Honestly, I wish I hadn’t waited until the ninth episode, but even with its rough production values the stories were at least entertaining. The much-telegraphed death of Siesta was a big ol’ drag that ruined any goodwill or enthusiasm I still harbored for the show. She deserved better.—Braverade
We’ve now arrived back at that scene on the boat where Siesta, Kimihiko, and Char—who is still not really a character—are headed to Secret Evil SPES Island. It’s as clear as it is by the name of the anime that this will be Siesta’s last mission, especially since Char keeps telling Kimi he’s going to regret not hugging Siesta or having her pat his head.
Kimi and Char go off on their own armed only with guns against an enemy they know to be superpowered. Seems kinda dumb! But then the entire excursion into the deeply unimpressive SPES HQ is a bit of a waste of time, unless you got anything at all out of the deadpan monologue of SPES’ space plant uber-boss. I was just waiting for Kimi to go back to Siesta. When he does, she’s only playing dead…at least at this point.
It’s a trick as cheap as much of the animation, framing, and general direction of the final showdown between Hel and Siesta/Kimi. Giant vines pop out of the ground, but they’re mostly a series of still shots. Our heroes move awkwardly and stiffly across the barren, boring battlefield. Hel reveals that she’s a personality created by Alicia to deal with all the torture, or something.
Then the giant stupid monster comes out of nowhere and tries to eat Kimi, only for Siesta to dive into harm’s way, push Kimi aside, and get killed. Yet even this is so oddly and sloppily presented that finally witnessing how the Detective who was Already Dead dies elicited no more than a shrug, and a bit of a yawn.
As if there weren’t enough clichés in this episode, it ends with Kimi waking up in his bed, presumably in the present when he’s rolling with Nagisa…but who knows? It’s a bit frustrating to think that all these episodes that took place with Siesta, and indeed made up the bulk of this cour, were just one long flashback that undermined the show’s premise. Sure, the Detective is Already Dead…but we’re spending most of the time with her still alive. Now that she’s gone, I’m not sure I care where this show goes next…
This episode starts off with a gag—that the carrots in the curry Kimi made are too hard. They’re hard because he couldn’t find the kitchen knife, which Siesta confirms is still missing. Siesta is rather harsh and perhaps even a little possessive of her Sidekick when she informs Alicia that her services as substitute detective are no longer required. Kimi disagrees, and allows Alicia to continue investigating beside him.
Then sirens blare, and the next victim of the heart-stealer is revealed. Siesta, Kimi, and Alicia visit the grief-stricken mother of the woman, and regrets only taking and never giving to her daughter. Siesta is again harsh and clinical in questioning the grieving mother, causing Kimi to interrupt, while Alicia comforts the mother by assuring her that it wasn’t a one-sided relationship.
Siesta and Kimi have a tiff and go their separate ways for the day, but Alicia isn’t far behind, and Kimi presents her with a gift—the ring she liked at the curbside jeweler—and she asks him to slip it on her finger as a groom would. Siesta returns to apologize, only to see the two together, wish them every happiness, and storms off in a fresh barely-concealed huff.
Needless to say, Kimi has become quite fond and trusting of Alicia, in spite of the fact so much of her is still shrouded in mystery. In place of all the things he doesn’t know, he fills his heart with all the things he does, including that she’s a good person, and completely misses how she suspects she used to be a bad one. Turns out the ring was a tracking device, and Kimi soon finds a stabbed but not killed police officer…and Alicia on the ground with a gunshot wound.
It was when Alicia first said she was once bad that it first popped into my head she was Hel in a different form. That’s because everything I’d seen so far pointed to that. So I fully expected the episode to zag instead of zig, and pull something completely different out of nowhere; once again to prove it doesn’t really care about process or clues so much as the final twist.
Instead, it just zigged—Alicia is Hel, or at least the innocent, kind surface side of Hel. She’s been unknowingly switching into Hel Mode and stealing the hearts of the victims. Once she put the pieces together for herself, Alicia was left with nothing but the inevitability that her fun with Kimi had to come to an abrupt end.
