English Dub Review: The Dinner Table Detective “Murder lies in a beautiful rose”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Kyoichiro and Reiko investigate the strangled body of a woman left in a rose bush.

OUR TAKE

Holy crap, they did it! They actually managed to fit a single mystery within a single episode! No tiny bit left to carry over into the first half of the next episode or cramming in the first third to be resolved next week, but a fully self-contained story within a fully self-contained episode! Hallelujah! Happy days are here again! It’s a shame then that this episode has basically all the same problems as every other story arc this series has had so far, but I’m two episodes away from finishing this thing and I’m looking for any silver linings I can get, okay? LET ME HAVE THIS. Anyway yeah, this is one they manage to wrap up in just one go, once again investigating a murder case as they are prone to do. Also the people involved in this case know Reiko’s parents, which doesn’t amount to anything other than her trying to cover up her face and hide her identity and convincing them by being a total mess of a human being which apparently her parents are not known for being. I’m so glad that I’ve come to know this character better over the course of this series, to the point that she feels like a fully fleshed out person and not at all a talking cardboard cut out with a post-it note’s worth of personality.

So, the mystery itself is about figuring out who among the suspects may have killed the victim and how they hid being scratched by roses, which would give them away. And just like with every other mystery, Reiko decides to delegate to Kageyama to figure this all out for her, at this point basically taking him for granted, which then leads him to dig into her about how little she’s matured or grown as a person, let alone as a detective, before still solving the mystery himself anyway. I’ve gone over this issue several times at this point, and probably will again at least once by the time this is all done with, but it’s seriously getting to a point that not even the characters are caring about this anymore. How the hell did Reiko manage to have this job for so long before Kageyama, who she only met out of nowhere at the start of this series? Ugh, anyway, two more episodes to go, let’s please just wrap this up so I can put this out of my head forever.