ID: INVADED – 13 (Fin) – The Right Person in the Right Place

ID:INVADED put a lot of ideas and mysteries out there, but it was never that coy about the Big Bad being the perpetually closed-eyed Chief Hayaseura. That the start of the final showdown with John Walker came down to a one-on-one physical fight—with Narihisago literally kicking at him as he blocked with his cane—almost felt like a surrender at first.

Then Hondoumachi arrives on a huge shark and bites off part of Hayaseura’s face. This is going to be two-against-one, at least in the Id Well.

Hondoumachi steals Hayaseura’s hat and she and Narihisago lure him on a chase to retrieve it that leads back to the first Id Well we ever saw: Fukuda’s world-in-pieces. The three meet on a platform, Hayaseura has a seat, and they talk it out, with Hondoumachi analyzing her former chief as having a God complex, hence all the sevens.

Seven serial killers with seven victims each. When Hondoumachi  counters that Narihisago was the eighth, she parries with the fact that Narihisago isn’t a true serial killer, but a serial “suicide inducer” whose only victims were serial killers. If he’s the “Cornerer”, the last person he was meant to corner was Hayaseira himself.

What Hayaseura doesn’t know his adversaries already have him right where they want him. The seat is actually a cockpit placed there courtesy of Fukuda, and Hondoumachi traps and neutralizes him in a well-within-the-well. But that still leaves her and Narihisago trapped in a well.

To get out, they’ll have to put their hope in a “third pillar” they’re not even aware of—Momoki, in the iso suit in the real world. Asukai’s powers have grown in intensity, testing both his body and the limits of his suit. Mitsuoka just manages to bring him back to life after his lungs fill with vomit and his heart stops.

He eventually finds Asukai, who is initially happy someone has come to help her, but then she sees the gun in Momoki’s hand. Asukai laments that when she was first found, she asked to be killed and put out of her misery, and that that remains to her the best and only solution. The thing is, Momoki can’t do it, and when she tries to, the gun doesn’t work in her hand.

Instead, Momoki has her return to the Mizuhanome pool, which will at least contain her expanding powers. He can’t promise they’ll find a solution that would enable her to leave that pool without murdering her, but they’re not going to murder her, nor are they going to stop looking. Before the Kura is released from her powers, Sakaido meets Kaeru in a beautiful well—seeing her alive for the first time, and bidding her farewell.

Everything related to Hayaseura, his John Walker persona, Asukai and her remaining comatose dreamers are buried from the public, as is Kura’s way, and everyone basically gets back to work. Presumably the difference is that Hondoumachi is now a full-time id well diver beside Narihisago (who may or may not still be a prisoner). The two even participate in joint dives, since they worked so well together to bring down the chief.

This was a solid, good if not great finish to a show that borrowed a lot of ideas from sci-fi and psychology and managed to merge them into a mostly cohesive and original story. Compared to the ambition of the earlier issues it raised, the ending falls a bit short, but the show is still to be commended for not completely coming apart at the seems, and for being ambitious, confident, and smart in the first place. It’s a story I’d love to return to, should favorable circumstances align.

ID: INVADED – 12 – Just Wait, Cane Bastard

All along, the Kura and Mizuhanome have been made possible by, essentially, the superpowers of a mutant: Asukai Kiki, who ensares anyone around her in her dreams. Once she’s released from her holding tank, there’s nothing keeping everyone in the Kura from falling into a coma and waking up in various dreams—a kind of ID:Invaded Greatest Hits scenario.

Such was the plan of Chief Hayaseura, AKA John Walker, AKA Brilliant Detective Unaido (whew). He has a “want and omelette, break some eggs” logic to this scheme, wherein many serial killers were caught and brought to justice at the cost of creating a few; but in the long run it will be a net plus for society. As for facing justice, the chief shoots himself several times while in a cockpit programmed to inject him into his own Id Well.

Narihisago and Hondoumachi manage to dive in after him in time, and find Hayaseura in a dream world full of masks, each of them an id well. He eludes them by putting on Hondoumachi’s (the drill world), and then tries to neutralize her by revealing her true name, causing a well storm.

As Kura employees are killed (and the Wellside team run from boulders), Brilliant Detectives like Sakaido, Hijirido and Unaido can teleport between the wells. Narihisago keeps up the chase and ends up in his own id well again, where he spots his wife and daughter and gives them a nod goodbye.

