Lupin (Part Three)

Lupin is back and getting up to his old tricks. It’s been a year since the end of part two within the show, two years on Netflix, possibly more in France, courtesy of Covid. Assane has spent most of that time in hiding and comes up with a plan to get his wife and son away from the ridiculous pressure they’re under as he remains one of France’s most wanted criminals. In terms of format, we have very much the same structure as in the previous parts: a daring caper and then a Leverage style explanation of the more unlikely components. It felt to me for most of the season that we were missing the social commentary that Lupin had sprinkled throughout the previous parts, but it does rear up with a vengeance in a few episodes. The episodes feel oddly structured, both for Netflix and anglophone TV. Stories spill from one episode into the next, then finish part way through it. Not every time, but often enough it feels jarring and sets an expectation of odd pacing. You get what ought to be act one of the next episode, but it’s tacked onto the end of the previous one. If you binge, this doesn’t matter, but I’ve tended to watch it late and one episode at a time. It doesn’t bother me particularly, in one of the books I was reading while watching this, the chapters varied from a couple of pages to 50+ and that didn’t bother me, it just feels a bit odd in a TV episode. Parts one and two dropped as, functionally, a ten episode season on Netflix, but were clearly two separate parts, five episodes each. Part three is seven episodes. It doesn’t make any difference, no matter how you watch it, but I can’t help but feel an American production company would have spread the story over eight or ten episodes rather than tell it properly in seven and stop, and they really did tell it properly in seven episodes, then wrap it up. A bit more than in the previous parts, we have flashbacks to Lupin's youth. Normally this wouldn’t bother me, and there are excellent reasons in the story. I really don’t have any complaints from that perspective. Young Claire is spot on, to the extent I wondered if it was the actor that plays Old Claire's daughter (Wikipedia says no). Young Assane is good and I believe he could grow up to the older one. But there a number of the other characters that are in both times and I really struggle to connect their younger versions to their older ones. It’s a small complaint, it doesn’t stop the story working, it’s just a moment that stretches suspension of disbelief. The story plays through and, while I understand how it’s meant to work, and it ties back to the earlier parts, it feels off in tone to me, like they changed Assane's character quite markedly to fit the plot. That might be due to events in my personal life interacting with the story arc badly though. Despite me moaning, there are more than enough wonderful moments that I happily watched the whole season. I’m not sure if we’ll get another part, I would have said no, until the final 30 seconds or so. I would be happy if they left if here, the story feels wrapped up in many ways, but I would equally happily watch another part - I enjoyed the story more than enough for that. Bechdel Test: Pass. This is fairly close, but mostly we pass courtesy of the dynamic cop duo who, yes, talk about Lupin a lot, but talk about other things too. But we also see a variety of other named female characters talk. Ko Test: I switched between the original French with subtitles and dubbed English versions, depending on how tired I was while watching. But as usual while watching foreign language originals, this test is null - the Ko Test is for Hollywood and non-white characters being “allowed” to speak English in Hollywood film and TV. I’m sure there can be similar problems in other nations’ media, but I don’t know them, and certainly when it’s all dubbed into English it’s really hard to catch them. Russo Test: Fail. While you could certainly write fun fanfic about the two detectives, there’s no hint of any queer characters.