Just as her reveal as Hell was earned, so is Alicia’s tearful goodbye to Kimi before turning into a knife-brandishing Hel. It was truly heartbreaking after all the moments—both tender and fraught—they’d shared, and become a kind of big-brother/little sister detective duo.
Again, Siesta comes in to do what is necessary, tackling Hel!Alicia before she can kill Kimi, then preparing to shoot her in the head before Kimi pulls his gun on Siesta. His heart may still be beating in his chest, but there’s no denying that Alicia stole it anyway. How else could he point a gun at Siesta?
Kimi was emotionally compromised. He’s a human being; it happens. Siesta doesn’t hold it against him, nor does she impose some kind of punishment for him losing objectivity. On the contrary, Siesta admits that Alicia was so trustworthy to her that she didn’t start suspecting her until the most recent victims, meaning she didn’t have the knowledge to act before anyone was killed. Call me crazy, but I like the fact that while Siesta is legendary, she’s not perfect.
But as both Kimi and Siesta were trying to do the right thing and were momentarily at odd with one another like never before in their three-plus years together, they’re soon reunited when Chameleon abducts Hel!Alicia and dares them to follow him to his not-so-secret private island base (which…what a stock villain move). They have a comrade to save, and they’ll do it the best way they know how: together.
Alicia takes to the mantle of Substitute Legendary Detective like a fish to water, donning a gumshoe’s coat and plaid cap and running all over downtown searching for the Eye of the Sapphire per Siesta’s instructions. Kimi does his best to catch up, but is constantly losing sight of the Mini-Sherlock. She’s just happy to be outside for the first time in a while, leading her to wonder why she hadn’t been outside for so long.
A couple weeks pass, and Siesta recovers from her injury, so the three go out for celebratory drinks. In Alicia’s case they’re all non-alcoholic, but something tells me the dark red liquid in a wine glass Siesta is enjoying isn’t just “juice.” Alicia is also somewhat frightened of just how in-sync Kimi and Siesta are, and is about to call them a couple of lovebirds when she’s abruptly cut off.
Alicia ends up heading to bed first, leaving Kimi and a Siesta who’s not quite done partying. After somewhere around ten “last” drinks, Siesta is hopping on her bed in a loose bathrobe and slurring her words as she spouts nonsense about melons so unlike Siesta, Kimi assumes she’s speaking in some kind of higher codespeak he can’t quite pick up.
There’s nothing to decode in her desire for him to sleep beside her. While she teases his forgettable face, she places her hand on it when she says she’ll never forget their three years spent together, and proposes that after so much serious talk they try doing something…“not so serious”.
We don’t learn how far the two got—or if Siesta passed out right after making her proposal—but when she wakes up next to him all sobered up, she prepares a syringe with a memory-wiping compound. Fortunately, Kimi is saved by the doorbell. It’s Alicia, who managed to solve overnight the real case Siesta apparently gave her: to discover that Kimi’s left eye was injured, and an eyepatch needed for it to fully heal.
Now donning his new “daring pirate” look while out and about with a slightly jealous Siesta, Kimi gets a call from Detective Kase, who assures him they actually didn’t meet two weeks ago. Instead, the Kase he met had the lighter she’d already given to him, so it was an impostor.
It could have been Hel, who sat this episode out so Kimi could play Alicia’s babysitter by day and Siesta’s Casanova by night. Not that I minded this in the least—Kimi and Siesta’s interactions remain the heart and soul of the show—but I imagine some heavier-weight material is in store for us next time.
Crow’s on the case with some thoughts on episode 7 here.
Once Siesta busted through the walls of the huge complex beneath the Houses of Parliament, I knew we were in for some gleefully bizarre action. After explaining how she really doesn’t care about her sidekick enough to beg the government for a top-secret humanoid weapon, she puts Kimi in the only seat in the cockpit and sits on his lap as the pair go up against Hel and her eldritch abomination.
