Predictions and Observations:
One Step Ahead II - Sinister Secrets I

I wonder if Yami’s saying that Joey’s cheering for Kaiba foreshadows that this is important? I have been noting that during the past few episodes, the two parties have been taking each other’s side quite commonly. For example, when Kaiba dueled Zigfried, Yugi and his friends, even Joey, cheered for Kaiba. Now, when Yugi’s dueling Leon, Yugi’s friends of course cheer for him, but Kaiba also shows confidence in Yugi.

On the Cave-Dragon-vs.-Brunhilde thing, I don’t think Kaiba played a sloppy move. I don’t think he had a choice but to bring back Cave Dragon, because the rest of his monsters were out of the game or something, and since Zigfried brought his Valkyrie back in attack mode, maybe the card required Kaiba to also, leaving him with no choice; if he hadn’t brought it back to soften the blow, Brunhilde could have gone straight for his lifepoints.

Wow, now that we know that Leon and Zigfried are brothers, the whole tournament seems different; I recall that before the second round the Elite Eight were waiting in the same room. I was wondering why Zigfried seemed interested in their conversation, eavesdropping over his book. The scene was thus:
“Téa: You okay, Leon?
Leon: I guess I just have a case of the pre-duel jitters. (joking) We can’t all be as calm as Joey!
(Joey and Tristan stop roughhousing, and Joey walks over)
Joey: Huh? Hey, sure ya can. Can’t be *too* bad if you made it to the final eight, right? You just gotta do what I do and *believe* you’re gonna win!
Leon: Well, that’s just it. I’m *afraid* to win, because then I’ll have to face off against Yugi. Just thinking about it freaks me out!
Yugi (quiet, unnoticed): Huh?
Joey: Listen, pal, just take this one duel at a time, okay?
Rebecca: Joey’s got a point. It’s too soon to be thinking about the championship duel now. Besides, you’ll have to duel against *me* before you can get to Yugi!
Leon: Well, make sure you go easy on me, okay, Beck? I’ve seen you in action; you can be brutal!
(Zigfried’s pretending to read his book in the corner, but his eyes are slits as he watches the group out of the corner of his eye. Mokuba walks in to announce the start of it)”
Perhaps Zigfried is suspicious that Leon might be ready to back out of their plan. In my experience of keeping large secrets, at times you feel like telling a small portion of the truth, just not to lie to a friend or someone you respect. That seems to be what Leon’s doing right here, because his saying that he’s afraid to duel Yugi sounded sort of out-of-character as opposed to his statement that he’s always dreamed of dueling Yugi. In light of discovering the truth about Leon and his dilemma, this half-truth now makes sense.

In this tournament I can’t help but notice that Leon’s duels have been conspicuous in being inconspicuous. What I mean is that I’m sure I said that it seemed suspicious that we were only shown the beginning or end of Leon’s first two duels, and nothing about how he won or anything; there was always something else going on, whether it was Joey vs. Mr. Moto or Rebecca vs. Vivian, or Joey vs. Zigfried or Rebecca vs. Abe the Monkey Man, or even when it was Leon vs. Rebecca, Yugi was absent for the entire duel except the tail end where Leon won, and we were also sidetracked by Vivian’s “*real* GC.” That’s basically what Zigfried said; he has sidetracked Kaiba and his lackeys, and us, into thinking *he* was the one to worry about, and Leon’s gone through the tournament entirely inconspicuously. I also note that Leon was in the KaibaDome during Zigfried’s little prank on Kaiba when he hacked into the KaibaDome and made the duel computer go berserk and lock them in, further alleviating his suspicion as a suspect. I bet that was planned, too. I think that look of surprise on Leon’s face after he beat Goat was kind of, “wow, I’m really going through with this?” He was in it for good now, because unless he got disqualified or eliminated, he wasn’t going anywhere. I wonder if he was considering throwing his duel against Goat or taking off?
Leon does enjoy dueling, though. Like he said, he discovered Duel Monsters and it changed his life. I was right in saying that it seemed fairy tales and dueling were an escape for Leon as a lonely child (though I was wrong in saying only child!). He loves to duel, whether he was dueling for a cause or not, just like other big-league duelists I can name. He is very conflicted, though, in this. He has to do this and win for his brother, whom he looks up to and, you can see from the flashback, loves, and for his whole family. Take that, and throw in that the person he looks up to the most, Yugi, has become his greatest enemy, because they can’t have just a friendly duel, like Leon says, he has a job to do, and if he loses, which, knowing how good a duelist Yugi is, he’s probably fairly sure he will, then he will have let Zigfried and his whole family down. They never paid any attention to him, and when he had the chance to help them, make them sit up and take notice, he failed. He always dreamed, he tells us, that he could be somehow useful to the family, like Zigfried was. So then there’s the fact that he always saw Yugi as a role model, and he voices what he knows Yugi would say to the situation he’s in now (“Save it! My brother’s right—you just don’t get it! Trust me, I know what you were about to say, Yugi; that dueling in order to get revenge is wrong.”), which implies that he already knows that he’s going against what he thinks is right, so that’s another conflict.

