The room is dimly lit, filled with cigarette smoke. Five men are at the table playing poker, the other three watching from the sidelines. Watching, shifting, and going about their business, and yet they are also sending signals to the people at the table, codes for the other players’ cards. Are they real or fake? Who is the recipient, and who is the victim? Where do their allegiances lie? All of them know the game, and all of them know the game going on underneath the game, but the latter lies submerged, unspoken, built on micro-transactions and diplomacy. For they are spies, and to them the only differences between international relations, undercover missions, and a friendly game of poker are the players and the risk.
All eight of them have fake names, similar faces, and unexpressive personalities, but Joker Game is not a show about their differences but rather about their missions and accomplishments. If the first two episodes have the audience confused as to who is who, then that is only because we will soon be dropping in on their solitary operations across the pre-World War II globe, and sometimes it is only at the end that the spy is revealed and the mystery solved. The episodic nature of the show allows for a varied structure of these stories, whether it be solving a murder, tailing an enemy spy, or simply sitting back and picking up information as they go. Ditto the endings; success or failure, few stories end with everyone still alive, and as spies they often run the greatest risk.
Their skills and training come from the spy training organization known as D-Agency, run by the Japanese military in secret, a necessity to keep their identities under wraps but also because the proud Japanese are loathe to accept the use of underhanded tactics like spies. In listening to the principles of the D-Agency’s mysterious leader Yuuki, such as the futility of killing and dying nobly as a spy or to consider the possibility that Japan could lose the upper hand in a world conflict, there is a sense that Joker Game partially exists as a retroactive criticism of World War II Japan, revealing a world where information control is the penultimate form of warfare. Occasionally the show itself indulges in some outdated thinking of its own, such as the notion that women are more prone to committing emotionally-charged murder or that information can hidden below the level of truth serum should it be forgotten, but more often than not it plays to a much more advanced game of staying one step ahead of everyone else and always staying in control of all the variables.
The episodic nature of the show seemed to turn plenty of people off to it, on the basis that there is no plot to grab onto and little time to sympathize or relate to the central characters. I personally feel that both aspects worked just fine; aside from one or two lackluster stories the episodes deliver many different facets of the intelligence war of the 1930s, as well as the situations that spies need to adapt to at a moment’s notice, all without feeling farfetched or unlikely seeing as they happen completely independently. As for the characters, the less we know about them the better they work. One episode involves a foreign party investigating a mysterious figure who turns out to be Yuuki, but just as he—and the audience in turn—believe that he’s found the whole picture, it disappears in a moment, dispelled by Yuuki’s planning and forethought. In some episodes we follow a spy and learn a bit about his personality through conflict, or watch as he discovers more of the truth of living as a spy. Yet ultimately without backstory, names, or more than a few short minutes to look into their lives, they remain in the dark to us, less people than symbols.
There are two arcs that stand out from the rest of the show’s formula, each taking two episodes and revolving around the entire D-Agency cast. The first is the show’s introduction, where the new go-between for D-Agency and the military expresses his distaste for their methods as spies only to find himself trapped by the machinations of his own superior officers, pitting corruption and personal gain against loyalty and trust with the spies in the background holding a smug “told you so” look the whole way through. The second, a slightly weaker arc towards the end, follows a more ruthless rival Japanese spy agency trying to establish themselves as the country’s only necessary evil. They engage D-Agency in a race to catch a foreign spy, going in just as deep and fully willing to kill for their objectives. The double joker game between them is interesting until the payoff comes with everything going D-Agency’s way in an instant, and Yuuki coming out from behind the curtain to reveal that they were simply one step ahead the whole time in a somewhat simplistic way. If the other stories resolve in similar fashion, then with the actual tangible work put in by the D-Agency spies it’s hard to notice or feel let down in the same way.
But the stories where Joker Game really shines are the ones where we are just as much in the dark as the next person, the ones where the spies lose control of their mission, the ones where we follow an outsider as they are led by the nose and come up empty-handed in the end. In particular, there are stories where there is an element of uncertainty, even randomness, and whether by human nature or circumstances outside of anyone’s control things get messy and public. When a famous figure or known agent dies, it becomes a matter of public knowledge that the stakes have changed and damage control is imminent. As spies however, all of this still happens in the shadows, so that even in the course of a public investigation there is a race against time to make sure that public investigation succeeds or fails, before the enemy brings it to light or submerges it for the rest of time. It goes beyond playing a game of poker where alliances are fluid and everything can go wrong in an instant; in the real life Joker Game, sometimes everyone has to start by figuring out what game they’re even playing.