Fukuda, despite not being in Brilliant Detective mode, is still able to catch Hondoumachi in mid-air and free her from her well storm. Back in the field of masks, Fukuda is shot by a Inami Nahoshi, as payback for Hondoumachi killing Kazuta. As Hondoumachi gives a somber goodbye (or see-you-later) to Fukuda, Nahoshi travels to her id well, where the half-Kazuta is still there clinging to life, but she’s promptly stabbed to death by Hayaseura.

Narihisago returns to the mask world, reunited with Hondoumachi, and both of them agree to stop Walker and get everyone—including themselves out of this mess safe and sound. It’s good to see both of them with something to live for, not giving in to despair or Hayaseura’s cruel games. And it’s possible dying in the id wells doesn’t automatically mean death, as some of the nurses at Asukai’s hospital eventually woke up from their comas.

Out in the real, Momoki and Mitsuoka have a plan of their own. Momoki will don an isolation suit, walk into the compromised Kura, and neutralize Asukai, preferably by inserting her back in the Mizuhanome tank. If she refuses, Momoki is prepared to kill her, for there are too many other lives at stake to indulge her. The question is, even if he’s willing to kill her, will he be able?

ID: INVADED – 11 – Three is a Nice Number

Whether the outline of John Walker in the sandy winds was a literal phenomenon or artistic license, the grit of the well storm makes the facts of the case clearer to Narihisago. Fukuda trapped him in the well hoping Narihisago would kill him in a rage…but Narihisago can tell this is another manipulation by Walker, and asks Fukuda for his help instead.

Fukuda used to be a whiz with numbers, and in this well his hole is gone, bringing back the arithmomania he drilled out in the real world. Narihisago pieces this together from Fukuda’s past three-stage gestures and even his outfit, which is packed with threes. As the storm churns, the Mizuhanome continually updates, and the cockpit from the lightning version of the well is transported to the desert version. The two of them start digging, hoping to find Hondoumachi.

Meanwhile, still in Kiki Asukai’s dream world, Hondoumachi checks the work Narishisago did while he was there for a year, and comes up with another important number: seven. The dates and times when victims’ bodies were found seemed random, but the M.O. of all the killers was to cause gradual, rather than instant death.

When she records the dates of the killing blows, rather than the times of death, everything matches up neatly: each of the seven serial killers have a designated day when they kill. If Walker arranged it this way, it could be an allusion to the seven days it took to create the world—or in his case, his new one.

Hondoumachi pays the Fukuda of that time a visit in order to get the final piece of the puzzle. After proving she knows things about him she normally couldn’t possibly know, as well as revealing her head-hole kinship, thus gaining his trust, she’s able to get the precise dates and times when he dreamed of John Walker.

Whoever Walker is, they visited Fukuda in his dreams during that time. The one time that’s out of place with normal sleeping hours occurred not while Walker was asleep at work, but in off on a business trip, in a different time zone. The member of the department who was on that trip the day of Fukuda’s dream was Chief Hayaseura, whom she calls to confirm it.

Back in the real world, Togo has Mitsuoka check out Momoki’s house again and carefully observe everything. She notices a picture that was not there last time she visited, and has him scan it. He finds cognition particles, but they’re not Momoki’s. They come from a photo of Narihisago with his wife and daughter. In other words, it was a plant and Momoki was framed as a diversion.

In another demonstration of her almost scary luck, Hondoumachi is ejected from the cockpit moments after confirming Walker’s identity. She informs Narihisago and Fukuda of her findings, and the storm clears sufficiently to allow Togo to have all three extracted. For now, the well-in-a-well shenanigans would seem to be over, at least for these three.

The well storm also ended up working in their favor, and even being a crucial to their success. While the storm was raging, no one from outside could observe them, meaning the outside and inside times weren’t synched. Of course, now that they’re back in the world, it will be a mad dash to detain Hayaseura, who may know from the activities at the Wellside that it’s only a matter of time before he’s caught.

Indeed, just as Togo is ordering an arrest warrant, the Wellside goes dark, and Hayaseura heads to a chamber where Asukai Kiki has been asleep since vanishing from the hospital, serving as the totemic “Kaeru” in Narihisago’s cases. Only now it’s apparently time for her to wake up. No doubt he has a use for her that will further his plans.

