(4:1 if the ending of episode 5 implies that another woman has died a horrble bloody death. I do not care to find out)
It’s not a spoiler, by the way, the dead women are irrelevant, half of the time nameless and their sole purpose is to be murdered and have their deaths investigated by the uninterested leads. As you can guess, it doesn’t make the situation better.
Do you like detective stories? Do you like the ones where most of the case is spent discovering and analyzing evidence to reach a logical conclusion? Do you like the grounded ones about regular people doing their best? Or do you like the ones where a charismatic genius assembles the finer details with ease and then proclaims their findings to the audience to everyone’s great delight? Well, then you’re out of luck!
In Kintsutsuki Tanteidokoro, get ready for the never-failing formula of:
1. Discover that a murder has happened in the very beginning of an episode.
2. Spend the next ten minutes following annoying hijinks of characters with neither depth nor common sense. The hijinks include: Ishikawa having no money (or spending whatever he suddenly does have on food and sex workers), Kindaichi being awkward and Ishikawa’s plot-irrelevant friends drinking in the same old bar/cafe and trying to do comedy(?) to no avail.
The hijinks may also include a confusing amount of gay subtext and moments that may sincerely read as romantic, though the reason for their inclusion is unclear as I see no tags/comments mentioning bl in sight. Is this just a way to poke fun at Kindaichi’s virgin-ness, implying that he’s so awkward with women because he’s gay for his womanizing bestie? Is this an awkward attempt at genuine representation? I wish I could find out, but the anime is so painfully boring and uneventful that I struggle to find the motivation to find out if the fruitiness is a gimmick or a feature, though I have to admit that sincere gay rep would make the show better only by a small margin.
3. Ishikawa will suddenly come to a conclusion that he has it all figured out and confront the killer, explaining the entire murder plot to the audience.
4. Que the ending, the first shot of which depicts a crab and a train, the relevance of which I do not know. Honestly, after episode two the mystery of the train and the crab was the only thing that kept me going, but even the combined power of it & the gay subtext couldn’t keep me from dropping the show.
I sat through five and a half episodes of this show and found not a single reason to stick around. I can’t even hatewatch, it has managed to be bad in the blandest, most oatmeal-on-water way possible.
