The Detective Is Already Dead (2021)
[ๆขๅตใฏใใใๆญปใใงใใใ]
Season 1
Director: Manabu Kurihara
Studio: ENGI
Starring: Arata Nagai, Saki Miyashita, Ayana Taketatsu
Episodes: 12
Synopsis:
The assistant of the famous detective Siesta finds himself drawn back to detective work after her death.
Impressions:
Normally I try not to get too spoiler-heavy with these reviews, but this series annoyed me and I can't very well talk about why and how it annoyed me without delving into spoilers. The first episode does a good job of hooking you and painting Siesta as an appealing character before reminding you of the title. Once we pick up the story in the present, it looks like the gimmick is that our lead Kimizuka reconnects with Siesta via various recipients of her organs and we'll get drip-fed information about how she died as he takes on new cases. The former gets proven wrong in the second case, which is a bit of a red herring, while the latter gets disproven immediately after when we get into an extended flashback that covers half the series. Now, the concept I imagined not playing out is a me thing, so I don't judge the series too harshly for that, but the structure of the story is one of the major beefs I have with it. They go to the trouble of setting up Nagisa, but then she's gone until the last few episodes, leaving her undeveloped and feeling irrelevant. With the past events being dumped on us in one go, there's no real sense of mystery (in a detective story of all things) and we're left wondering why they didn't just tell the story chronologically if they wanted to spend so much time in the past. The scifi and fantasy elements are poorly integrated, making the story feel like a disjointed hodgepodge (and I feel "android" isn't an accurate label for the SPES operatives, who would probably be more accurately dubbed mutants or hybrids). Siesta's death scene, which should have been one of if not the most powerful scenes in the series, was pathetically limp, but by that point, my sense of disappointment had reached the point where I was just trudging along to finish the dang thing. If that were not enough, the budget was clearly front-loaded to make a strong impression in the first episode while production values were spotty at best afterward.
If you can't tell, I didn't have a good time with this and I don't think you would either. There's some potential in the concept and characters, but from top to bottom, it all fell short. I'm going to say pass on this one.
Rating:
Avoid It