At the end of the day, even a casual detective such as myself could tell there was no way Momoki was Walker, and that the most likely candidate among the staff was Hayaseura. I just wish we knew his character a little better, to give the revelation more weight. That said, bringing the mastermind behind the death of his family to justice is what Narihisago deserves. No doubt he’d die to gain that outcome, but with Hondoumachi and Fukuda by his side, it may not have to come to that.

ID: INVADED – 10 – Things Fall Apart

Narihisago makes it his mission to excise each and every one of Kiki’s tormentors from her dreams by apprehending and inducing the death of all of the serial killers in the waking world. This is a process that takes over a year, and in that time he forgets this isn’t the waking world. Doing police work, catching criminals, spending time with his family; he starts to feel like the past events when he was Sakaido in the Mizuhanome were all one long elaborate dream.

But no matter how much progress he makes, Kiki doesn’t recover. In fact, she only grows more frail, and in her final meeting with Narihisago, she tells him catching Walker won’t save her; there is no saving her. The killing in her head won’t stop.

Kiki has two options: slowly lose herself, dissolve, and warp the world with the violence and corruption within her dreams…or have Narihisago end her suffering now, while she’s still recognizably human. Even though she frames it as a necessary act to save the world, Narihisago refuses.

A month or so passes, and one day Kiki vanishes, leaving a pile of unconscious nurses in her wake who later recall sharing the same dream. It would appear Kiki’s prediction about “dissolving” came to pass. That means it’s only a matter of time before the world falls apart.

While about to deal with the Perforator, whom he’d “forgotten”, Narihisago encounters Hondoumachi. By her count she’s only been in the well-within-a-well for twenty minutes, which means even though it’s felt like more than a year to Narihisago, in reality he’s been in the well for less than twenty minutes. Talk about time distortion in dreams.

Narihisago doesn’t want to pick up what Hondoumachi is putting down, and considering how long this has been his reality, who can blame him? Still, when the meeting of the two detectives is followed by the world starting to come apart at the seams, he can no longer deny that none of this is real.

He calls his family, first to ask them to get away, but eventually, to say goodbye in his own way. Suddenly, and heartbreakingly, his memories from the real world rush back into his head in sequence, from the day he married Ayako, chronicling the birth and growth of Muku, and ending with Muku’s death at the hands of Challenger and Ayako committing suicide.

These images, the initial ones being the photos on the wall of his cell, all speak for themselves, so the very loud and melodramatic song felt like overkill. Perhaps it was more the fact the lyrics were in English—and very obvious and bad—than the music itself. It was still a moving scene. It could have been better with more restraint.

With the time in this dream world dwindling rapidly, Narihisago suggests he and Hondoumachi do as much investigating as they can, but his time is up, as Anaido extracts him from the well after ten minutes. He then tells Sakaido that he identified the body in the quicksand. It’s…Narihisago Akihito, someone Sakaido doesn’t know due to the protective amnesia of the Mizuhanome…but due to the condition of his brain, the amnesia function doesn’t work on Anaido/Fukuda.

The Wellsiders didn’t know that, which means Fukuda is up to something, likely under the direction of Walker. When Fukuda shows Sakaido the photo of Narihisago and his family (which he took from the corpse), things…take a turn. This desert isn’t Momoki’s id well at all, but the “end stage” of Narihisago’s. Remembering himself in his own well produces a “well storm”, depicted as a literally wind storm, as a fail-safe to protect the conscious from the unconscious…and Walker’s form appears in that wind.

ID:Invaded is starting to get very tricky with its Inception-style premise, but with the Big Bad finally making a decisive move that would seem to have Narihisago in check, it sure seems like more answers are forthcoming. Somehow, this all manages to hold together. Here’s hoping Narihisago can similarly keep it together, or if he can’t, if Hondoumachi can save the day.

ID: INVADED – 09 – You Can Not (Not) Redo

When Sakaido wakes up in what he assumed would be Asukai Kiki’s Id Well, Kaeru’s dead body is nowhere to be found. Instead, he’s flanked by his very much alive wife and daughter. He remembers he isn’t the Brilliant Detective Sakaido at all, but Narihisago Akihito.

