English Dub Review: Case File nº221: Kabukicho “Why Not Join the Staring-At-Eye-Moles Squad?”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Mrs. Hudson explains the rules of hiring detectives for certain ranked cases to Watson. And he’s going to need to know these in order to hire Sherlock, who he ran over the last episode accidentally. But that’ll have to wait, as a new case has arisen: Fujiko Takamine, the owner of the local flower shop, got convinced to join an Idol Group, leaving the shop for her assistant Saori to take care of. But before she could go to her audition, she found out the man in charge, a man named Kita, had mysteriously gone missing. So she’s enlisted the willing detectives to help her find him. Among them are Mary Morston (who Watson takes a liking to) and her sister Lucy.

It’s not long before Sherlock uncovers that Saori is behind everything, as well as finding Kita in what is likely his usual attire, parsing out that the audition was a scam. However, Watson is not as on the ball, letting Mary into Sherlock’s room when he was expressly told not to, which leads Sherlock to tell him to get lost. Sherlock then catches Saori and Kita trying to use the flower shop to break into a nearby pawn shop, then tells them how he figured things out through his Raguko method. Saori had worked with Kita to make up a whole fake Idol audition in order to lure Fujiko out so that they could break into the pawnshop, as Kita was actually a rival thief of a guy named Cobra. Cobra even shows up to kill Sherlock but is saved by Watson.

OUR TAKE

I’m still finding myself finding fun with this crazy new flavor of Sherlock Holmes, even if this particular episode wasn’t exactly the most clever. In fact, it was kinda boring at times. I guess this is what we can expect for typical episodes of this show moving forward, but it feels like the actual mystery basically flew by. You can pretty easily guess from the start that Fujiko was set up, especially with how easily she was convinced to leave the shop. What wasn’t obvious at first was how Saori and Kita were working together OR to what end, but even learning about that didn’t exactly fill in many blanks. There just seemed to be way too many factors we had to learn after the fact or as they were explained, which I feel like is the opposite of what a series about mysteries should be doing for its audience.

But the brunt of this episode seems to mainly be about Watson settling into his new situation as Sherlock’s potential hire/potential protégé. Watson, like in a lot of versions of this character, acts as sort of a viewpoint character for the audience, which is easy since he is the most normal out of all these eccentrics. Through him, we learn more about the weird system of hiring detectives for certain cases, with the differences between types of cases likely becoming important later on. For now, though, it seems to serve mostly just to get certain characters out of the show a week so that they don’t gunk up the plot. At least that’s what I’m getting so far, seeing how the more serious or at least more competent characters don’t stick around for long this time.

I don’t know, this episode just felt really unremarkable, which is hopefully not a sign of things to come. We’re only two episodes in what might be about twelve or thirteen, so I’d rather this be consistently enjoyable and not just tolerable. Even a bad show can be fun in its own way, but pleasantly boring wears on me faster than even bad shows would. Then again, I don’t see this becoming more painful than Series 4 of BBC Sherlock. For now, let’s just hope for the best and see how things play out. There could be a greater mystery yet that could clinch this as one of the best shows of the year!