While in theory this would be a pretty cool battle, the execution greatly suffers, with both storyboarding, animation and sound contributing to an underwhelming spectacle. Rather than sitting on the edge of my seat, I was distracted by the fact the show had just written checks it could not cash. To borrow a Top Gear phrase: ambitious, but rubbish.
What keeps this sequence from bottoming out all together is the huming chemistry and always entertaining (if sometimes florid) banter between the Legendary Detective and her sidekick. Yet even as they remind us not to take the mecha/monster battle too seriously, the peril and urgency is suddenly ratcheted up when the battle takes to the skies of London.
It’s here where I kept thinking this could be it; when the Detective who is Already Dead…would die. She even ejects Kimi from the mecha and collides with Hel and her monster in a big explosion as the two combatants fall to the ground in a cloud of dust, smoke, and flame. Somehow, Kimi is able to meet right back up with Siesta, and gives her a hug, telling her never to do that again.
In a heartbreaking moment considering what we know, Siesta promises Kimi she’ll never suddenly willfully die without telling him anything. Then she defeats Hel rather easily by using a pocket mirror—one of her special “tools”—to cause her to stab herself with her own sword. She’s about to finish her off with a bullet when Hell yells “Chameleon!” and then vanishes. Clearly, she had a sidekick…so I guess Kimi was going to be her second?
Hel may not be dead, but neither is Siesta; instead she’s suffered a broken leg, which results in a cast and her and Kimi cohabitating so he can take care of her. She’s loving how much he’s loving this suddenly intimate situation, even if he tries valiantly to hide it. Why else would he head out to buy juicier apples?
It’s that little shopping trip that leads our trouble magnet of a sidekick to the next case, this one involving his discovery of a twin-tailed loli in an Alice dress and striped stockings sleeping in a wooden crate on the sidewalk. Voiced by Kugimiya Rie, the girl’s name is even Alicia, but other than knowing she’s Kimi’s age despite looking ten years younger, she doesn’t remember who she is or why she woke up in a box.
Kimi comes home to a Siesta who was not only wearing an apron (thus fulfilling Kimi’s lifelong dream), but preparing to bake a pie with the apples he was supposed to come home with. Instead, he comes home with an amnesiac girl who ate all those apples, and Siesta’s understandably a bit-miffed.
No matter; Siesta, Kimi, and Alicia discuss the situation over Darjeeling tea and apple-less apple pie. Siesta decides that this is their next case, but since she’s laid up with her injury, she asks Alicia to be the Detective in her place (she doesn’t pick Kimi despite his experience because he just has “the face of a sidekick”). Alicia agrees when she learns she can boss the sidekick around all she wants.
But just as this case gets started, a new one rears its head: Detective Kase barges in without knocking and smokes indoors while reporting that the heart-harvester has struck again: Hel is still at it. I guess we’ll see how Alicia fares as the Substitute Legendary Detective…or maybe the show will switch gears entirely and return to the present. I really don’t know anymore, and I guess, for now, that’s part of the fun.
Read Crow’s episode 6 review here.
This week dispenses with the present day event of Char preparing to reunite with Kimi and takes us back to when he has been Siesta’s sidekick for around a year. They’re on vacation at the beach, Siesta is showing off the ripped abs that make her a formidable combatant; she also gets to see that Kimi is in better shape than she expected.
This continues the quasi-romance, but as important as Siesta ends up being to Kimi in the present once Nagisa shows up with her heart, they never actually dated. That said, Siesta never let Kimi forget she was a woman, he was a man, and if “no one is watching”, why not have a little more fun?
The duo return to business in London where a modern-day Jack the Ripper named Cerberus is poaching hearts of their victims. Detective Kase only shows up long enough to hand Kimi her lit cigar and lighter along with what seems like a tough serial murder case. Obviously, Siesta is already well into this case; the main issue is that every time she gets close to Cerberus they manage to slip through her fingers, suggesting a powerful sense of smell.