He hugs his family, who react as if he’s acting weird. But as far as Akihito is concerned, if being able to go back in time, fix what broke, and protect those who mattered most to him is “losing it”, then he doesn’t want to have it.

Without dwelling too much about what this reality is, Aki starts by paying a visit to the Challenger. Since this is before Muku was murdered, no one in this world has caught on to his depravities, except Aki, who comes in with outside knowledge from this reality’s version of the future.

Instead of rushing into Challenger’s house in a revenging rage, gun blazing, he challenges the Challenger to a “fair and square” fight, for which the killer is obviously more than game. Aki gets the absolute shit kicked out of him, but he manages to get the upper hand just as Momoki, the only backup he requested, arrives.

With the Challenger in custody, Aki directs Momoki to check out the basement, where a still-living victim sat bleeding in the “arena”. The woman turns out to be Asukai Kiki, and when Aki visits her hospital room, he’s perplexed by the fact she looks just like Kaeru. Kiki tells him how her thoughts have a way of broadcasting themselves to people around her.

Turns out Aki is in Kiki’s dream, because not only is there no sign of her injuries in the waking world (or whatever it is), but in this dream world of hers, serial killers like the Challenger come every night to kill her, with each night designated for a certain killer.

Aki soon wakes in his own bed with his worried wife and daughter by his side, while Momoki informs him the incident with the Challenger is being considered self-defense (a welcome change from the premeditated murder charge of his first “go-round”). He meets with Kiki—for real, this time—but can’t get her, an inhabitant of this “reality”, to explain what the reality is.

What she can tell him is that the person who has been letting one killer after another into her unconscious dreams every night matches the description of one John Walker: top hat, tails, and cane. This not-quite-Id Well-within-an-Id Well scenario created as many questions as it answered, and Hondomachi is still AWOL, but I am nevertheless deeply intrigued.

ID: INVADED – 08 – The Lone and Level Sands Stretch Far Away

With Hondomachi diving into a well within a well, Assistant Director Togo leads rescue efforts, which consist of sending both Narihisago and Fukuda into Momoki’s id well. No one knows how this will go, but it turns out working out pretty well…for whomever set this elaborate, elaborate trap.

Sakaido and Anaido wake up in a massive, desolate desert with no food or water and an unmoving sun. The two Brilliant Detectives briefly clash on how to proceed, but their disagreements are more a matter of speed than content.

As Sakaido inspects Kaeru’s corpse a bit longer, Anaido follows footsteps of someone who “stole their watches”, which would explain the watch-like marks on their wrists. Sakaido eventually catches up, and the two trudge through the desert until they find something…anything.

It’s notable that with no memories of the real world but the Brilliant Detective programming that came with them, these two get along famously, with Akaido even calling Sakaido “brother.”

The two eventually find a second corpse—that of the “watch thief”—partially submerged in quicksand. They also find a second cockpit, like the one in Narihisago’s id well, which is also programmed for the id well of Asukai Kiki. Sakaido volunteers to dive in, while Anaido stands by to extract him in ten minutes.

In the real world, Momoki is being interrogated by police, but he just doesn’t seem like John Walker so much as the victim of a frame job. When he hears two detectives were sent into his id well, he demands they extract them at once. If Hondomachi is already in a trap of Walker’s making, Narihisago will join her soon.

ID: INVADED – 07 – Easy as Pi

Hondomachi’s first mission in an Id Well is no murder-of-the-week, but could be the key to everything. The Id Well in question is Narihisago Akihito’s, taken from still-strong cognition particles found at the sight where he emptied a clip into Katsuyama Denshin, the man who killed his daughter Muku.

Here, Hondomachi is not Hondomachi, but the Brilliant Detective Hijiriido Miyo, sporting a stylish twist on the classic detective coat. Following the same pattern as Sakaido, the sight of Kaeru’s body triggers the memory of who she is and what she’s here to do.

While Miyo is handcuffed to Kaeru, the fact Kaeru was killed by lightning means they were cuffed together by a third party after Kaeru died. When Miyo spots a dead Narihisago, she determines he did it to keep her safe: lightning never strikes anywhere twice here, because it’s not real lightning, flashing every nine seconds without fail.

