English Dub Review: The Dinner Table Detective “There is no such thing as a completely locked room File 1”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Reiko and Kyoichiro investigate the death of a famous painter who pointed at one of his paintings before he died, hinting that whoever inspired it may be the killer.

OUR TAKE

Okay, we’re finally back to regularly scheduled releases on Saturday after two weeks of strange delays. And we’re on to a new story arc, which means this one gets a whole episode to itself! In fact, it may get more than that, as if the titles for next week are to be believed, this may be long enough to get TWO FULL EPISODES! What a concept, letting the end of a story be crammed next to the beginning of another! With that rant out of the way, let’s talk about the episode itself, which I was actually pleasantly surprised by. Mainly because this one kinda gives us SOME development of Reiko and Kyoichiro’s…dynamic? I’d say “relationship” but it’s pretty cut and dry about how they barely tolerate each other for the sake of solving mysteries. And I also only say they KINDA give us some development because, in actuality, they really only do some vague gesturing towards it, as Kyoichiro starts complimenting Reiko more and it strikes her as odd, as well as when he decides to leave this case to her…only for it to be revealed that he’s shooting for an antiques show the next day. Maybe it’s leading somewhere towards them respecting each other mutually, but that’s probably it.

As for the case they’re investigating, it’s another classic Locked Door Mystery, which is weird to me since I covered another one of these in a totally different mystery anime just a month or two ago. In this case, it involves a painter who was having an affair and found dead in a locked room with his painting…spatula (apparently that’s what it’s called) stabbed into him, and the only witness, his son, coming in to see him point at a painting of a beautiful woman, whose muse may be the culprit. Except, as we’ve learned to expect from this show, the first person is most likely a red herring. Here, it’s both the woman he’s having an affair with AND his wife who seem like obvious choices, but are probably not if only because of narrative convention. So that kind of just leaves the son as a suspect, but I’m sure it will be something that feels totally out of nowhere. As always, Kageyama is going to be the one to solve this, but they’re dragging it out until the next episode I guess. Which I suppose is just as well.