Ameku Takao #02 — …In a Dennys
January 1st, 2025
When you hear hoofbeats, think unicorns.
Impressions:
…Like I said, we suddenly jump instead of an especially nice Dennys. Why is there an entire tree in this restaurant? Anyway, the 'large animal wound' she declares to be a dinosaur fossil. Obviously. Like, we understand that bite marks and shearing blunt force are very different things, right? I'm not an anime doctor though, which is why I'm not currently in Dennys. They then visit literally the only person anywhere near anything that happened, go back to the museum, and declare the case solved. The next ten minutes is spent explaining that there were some silly chemicals involved, the one that's spilled all over the goddamned place, and that the only possible suspect is the one who did it. Not sure this one would've taxed even Wilson. I suspect Mr. Magoo might've been able to put the pieces together.
We do the usual song and dance of the supposedly genius detective spending longer to explain the mystery that they did actually investigating it. Forget any red herrings, misdirects, or twists. There's a couple unusual things. I can explain those. Oh, well, okay then. Case closed. How is this satisfying in any way? There was no actual investigation, or even mystery honestly. Christ. There was only one possible suspect, and even he broke down in the usual flopsweat as soon as she spewed out the master plan. The explanation of what happened took longer than the mystery itself, and that includes the trip to Dennys. It's hard to even call this an attempt to copy House. It's just another bad Sherlock knockoff that over emphasizes the reveal while kneecapping literally everything else along the way.
Posted in Ameku Takao | 3 Comments »
gedata 
Ark noir
Sounds like another case of the “Smart people being written by dumb people” pitfall many mediocre mystery shows fall into. What make mystery shows fun to watch and read about is everything about the investigation and how it leads the protagonists around as they find clues and evidence. Everything relevant is shown and focused on at least a little bit. You even get to see the protagonist struggle with trying things out as things become more convoluted before they figure things out. As more things get revealed over time, it allows for the audience to possibly unravel and sometimes even solve the mystery themselves before the reveal comes. Then when the reveal does comes its shows off how logically sound everything was written so that audience can be satisfied with how smart the protagonist is.
With this kind of show, very little relevant things is actually shown or focused on and the protagonist just kinda already solves everything easily with no struggle. Keeping the audience pretty much out of the loop of what and how things are transpiring and making the protagonist look like they are just clairvoyant and have a computer brain. It makes it worse when theres this huge amount of infodumping about how the protagonist figured everything out cause it just looks the author injecting apologia for writing in asspulls. Makes you wonder where the real writing focus when into.