All the other people in the well are family and people connected ti Narihisago, but Miyo manages to get them all onto safe spots to stop the killings. When Narihisago’s wife and daughter Muku wonder what’s to be done about people elsewhere getting killed, the single-minded Miyo suggests they do something about it; she’s here to solve a mystery.

Moving in nine-second spurts, Miyo eventually makes it to an operational cockpit that leads to the id well of the Challenger’s last victim, Asukai Kiki. Diving into an Id Well within an Id Well is some Inception stuff we haven’t seen from this show yet, but Miyo wastes no time taking a seat in the cockpit to see where the rabbit hole goes.

Wellside, they’re unable to extract Hondomachi, then investigators burst in led by the Chief, and Director Momoki is placed under arrest for the charge of inducing all of the 44 murders committed by the serial killers investigated. In other words, they suspect him to be the John Walker; the mole within the unit.

As Momoki is taken away, and with Tougou now in charge, Habutae cracks the number pattern of the lightning: the sequence they’ve witnessed appears in pi around the ten millionth digit. Extrapolating from there, and taking into account a strike every 9.03 seconds, he calculates that the first strike hit the number “3” 1,084 days ago, the day Muku was murdered.

The Id Well within and Id Well, as well as Miyo’s freedom to expore it without interference from Wellside, comprise exciting uncharted territory, and it’s anyone’s guess which crazy twists and turns the mystery goes from here. As for Momoki as John Walker, despite the mounting evidence, I’m not 100% convinced it’s not an elaborate frame job by the real Walker.

Narihisago seems to be, however, at least with regards to having access to Momoki’s well. He believes he’ll find answers there one way or another. Will acting director Tougou indulge his desire to solve the case? I imagine so; as he’s said himself, there’s not much else he’s still alive for.

ID: INVADED – 06 – Eternal Rail

What had been a calm encounter with Inami Nahoshi takes a turn when Hondomachi outs her as the Gravedigger mastermind. Nahoshi is calm because her accomplice Kazuta is in the house with all the kitchen knives.

A dust-up ensures, with Matsuoka receiving a flesh wound to the shoulder and Hondomachi stabbing Kazuta to death, much to Nahoshi’s uncharacteristic dismay. These two detectives are just powerful electromagnets for trouble.

Demonstrating that the detectives at the Wellside are always working, five of them spend their time a police officer’s funeral discussing the Walker case. Why does he keep showing up in the id wells of serial killers, and in the same whimsical form? The name of the inventor of the Mizuhanome, Shirakoma Nishio, comes up, which is sure to be important later on.

While this case are already complicated enough, one of them brings up the possibility one of them is a mole working from within. Considering we only have cursory familiarity with these five detectives, the eventual reveal of one of them as Walker wouldn’t be that narratively satisfying, at least not yet.

Using the cognition particles from Kazuta’s urge to kill (which manifested in a dying kiss to Hondomachi), Narihisago is injected from the flying house to a train. On it, Kaeru is (obviously) dead via stabbing. When he follows the very obvious bloody footprints, he discovers the train is a closed loop, ending right back where it begins.

The Wellsiders determine this is the very train Nahoshi’s mother jumped in front of…while Nahoshi was on it. A high school-aged Nahoshi is here to, with a younger Kazuta sitting on the opposite side of the aisle. There was once a time when Nahoshi abhored seeing dead things or people; her mother’s suicide flipped that sensibility.

IRL, Nahoshi reveals all the locations of the barrels containing her victims, but on the id train she didn’t kill Kaeru; Kaeru killed herself. When Narihisago comes to this conclusion, he weeps in her lap. He grows weary of coming upon her corpse over and over again. He wants to save her, but like the train, he’s going in circles. One wonders how long he can keep up the Brilliant Detective act with his sanity intact (such as it is already).

That brings us to Hondomachi, the other protagonist. Matsuoka recommends her to be a second Brilliant Detective utilizing the Mizuhanome. Hondomachi is flattered, but Matsuoka considers it a practical decision, in part to protect him and their colleagues. Hondomachi has killed more than once—by attempting to kill herself and then killing Kazuta. Matsuoka laments he couldn’t keep her out of this business, but she’s too suited for it, and there’s no turning back.