Just for the heck of it, I decided to then ponder who else and what else Leon reminds me of. Mokuba, of course, for being a little brother of the president of a huge company and being similarly passed over. Mai, because they both had a lonely childhood and turned to Duel Monsters as an escape and comfort. Interestingly enough, he even reminded me of Kaiba, who in Duelist Kingdom was forced to ignore what he thought was right or good and go to great lengths to help his brother. In Kaiba’s case that was playing Pegasus’ games and even cheating in the end to defeat Yugi in the battle of the castle wall even though we all know (and so does Yami) that Kaiba duels honorably and considers it beneath his dignity if nothing else to cheat. In Leon’s, sure he was raised to loathe KaibaCorp, but not that much because everyone was focusing on Zigfried. He watched all of Yugi’s Duelist Kingdom and Battle City matches, learning through experience in his own duels as well as by example that dueling is about heart, and not revenge or gain. He’s only doing this for his family, and given the choice, he would be having a friendly duel with Yugi, where all that matters is having fun and doing his best and he probably won’t win, rather than one with everything at stake where Yugi is his foe and no matter what losing isn’t an option. In that respect this reminded me of Best of Friends, Best of Duelists, where everything was on the line for both Yugi and Joey, but they agreed to duel their very best and remain friends. Leon doesn’t have that luxury and the duel hinges simply on who loses or wins, and not on the prize gained from it. I’ve just realized that I can babble on about this all night if I want, but I still won’t quite get it. If anyone else wants to add their opinions to this jumbled mess, feel free.

From the hallway scene in Leon’s flashback, it seems pretty clear that Zigfried is using Leon. Zigfried came with evidence fit for blackmail, the little blue disk. The entire time he was complementing Leon: “I came to congratulate you on your latest victory…Look at you, hacking into tournament computers and creating phony identities for yourself like a little secret agent…Let me rephrase: my very talented little brother…Leon, you have a gift that could help thrust SchroederCorp straight up to number one!”. And when he wasn’t, he was promising Leon the thing he knew Leon wanted most, the acceptance of his family: “ I’m just glad I’m finally getting the chance to bond with my little brother…I promise, you’ll never be alone again…” And there was some guilting into it there as well: “…Abilities he should be using to help his older brother run the family business…” During that last line, as well as “who knew you were so devious?”, Zigfried catches attention with the floppy disk, implying subtly that Zigfried has the power to turn Leon in if he happens to change his mind. In short, Zigfried was, it seems, quite insincere and the entire time he was doing nothing but persuading Leon to help him. He played on Leon’s fears (to not get to duel anymore), and loneliness.

