Just watched the Funi sub. Everything went better than expected.
1, 2, and this here episode 5 are really-great pieces of directing, script-writing, and pacing overall. But the themes and humorous scripting in this episode, in particular, does the best job of characterizing each character overall. In addition to the expressive Otsuka-school animation (with some Kanada, of course), and music that's great as always, this episode does an amazing job of blending 1 and 2 together to create a well-developed spectacle of crazy scenarios and big personalitiesboth of which get progressively stronger as the ep continues.
Jigen's the one who developed the most here, hitching a ride to Egypt (possibly still searching for something to do now that he's renounced his past career), and finding himself naked in an alien environment very quickly (because all he's got is his gun, at least after he gets robbed in a game of Osiris' scales). I guess this allows me to forgive the first sequence of set-pieces following the mid-ep break for their relatively-long running time, simply because it's both captivating and, frankly, amusing to see Jigen in a context he's never had to deal with before: thieving from a brutally-designed pyramid (and one where you can't even escape with the treasure inside!). This struggle to adapt in the face of loss and fatalistic attitude (a hand-me-down from losing Ciccolina, perhaps) even makes the overuse of obfuscating shadow filters in this sequence seem useful. We can barely recognize Jigen at times, if only because he's changing and getting limber to deal with the insanity of Lupin's gizmos and Fujiko's treachery. When Lupin revealed how he swapped Jigen's bullets with explosive bullets, so that Jigen would survive and progress past his encounter with the golems mid-ep, it became clear to me that Lupin already knew what kind of guy Jigen was from the first time they met, being more experienced with this pyramid and with bases-under-siege in general.
I could say more about how much more subtle and unpredictable Lupin was, or how Fujiko's past and her nature became a locus of fascination for Lupin at the end of the ep, but the way the directing and plot progression molds around Jigen's development from sentinel to sentient thief is impressive enough to write about. The only big flaws I can see in this episode are some dodgy shadowing and a dragged-out escape sequence that just takes too long to be as effective as it should have (though revealing the impossibility of escaping with the MacGuffin and how the pyramid is designed to screw you over no matter what was quite fun). Outside of that, it's my favorite episode so far, though the next episode better lead to some development for Fujiko herself.