The Wellsiders make a connection between the surveillance devices found in the Perforator’s house match those used in the case involving the “Challenger”, AKA Katsuyama Denshin, the man who killed Narihisago’s daughter. With every subsequent case, ID:INVADED adds another piece to the larger puzzle of John Walker and the root of Narihisago’s fall, just as his possible successor begins her ascent.

ID: INVADED – 05 – Kiss or Kill

Hondomachi may not be a superhero who got her deductive powers from a hole drilled in her head, but that bizarre injury offered her unique perspective into someone like Kazuta Haruka, whom she meets in the street and who kisses her before fleeing.

For her, everything suddenly points to Haruka, a former victim of the Perforator, being the Gravedigger. Their equipment hasn’t been able to detect his killing intent because when he has a sudden urge to kill he reacts with a gesture of love instead—a kiss—and would therefore kill those whom he loves.

Sure enough, cognition particles are found an an Id Well is opened, into which Sakaido is injected. He enters the well in the middle of the sky falling at great speed, but manages to land on a floating island containing a house later identified as belonging to Kazuta.

Once Sakaido’s memory is activated by the sight of a murdere Kaeru, he looks under her carefully-spread pool of blood to find a girl hiding who has shifting features and voices—a composite of the Gravedigger’s victims.

Sakaido also finds shards of a photo also found when Kazuta was a victim, and Hondomachi and Matsuoka are dispatched to meet with those in the picture one by one while Nishimura and a SWAT team head to the site of Kazuta’s house, now a soy sauce brewery.

The composite girl said her boyfriend went out of the house to fight the “monster”, and when Sakaido heads out he quickly learns that monster is John Walker, who kills the “boyfriend”, dodges Sakaido’s attacks, and flies off with that trademark tip of his hat.

As Hondomachi diligently interviews the “cutest” of the people in the photo, Inami Nahoshi, Nishimura and his team discover vats that could contain victims, but are blown up in the brewery—it was all a trap. Meanwhile Hondomachi is unafraid to pry as far as she can with questions relating to Inami’s love life. Inami also seems all too happy to clean her head wound when it suddenly starts bleeding.

By the time Matsuoka gets word of the trap, Hondomachi has Inami cornered, revealing her to be a sadist using Kazuta’s scrambled romantic and murderous urges to her advantage by having him commit the murders for her. Hondomachi moves to arrest Inami and demands to know where Kazuta is; meanwhile, he’s lurking nearby with a knife.

It’s interesting to see how both Hondomachi and Sakaido have been elevated in their deductive ability by their respective marks (the former, her head wound; the latter, his crime) In the Id Well, Sakaido is the Brilliant Detective, as well as a Mission Impossible-style action hero.  But in the real world, the ace detective is without doubt the recently wounded but no-less-relentless Hondomachi.

ID: INVADED – 04 – Hiding a Leaf in the Forest

We begin with one of the worst things that can be done to a person: high schooler Kikuchi Keiko has been buried alive. She is the seventh such victim of the “Graverobber”, and is aware of the past victims because like her, they were all livesteamed on the internet to a morbidly fascinated audience. Once again, the police are fighting against a ticking clock to prevent a seventh death.

Worse still, their most reliable “pilot” drove another criminal to suicide simply by talking to him about the furthest reaches of their psyche, which of course he saw when in their Id Wells. He’s in solitary while they try to use the Perforater as a substitute pilot, but his survival rate is too low to make any progress. It has to be Narihisago. He’s the best they’ve got.

And yet, even the Brilliant Detective Sakaido finds that the Id Well they were able to create from the perp’s cognition particles has a high level of difficulty. He’s trapped in a massive, undulating apartment block that is currently on fire and full of burnt corpses.

The stange thing is, he finds a burnt-to-death Kaeru above the flames, suggesting they weren’t the flames that killed her. He spots a ten-year-old Keiko on the other side of a huge gap between blocks, and wants to rescue her, but solving Kaeru’s murder must come first if they’re to find the real life Keiko.

As Narihisago is killed and re-injected again and again into the Well, he gets more exhausted and makes mistakes. Momoki decides to give him a break, but neither he nor his colleagues are interested in taking a break themselves, even if it means staying up two straight days. There’s a girl buried somewhere who is slowly running out of air. Rest can come once they find her.