Siesta neutralizes Cerberus’ olfactory advantage by using Kimi as bait. At first it looks like Char was sent by Siesta to protect Kimi, but when Char calls Siesta by her name instead of “Ma’am”, Kimi exposes her as an impostor. Sure enough, “Char” is really Cerberus, who is also a werewolf, hence the great sense of smell. Bereft of any other weapon, Kimi tosses Kase’s lit lighter on the bed, starting a fire that activates the sprinklers.
This whole time, a special gas was released in Kimi’s room by Siesta, which when mixed with the water of the sprinklers, blocks Cerberus’ sense of smell. This allows her to get the jump on him, blasting through the window, shooing him with her silver rifle and delivering a kick for good measure. While clearly fluster moments earlier, Kimi breathes a sigh of relief, implying he never doubted she’d show up in time.
Unfortunately, Cerberus nearly gets away, only to be beheaded and de-hearted by his boss, Supreme Leader of SPES, codenamed Hel (Norse goddess of the dead). With her black hair, red eyes, and evil affiliation, Hel is very much Siesta’s opposite.
Hel uses some kind of magic eyes to stop Siesta dead in her tracks, and then takes Kimi hostage. Cuffing him to a chair in a huge facility beneath Parliament, she reveals a giant monster she’s been feeding human hearts. You’d think someone with this power and reach would have made sure Kimi didn’t have anything on him he could use to unlock his cuffs. Alas.
Hel is interested in Kimi because the Secret Writ she follows already predicts that Kimi will work for her someday in the future. She doesn’t see him as a magnet for trouble, but an entity who brings out trouble; a “pivot point” of the world—the perfect person to have around if you want to “save” the world by destroying its present version.
But yeah, Hel spends too much time talking about her plans and the facility they’re in, giving Siesta time to use an industrial mech to blast through the stone walls to rescue Kimi once more. Kimi is her sidekick, and she’ll be damned if she’ll let anyone poach him.
Want to read more about this episode? Head over to Crow’s!
Huh…well that was…something? I dunno, there’s something very odd and random about just running into an idol concert and randomly wandering around until you realize the bad guy can hear you even through all the noise…and the bad guy gives away his position for no reason. Also, both the crowd of weird shadow people who all have identical green light sticks (why not…blue?), Yui’s performance, and the general sound mix left a lot to be desired.
I’ll, admit, while I suspected Yui made that threat letter, I didn’t think the giant sapphire would her false left eye. That’s odd in more a cool way than a head-scratching one. Still, the entire concert scene that culminated in Kimizuka leaping to push Yui out of the path of a crossbow bolt lacked suspense and the appropriate level of production value.
Matters aren’t helped when Yui explains why her eye is a sapphire and while I obviously sympathize with her losing her parents at such an age, only to inherit a giant mansion, immense fortune, and oh yeah, a sapphire eye that SPES is apparently trying to steal.
That brings us to the most contrived part of the episode: that Yui was manipulated by SPES into trying to kill Kimizuka and Nagisa by rigging a bomb in the jewel vault. This is indeed a twist, but Kimizuka’s manner of deducing it makes no sense. Also her eye has x-ray vision…so I guess it’s not just a sapphire, and Yui is part cyborg?
It’s all moot, as despite the fact Yui pulls a gun on Kimizuka and Nagisa, five minutes later she’s lowering it and crying about not wanting her jewel eye stolen. This begs the question of why is SPES only now trying to steal it. It also seems strange that a secret evil organization would choose such a public and audacious manner of trying to steal it as shooting a crossbow bolt through a beloved idol’s eye.
These are the kind of questions I’d rather not have, but because this episode is only interested in conclusions and twists and not doing any of the work to set them up properly, my mind wandered often.
In any case, Yui is now a friend and compatriot of Kimizuka and Nagisa, fellow targets of the nebulous Bad Guys. The next day, as news of Kimizuka rescuing Yui plasters the city’s video screens, another person from Kimizuka’s past arrives: a blonde bombshell named Char whom we learn—in a flashback in the most obnoxiously expositiony way possible—is the brawn to Kimizuka’s brains.
