English Dub Review: Case File nº221: Kabukicho “Not Breathing”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

In the aftermath of Moriarty’s betrayal, the rest of the detectives reel from the revelation, though no one has seen Watson. Sherlock doesn’t seem worried, however, that is until a purple bearded Santa (oh yeah, it’s apparently Christmas. Sure, why not, time doesn’t mean anything anymore anyway) arrives at the bar leaving gifts. He quickly realizes that Santa is Albert and gives chase, then running into Moriarty, who invites him to a party. Once at the location, City Hall, he meets with a perfectly unharmed Watson, who apparently survived Mary’s need to kill him, and Lucy is left alive, likely meaning that they’re no longer involved with this. Sherlock and Watson are also followed by Lestrade and the police, who are eager to capture Moriarty, but are diverted by an explosion that drives everyone else out.

The detectives meet Moriarty on the top floor with the intention of helping him, but it seems he’s too far gone. He tries once again convincing Sherlock that they are the same, having broken teapots that they’re trying to futility fill. He hopes that he’ll give Sherlock a mystery crime he’ll give his everything to solve, then give Moriarty a mystery back, pushing themselves on and on with the world as their stage. So to give him the last push to join him, Moriarty put bombs everywhere in Kabukicho and now plans to set them off and then shoots Watson in the leg, asking Sherlock to kill him, but if that won’t work, he’ll be Sherlock’s Jack and take his Alex. What he didn’t count on was Sherlock and the other detectives learning this ahead of time and rounding them all up. Albert is found and kills himself once his name is called, as per Moriarty’s brainwashing (you’d think Sherlock would have informed them about that so they could take him alive, but whatever). And even then, Sherlock will never become the person Moriarty wants, thanks in part to Moriarty’s friendship. So Moriarty realizes that the one who needs to die to push Sherlock over the edge…is himself. He puts himself over the edge of the building and jumps off, Sherlock barely missing grabbing him.

OUR TAKE

Wow, I was starting to think Funimation would never get back to this one! Last time we checked in on this adaptation of the famous detective, we were still able to dine inside of restaurants. Now we’re back, hopefully getting through the remaining four episodes in a quick fashion while Funi steadily works through their remaining Winter season backlog. Still, we’ve been away from this show for almost four months, so naturally people are going to have some foggy memories of what happened before. We had previously left on quite a bit of a cliffhanger with Moriarty revealing himself to be…well, Moriarty, the Sherlock archenemy that literally anyone with passing knowledge of the cast of Sherlock stories knows to be the detective’s arch nemesis. His motivations for doing so seem to be similar in fashion to Heath Ledger’s Joker to Christian Bale’s Batman, or maybe the Sherlock and Moriarty from BBC’s Sherlock series (possibly, I haven’t seen that show in awhile), where in the bad guy tries to prove that he and the good guy are the same kind of monster and that they simply need one major push in order to understand that the world doesn’t matter and they can just mess around with it together at their leisure if they wanted. Naturally the response to this is that people can be good and the hero isn’t about to play the villain’s game, leading to them killing themselves or trying to prove one last time that the hero’s rules aren’t real.

A pretty anti-climactic end for Moriarty, and make no mistake, he’s dead. Honestly, whoever was interested in this series enough to watch until the end would have watched the rest of it as it aired in Japan regardless of the issues here in America, so I don’t think it’s going to surprise anyone at this point that Moriarty is definitely officially confirmed dead. I guess in retrospect, the purpose of that was to use the remaining episodes to show how that will impact Sherlock in the last three episodes, so I’ll talk about the execution of those as we cover them. But even then I can already say that I think this was premature. Even one more episode tracking Moriarty down or trying to give him more time to scheme would have really done more to help elevate his threat level. And the reflection on that death is definitely not going to require three more episodes. One at the most, really, but then that’s…well, we’ll get to that when the time comes. For now, while I think this was a serviceable send off for old Morty, it really could’ve used some more time in the oven to really get the taste it wanted.