One must wonder, though, why Zigfried was cajoling Leon into helping him then. The late morning or early afternoon before KCGC began (if you can consider scenes that are shown side-by-side to be happening at the same time) was when Zigfried discovered that KCGC was happening (“So, my dear friend Herr Kaiba is throwing another tournament, is he?”), while Leon’s duel in the flashback, it seems, took place at night. Therefore, Zigfried got Leon around long before then because Leon was already in place at the KaibaDome. Therefore, they already knew about it before the scene where Zigfried smashes a rose against the laptop screen, which then brings me back around to asking why Zigfried states that Kaiba’s throwing another tournament as if he just discovered it. We know that there’s no way he was putting on a show for any messenger that might have come by, because he does imply in his speech and his gesture of smashing the rose that he wishes Kaiba ill, and even if Zigfried wanted to be found out soon, not before he got into the tournament! Therefore, perhaps, Zigfried anticipated Kaiba’s move, hatched a plan, got Leon enrolled, and got Leon a pass to be there as a special guest (because only special guests could be in the park before the grand opening), and feigned sarcastic surprise at the news that Kaiba was once again predictably following his plan. This brings the question of how Zigfried anticipates Kaiba’s moves so well. Maybe because they’re what he himself would do, because they seem to have all the same ideas, but Zigfried’s slower with them. Bizarre, and kinda creepy though that they come up with the same ideas. It’s like being psychic because you can read someone else’s mind by reading your own. Which is basically what, it seems, Zigfried did. I have long and hard pondered this predicament of how Mokuba assembled all fourteen duelists (the sixteen minus Joey and Rebecca) in one afternoon. Mokuba plainly states that for this thing to work he needs Yugi, and moreover the tournament is all about who gets to face Yugi. Therefore, without Yugi, the tournament would’ve been off. So Mokuba went and talked to Yugi, like, late that morning, early afternoon, then they were trapped in the KaibaDome until it looks like perhaps 3pm or so (from the lighting and feel of the scene), and then all seventeen (the sixteen plus Yugi) were assembled at the tournament kickoff that evening. So how did Mokuba get it all done? The sixteen could have, arguably, applied via internet, considering that that’s what Zigfried was looking at, but that contradicts Mokuba’s flashback of Kaiba naming the tournament and him and Roland getting ready to take a helicopter and track down the greatest duelists on Earth. That implies that he talked to each duelist like he persuaded our heroes. But *when?* that’s the issue still, because there’s no way that Zigfried or Leon would have blown their cover by just *happening* to have shown up early. It’s sort of a moot point now (it happened, okay?) but it’s still annoying. By the way, Yugi’s grandpa is the most logical of how all this worked out, because Mokuba may have stopped at Yugi’s house before realizing that they were still in California, and when Mokuba showed up and explained why he was looking for Yugi, it would’ve given Mr. Moto the chance to beg Mokuba to be entered in the tournament.

I’m getting off-track. Anyway, no matter how many times it’s said that Kaiba was too busy, I still think that Kaiba could have joined the tournament if he wanted to, if all that was holding him back was that he was too busy. As an alternate reason, did he not want to join the tournament because he wanted to see who was a contender for the best duelist on Earth besides Yugi and himself? If so, why? This tournament, as Kaiba states in thought, was not about Yugi possibly having to give up his title. It was about improving KaibaCorp’s image, among other things, so I suppose Joey’s guess that Kaiba’s afraid of getting his butt kicked in public again is somewhat reasonable, considering that Kaiba can’t take the chance that he is disgraced by losing to Yugi again when KaibaCorp’s reputation is already in desperate shape. Could that be the reason that either Mokuba doesn’t know or Mokuba won’t say? Then why does Mokuba say that Kaiba wanted to join this tournament more than anything? Because Kaiba likes to duel (he’ll never admit it, but he *does* duel for fun, especially the fun of kicking some wannabe’s butt), he would have joined regardless of workload, before realizing that there’s the almost-certainty that Kaiba will win to the top of the tournament, and then whenever Yugi and Kaiba duel, it’s anyone’s game but Yugi usually wins. Either way, Kaiba risks falling in status as a duelist and harming KaibaCorp’s reputation even more than the tournament helps it, so he is forced to stay away. This also would show, if it were true, that Kaiba is no longer quite so proud as to say there’s no way that he can lose. However, he does stick out his neck some in dueling against Zigfried, but that was a pretty safe bet for him considering he had seen most of Zigfried’s strategy in Joey’s duel, and knew that if Joey had almost beat Zigfried (which he did), then he himself would definitely be a match for him. No offense, I like Joey too of course, but the fact remains that Kaiba is a stronger overall duelist and he knows it.

I’ll probably come up with more to say as soon as I send this along, but it’s already 8:15 Wednesday night, and I really should post this before the new episodes actually *show…* Everyone please write back! -Clio