This episode has an air of urgency and desperation that surpasses the previous episodes (with the possible exception of the one in which Hondomachi was kidnapped). And even though Narihisago is a murderer who has driven five other inmates to suicide while in captivity, the officers still end up rooting for him to survive and “win” in the Id Well, because if he wins, they win.

Sakaido finally makes it to the other side and climbs up to the unburnt apartment where the young Keiko is waiting. She even says something that helps Sakaido crack the case wide open. Kaeru wasn’t killed, i.e. Keiko wasn’t buried by the Graverobber at all, but by a copycat.

Young Keiko even points out by name the “failure” of a man responsible, and the police move quickly to locate and apprehend him (it comes down to the pattern of the rug under Kaeru’s corpse matching the one in the suspect’s lair, under which Keiko is sealed in an airtight barrel.

Alas, the livestream was never live to begin with, but a recording that gave the police a false sense that they still had time. In reality, Keiko has been dead of asphyxiation for nearly a week. After working so hard to find her, it’s a gut punch for all involved, including Sakaido once he hears the bad news from Momoki.

Pulling the rug out from beneath our feet, we the audience are similarly frustrated and that much more angered at the creature of a man that is the copycat Graverobber, not to mention the still-at-large Graverobber himself. The case wasn’t solved in this episode, but it did make the case for why, having spent time in their psyches, a once-righteous detective like Narihisago could develop sudden impulse to kill the suspects he helps capture.

Because of this, he’s not even sure he can call himself a person anymore, but Momoki assures him he is. And when Momoki asks if Narihisago still considers him a friend (they were once partners on the force), Narihisago tells him that friendship one of the only things he has left tethering him to reason.

Being dumped into the minds of depraved criminals is enough to drive anyone from reason, but somehow Narihisago has endured. He’ll have to continue to endure as the cops try to find leads to the real Graverobber’s whereabouts. The newly recovered Hondomachi may have found the first such clue in Kazuta Haruka, a missing person and one of the Perforator’s victims.

ID: INVADED – 03 – A Gawker Just Enjoys the Scene

I don’t believe we’ve been told who precisly Sakaido killed or how to land him in prison, but regardless of his crime it’s awfully hard not to sympathize with the guy. For one thing, he’s always dreaming of his wife and daughter, the good times always turning to bad before he wakes up. They weren’t just murdered, they also suffered terribly.

The pain and regret of not being there to protect them probably broke a sizable chunk of the Sakaido That Was. His investigative work within the Mizuhanome, psychologically invasive as it is, would seem to be not just a welcome respite, but a necessity for keeping what’s left of him intact and carrying on.

The things he did to end up with such a job are also the reason Matsuoka discourages Hondomachi from considering a similar line of work in no uncertain terms. When visiting her in the hospital. She’s missing frontal lobe matter but is already bouncing off the walls, desperate to get back to work, and romanticizes “The Great Detective” a pilot like Sakaido plays within Id Wells. But Matsuoka warns her: it’s a sacrifice tantamount to suicide.

As I said, one Sakaido went into this line of work, and another came out. Hondomachi doesn’t feel she’s loved or even valued by her family, while Sakaido’s family was murdered. Both detectives seek solace and purpose through work, creating their own value. Hell, Hondomachi could be a mirror to Sakaido’s past, when his work kept him away from the family he loved until one day they were gone.

This week’s Id Well is nothing like the previous two, demonstrating that we’re in for a new trippy psychological ride every week or so. This time he and roughly 70-80 random people standing on a giant turret surrounded by infinite waterfalls on all sides…very Myst Uru. This is the Id Well of “The Pyrotechnician”, who is responsible for very public, very meticulous bombings.

Kaeru is there too, already dead, while the others start falling one-by-one to rounds fired by a sniper hiding in the waterfalls. Like the stylized “Brilliant Detective” role Sakaido plays, Kaeru is a stylized version of his daughter, helping him remember himself, grounding him in whatever crazy dreamworld in which he ends up.

Sakaido is good, but not so good he doesn’t get killed a couple of times, requiring his handlers to quickly extract and re-inject him, resetting the scenario but allowing him to learn from the previous dives. But trial and error is only the start of his investigation. He eventually determines that there is only one sniper, but the turret on which his victims stand is turning, allowing the sniper to make quick successions of kills.

