the episode that had me fall in love with Joker Game, and here is my fourth love letter of 2016 in response.