Siesta insisted that the two learn to get along and cover for each others’ weaknesses. Either that never happened or it never had a chance to happen, because that day on the boat with Kimizuka and Char was Siesta’s last. I foresee next week focusing on Char’s return to Kimizuka’s life, the two trying and failing to get along, but not giving up on trying in honor of their mentor…whose heart is alive and well in Nagisa.
Hear what Crow has to say about episode 4 here.
Saikawa Yui is a nationally famous idol on the rise who also happens to be a ridiculously wealthy heiress. As her parents died three years ago, she is now head of a household that possesses, among other things, a sapphire worth upwards of three billion yen.
How she happened to find Kimizuka or know he was tied to a famous detective is unclear (though I’m guessing with her money she can afford all manner of resources) but her mission for him is simple: prevent the theft of the sapphire on the day of her live Tokyo Dome performance.
Nagisa threw Kimizuka for a momentary loop when she declares that she is the legendary detective and he is merely her sidekick, but he isn’t surprised for long. After all, Siesta’s heart is beating in Nagisa’s chest, and Nagisa later mentions that due to her prior poor health she didn’t really take pains to establish a clear identity for herself.
Now Siesta’s heart seems to be pulling her along, and Nagisa seems game to be along for the ride. Nagisa has taken a shine to Kimizuka, and vice versa, and while Kimizuka is concerned that the fact Nagisa wears her new heart on her sleeve could cause problems for her as a detective (who must always follow their heads first), that doesn’t change the fact he’s looking as forward to working with her as she is him.
Despite being packed with just the kind of almost-too-polished witty banter I often enjoy in these kinds of series, this was still the weakest episode of the bunch. It lacked the action and intrigue of the double-length first episode, and lacked much of the emotional resonance of the second. Instead, it’s basically about a case-of-the-week(s) that seems simple on the surface, but it’s complexities remain known only to Kimizuka.
While his claim that Yui-nya is lying should bear intriguing fruit next week, and there were likely a few clues this week that will be referred to when he makes his big deductory speech, the fact is this episode’s true value can’t be fully assessed due to its reliance on the payoff in the next.
Also, the fact Yui is so quick to label Kimizuka a pervert feels both lazy and unnecessary. Even if it’s mostly in jest, it undermines the goodwill built up last week which portrayed Kimizuka as a decent mature fellow. Yui doth protest too much…though maybe that’s the point: she’s trying to deflect his suspicions about what she’s hiding from him and Nagisa with childish insults.
We’ll see … as for my prediction: Yui made the ransom note-like warning that the gem would be stolen, or possibly hired people to steal it.
Sometimes I pick up on the mystery at the beginning. From the moment Natsunagi Nagisa told Kimihiko she was the recipient of a heart transplant a year ago—the same year Siesta died—I knew it was Siesta’s heart she had. It’s, as Nagisa later remarks, why she’s so forward with him at first, and also so weird, sticking her hand in his mouth and threatening to touch his uvula before giving him a comforting hug.
It’s partly so he can hear the heart, but also because it’s the closest he can get to Siesta now that she’s gone. Never mind that “memory transference” is pseudoscience. I believe there are documented instances of people suddenly yearning for things or people connected to the donor. There’s a reason for the popular belief the heart is the domain of the soul and not the brain.
The thing is, it didn’t matter that I immediately figured out the “mystery”, because that wasn’t the point. The point was the emotional fallout of such a reunion. Kimihiko had returned to his lukewarm ordinary life of high school and was fine with it, but he later admits he “couldn’t go on” without some form of closure.
Of course, that’s before he himself figures out what the heck is going on. I’m sure he had some suspicions—you’re not a legendary detective’s sidekick for three years without absorbing some deductive wisdom—prior to taking Nagisa to meet the very person who could not cannot under any circumstances harm Siesta, and so cannot harm Nagisa, the new owner of her heart.
