English Dub Review: Cop Craft “Cock Robin, John Doe”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

In the wake of Kahn’s assassination, tensions continue to rise between humans and Semanians, as well as the political divide between those voting for Cole Mozeleemay or Tourte. It’s also hard to deny that these remaining candidates could be suspects in the assassination, so Kei and Tilarna go to interview Cole, though Tilarna has to keep herself calm despite what happened with Zoe. They meet with Cole, though it’s his wife Marla (the one behind Zoe’s murder) who does the real talking, indicating to them that she’s the one running things and the more likely suspect of the two.

This becomes even more obvious when Cole himself is also shot and killed at a rally later that day. Kei’s deductive skills help point out the assailant, a Semanian, leading to chase through the city. In a rather confusingly animated sequence, Kei lands a few shots on the guy but is still over powered. While he’s recovering, Tilarna mortally wounds the suspect, who dies from his wounds. And to their surprise, he isn’t even Semanian, but a human who is somehow able to use Semanian transformation magic (which Tilarna theorizes is possible because Semanians are able to use human science). Though the bigger find is that his gun is made up of “vaifaht steel” which is able to change shape if enough magic is put through it, with Tilarna’s cloak being another example. But before they can investigate further, the FBI shows up to retrieve the body and weapon.

Their chief is pissed as always but keeps them on the case. There’s clearly both a human and Semanian mind behind this, but the next step is interviewing the last remaining candidate, Tourte. But as they drive to meet him, anti-Semanian protesters shouting “E.T. GO HOME” run rampant on the streets.

OUR TAKE

And we’re back to the regular story, with hopefully no more recaps for the rest of the season. Unfortunately, this arc isn’t really ramping up the excitement one might want to end a season on. The politics of this are already pretty black and white with candidates seemingly being either pro or anti-Semanian, which I imagine is a big issue especially in this city, but it seems pretty simplistic. Not that we really get a chance to learn more about these candidates or their policies because now two are dead. Even the one we actually met before gets a pretty unsatisfying conclusion to whatever might have been set up for him a few episodes ago, while now it just becomes that much more obvious that his wife is the real threat…which bores me even more because she has next to no personality.

He hasn’t come up much in this arc so far, but given that this is the end of the season (and likely series), I hazard a guess that Zelada is one of the driving forces behind these assassinations. We HAVE established that he wants nothing more than to divide human and Semanian relations, and killing political candidates with a supposedly Semanian assassin is probably a good way to accomplish that goal. But what I want to know is what the end game for all of this is, exactly. We don’t quite know where this is headed yet, but I feel like we should probably get some idea next week if we aren’t going to get it now. Ramping up to a race war is all well and good (wow, that’s going to look bad out of context), but that’s not much of a tangible goal to avoid or succeed at.

I do like how we’re learning more about the world and how the more supernatural elements work, especially with this newly named vaifaht steel and how it informs the rather unceremonious transformations Tilarna has had throughout the season. And yet, it still feels like we’ve barely scratched the surface of how this world functions, so I’m worried that we probably won’t before the end. The most I think we’ve really gotten into how these two cultures are mixing and reacting to each other would be the first arc involving the fairy dust and now this. I wouldn’t say the other arcs were bad, just more based on horror or comedy than worldbuilding. Still some time to fix that, though!