English Dub Review: Special 7: Special Crime Investigation Unit “One Year Earlier: Kujaku Nijo’s Melancholy”

 

 

Overview (Spoilers Below)

With NINE lying low for the time being, Special 7 finds themselves with very little to do. Well, that’s not exactly true, there’s still a massive backlog of paperwork. So that’ll be fun, right? They could make a game out of it. See how many papers they can file in an hour and then try to beat that record in the next! Hey man, Special 7 is a government job; nobody said it was always going to be a blast.

Anyway, Nanatsuki finds a triple homicide file where the primary suspect was… Nijo! Given what we now know about Nijo’s past, it won’t come as much of a surprise that he was once accused of killing three former members of NINE. But wait, there’s a twist. For this case—and pretty much every other case involving NINE—he was innocent.

And so, the storytelling flashback begins. I believe Bellemer begins telling the story, but there are plenty of POVs in this story, so the crew must be passing off the narrator duties around when we can’t see them. Anyway, Nijo was first assigned to Special 7 about a year ago. His secret source pulled a few strings, but to Boss and the gang, everything seemed on the up and up.

Of course, they were wrong, and there were plenty of red flags waving directly in their faces. For example, when Nijo was at the firing range, he clocked in a ton of kill shots which went in direct contrast to the “subdue” shots preferred by the Japanese police department. Ichinose and Gramps both saw the evidence, as well as some random guy who likely won’t be important to the story at all.

After a day, three NINE members are killed, supposedly with Nijo’s gun. Plus, there’s footage of him leaving police headquarters shortly before the crime. The freewheeling TPD allow Nijo to continue to work while he’s an active suspect, prompting him to conduct an investigation independent of Ichinose’s.

Both detectives come to the same conclusion because the true perpetrator was not careful in covering his tracks. And guess what, it was that random guy from the firing range who nobody suspected because he was just so random! However, even though Nijo and Ichinose are both super cops, Rando gets the drop on them and shoots Ichinose. Luckily—or perhaps by design—Mr. Charisma kicks his gun to Nijo who “subdue shoots” the culprit.

Following this victory—which wasn’t real since corrupt Public Safety got their hands on the perp—the team celebrates Nijo’s arrival by going out for Chinese food. And in the present, the current roster of Special 7 also goes out for some Chinese. They say it’s a belated welcome for Nanatsuki, but in reality they’re doing it because Chinese food tastes good.

 

Our Take

While this wasn’t the most entertaining episode of Special 7, it did answer a few lingering questions I had following the finale. I couldn’t help wonder how Nijo worked beside a number of people he supposedly hated. However, when I posed such questions, I assumed he’d been with the team for longer than a year. From episode one and onward, the kid seemed so comfortable and immersed with the team’s patterns, I assumed he’d been with them for a minimum of five years. Yes, he’s only twenty-five years old, but wunderkinds most certainly exist, and maturity for the Elfin race may play out a bit differently than it does for humans. That part of the overall world-building was never explained.

Let’s stick with that for a moment. Besides knowing that these different races exist, we don’t really know much about them individually. We did learn homunculi are considered “adults” from the day they’re created, and that’s why Bellemer gets to work as a cop at the age of twelve. But what are the rules for elves, dwarfs, vampires, and orcs? Is Akane thousands of years old like most vampires, or is she actually twenty-nine like her file says? If she is young, was she created by an ancient vampire from somewhere in Romania? Was she a human before being turned, or was she born a vamp? And if her maker is somehow killed, will she die herself, or will she simply feel his death coursing through her blood?

Okay, so most of my questions are vampire related, but it would’ve been nice to get an episode or two explaining such phenomena, instead of this outing about how Nijo requisitioned paperwork to cheat himself onto a squad he didn’t particularly care for. The mystery itself also unfolded way too easily. They cheated by saying the criminal was lazy about covering his tracks, but it came off as an excuse for uninspired writing. It’s also a cop out in any mystery to introduce a single random character only to reveal him as the culprit in the third act. We need to have a minimum of three suspects.

Overall, this was a bland paint-by-numbers that left me with many questions despite it answering a few of the show’s minor outliers.