While lacking anything in the way of action like the first episode (which feels more like a prologue to this series), the fact this second outing half the length means a more satisfyingly taut story can be told. It doesn’t waste any time, yet doesn’t feel rushed. Your mileage may vary, but I derived a great deal of emotional impact from the reunion of Siesta’s heart and her clearly bored and listless assistant.
A lot of the resonance is due to some particularly decent dialogue towards the end, when Kimihiko realizes that Siesta’s heart (and Nagisa along with it) needs both a hug and reassurance. Taketatsu Ayana, one of the best in the business, voices Nagisa pitch-perfect with a cool effortlessness.
Even if Siesta is no longer in Kimihiko’s life, I hope we get more Nagisa. As for the Chuunibyou-looking girl who shows up at the very end looking for the Legendary Detective, well…we’ll see, won’t we?
Crow’s watching this too! Read his review here.
Kimihiko Kimizuka just wants to live a normal dull life. But like Kamijou Touma’s tendency towards misfortune (if being surrounded by poweful cute girls all the time is somehow unfortunate) Kimi is a trouble magnet. It’s how he found himself being forced to carry a mysterious attaché case on a jumbo jet flight carrying 600 passengers.
Then a flight attendant asks not if there’s a doctor on the plane, but a detective, and the blue-eyed, silver-haired young woman sitting next to him not only declares that she’s a detective, but that Kimi (which in Japanese also means “you”) is her sidekick. Her name is Siesta—Spanish for a midday nap—and she’s the best trouble Kimi could as for.
He joins Siesta in the cockpit where a battle of wits with a hijacker ensues. Siesta manages to provoke him into revealing his identity as part-“android” created by the secret organization SPES. She also reveals she was the one who arranged for Kimi to board the plane with an attaché case, which contains a silver rifle loaded with bullets containing her blood. When the hijacker is shot, he can no longer do her any harm.
With their first “case” closed, Siesta suddenly disappears from Kimi’s life as soon as she enters it, only to show back up in his apartment, making herself at home by wearing his leisurewear, ordering pizza, and even walking in on him while bathing. Since Kimi’s dream is to live a life that’s the equivalent of a relaxing warm bath, this is particularly egregious to him.
But Kimi can complain all he wants about Siesta; the fact of the matter is she’s effortlessly capable, charming, beautiful, and assertive. Kimi spends so much of the episode profusely rejecting Siesta’s assertions he is her sidekick, when he should really be asking himself why living a life with her would really be so bad?
His regular life and “Siesta Life” cross over at his cultural festival, the preparations for which he completely missed owing to the many past incidents into which he’s gotten tangled. Siesta shows up in his school’s uniform, and the two proceed to go on a date. All the while, Siesta is also investigating the Toilet-bound Hanako-san case, which she discovers to be a performance-enhancing drug dealing ring using the urban legend (and the festival) as cover.
She solves that case too, though the last we see of it is her jumping out a window carrying Kimi in her arms, both of them in wedding cosplay. She can survive for the same reason she was able to neutralize the hijacker: she possesses seven special items (you could call them magical) that enable her to achieve similarly special feats; in this case shoes with the ability to fly.
Kimi eventually deduces that Siesta doesn’t so much want a sidekick, but someone with his inscrutable ability to attract trouble, which she can then investigate and resolve. But he still gives in and agrees to become her “assistant” when she gives him a forthright pledge to protect him with her life whenever the trouble he attracts threatens him.
From what we’ve seen so far from Siesta, that sounds like a promise she can keep. So it’s both intriguing and a little sad when we learn from a final Kimi voiceover that, as the title goes, the Detective is already dead. Does this mean the Siesta we saw died, and is now a ghost? A vampire or other undead entity?
It’s the kind of WTF twist that was hanging out in plain sight (in the title) the whole time, but even in forty-six minutes, there’s no explicit answer to what that title means…only clues and theories. And after all those affable interactions between Kimi and Siesta, I am fully invested in learning what’s become of her. I’m also hoping this isn’t the last we’ll see her for a while.
At any rate, if you liked In/Spectre, you’ll probably like this too.
Crow’s watching this too! Read his review here.
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