Sakaido eventually successfully hides from the shooter until there is only one man remaining other than himself—and it’s always the same man. He also happens to have a handsome but somehow artificial-looking face, which means the Pyrotechnician altered his face with plastic surgery. That is enough for the cops to track him down and for Mitsuoka to apprehend him.

In what seems like going a bit too far with the ironic punishment, the people Sakaido helps to apprehend end up his prison mates, occupying adjacent cells and enabling them to have a dialogue. The Pyro explains that his acts, which netted photos like the ones he took of people gawking and holding up their phones at the destruction and carnage, “exposed the emptiness of humanity” by showing that neither life or death matter.

Sakaido turns it around on Pyro. Just as he was in the Id Well, and in the bombing four years ago when he was a war photographer, Pyro always desired to be the Last Man Standing. He was the ultimate gawker, producing scenes of hell and watching the masses take it in, knowing humans can’t resist.

Then Sakaido tells Pyro his days are over, and that he’ll never see hell again, except in his memories, always a pale shadow of reality. The Pyro can’t really dispute anything Sakaido is saying, because the guy was in his unconscious, where truths are plain to see.

It’s enough to drive Pyro to suicide in the middle of the night. I’m not sure if Sakaido intended that, but he’s doubtless a man who abhors killers, and was none too happy about Pyro mentioning his daughter. ID:INVADED is proving to be a dense, nervy, and captivating depiction of crime-fighting from within the minds of the criminal.

ID: INVADED – 01/02 (First Impressions) – Some Assembly Required

When we meet the self-described “brilliant detective” Sakaido, he’s literally gone to pieces, as has the entire world around him. He soon calms down from the initial horror of such a status and puts himself back together, save a few gaps in his arm. He learns those are a boon, which allow him to fit the various pieces of his environment back together.

We’re in the same boat as Sakaido: a pile of pieces are spread out before us instead of a “whole” world. But it’s not really a world; it’s the unconscious of a serial killer Sakaido is investigating, and all of his victims (plus one little girl) dwell within that unconscious.

As we pull out to the real world, we see a team cops hard at work on the outside of the “Id Well” created by the Mizuhanome system led by Momoki, while Sakaido works within it. There are clues within the well for those clever enough to see them, and Sakaido is the man for the job. We also learn that only someone who has killed can enter such wells.

Once Sakaido finds enough clues as to the murderer’s whereabouts (literally piecing the world back together), field analysts Matsuoka and Hondomachi (a grizzled veteran and green rookie, respectively) head out to track him down. But their quarry, known as the “Perforator” due to his M.O. of drilling holes in his victims’ heads, uses his latest victim as a decoy to misdirect Matsuoka, then kidnaps Hondomachi.

When the Perforator threatens to drill a hole in her head, a defiant Hondomachi realizes the only way she’ll be located by her colleagues is to drill the hole herself, so she drives her head into the spinning bit, creating an Id Well of her own into which Sakaido is quickly transferred. It’s a reckless risk, to be sure, but it shows us that Hondomachi is willing to take those risks for the sake of Justice.

Unlike the puzzle world of the killer, Hondomachi’s well is a wasteland filled with mammoth drills, one of which kills Sakaido (or rather his avatar within the well) within 69 seconds. But that’s enough for HQ to determine Hondomachi’s whereabouts, and Matsuoka manages to rescue her and arrest the Perferator, who is so impressed by Hondomachi’s initiative he surrenders willingly.

But the Perferator is only a symptom. The disease this weird futuristic police force is pursuing is known as “John Walker”, who resembles the guy on the whisky bottle. His avatar appeared in the Perforator’s Id Well, and is believed to be the one turning people into serial killers.

Sakaido is extracted from the Id Well and escorted back to his spartan prison cell, decorated only by dozens of photos of his wife and daughter Muku—a very effective way to wordlessly humanize him. Every Id Well he’s dove into has featured a murdered girl in Kaeru, who may not look like Muku but still reminds him of her, and why he’s in this strange business in the first place (I’m sure we’ll learn the details of that later).

While there’s a bit of a learning curve with all of the jargon, and there are more than a few similarities to PSYCHO-PASS, the third season of which I didn’t bother with, ID:INVADED nevertheless scratches a future crime unit itch I wasn’t aware of until now.