English Dub Review: The Dinner Table Detective “There is no such thing as a completely locked room File 2/ Please don’t drown in this river File 1”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

The locked room case is solved, but a new mystery awaits!

OUR TAKE

Well, sadly my hope that this mystery could’ve filled up two whole episodes was fully dashed upon seeing that, yet again, we are cramming the end of one mystery in with the beginning of another. Fortunately, this time they seem to be tied together at least a little bit, but not by much. And unfortunately the conclusion to the locked door story is another major disappointment. As it turns out, the door itself was not fully locked, but it seems that’s mainly because there was a SECRET DOOR HIDDEN IN THE PAINTING, through which led to a secret room where the killer, someone who I’m pretty sure we’ve never met lies hidden and attacks Reiko and Kageyama. Ah, of course, there were so many hints and so much foreshadowing that led to that being the only possible conclusion! Like…the point of mysteries like these is so that readers and viewers can pick up the clues along the way and possibly figure things out themselves before the story reveals the answer, right? And this is supposedly a series of books that was popular enough to be adapted into an anime, right? Surely the original stories were not this clunky, or at least I can only hope they weren’t.

Anyway, that story gets wrapped up fairly quickly after that, though one point worth noting is that Kyoichiro returns to the scene as Reiko and Kageyama are investigating and takes a blow meant for Reiko, which earns him some of her respect, much to her chagrin. With only five episodes left in the season, I doubt it will go anywhere, but hey, scraps of character development are always welcome when that’s all we can hope for. So, on to the next mystery, which involves a paparazzi following a hot celebrity (with a big ego) being killed by someone, with the celebrity being the top suspect. Once again, first suspect is always a red herring, so we’re just gonna go ahead and rule her out. And to go along with our usual pattern, next episode is all about wrapping up this specific mystery, so we don’t even have much to go on for it in this episode anyway. The most we really have to delve into is that Reiko is a fan of Tokusatsu and this actress is known for a character from a show like that where she spouts Shakespeare lines. So, see ya next week for how this wraps up.