It would be hard to describe this show as anything but bland and pretty sedate so far as characters talk their way through fairly ordinary problems that are thinly disguised as mystery. That doesn’t make this bad, just really forgettable and fairly easy to pass over for people with better things to do. You know, like wash their hair or maybe stack a dishwasher.
I’m not going to lie; the only reason this hasn’t ended up on the dropped list is it is so innocuous dropping it actually seems cruel. We have a truly nondescript cast engaging in mysteries that at the very best might cause you to raise an eye-brow, assuming you managed to remain awake long enough to get the set up with solutions that are completely obvious from the set up forward. There are no red-herrings or confusing convolutions. No twists or unexpected events. Mostly there isn’t even a real delay between this is the mystery and here’s the solution.
What is more problematic is this series seemed to just skip right over the part where Aoi and Holmes bonded and now we are just expected to accept that they happily go on field trips together and Holmes opens up to her about his past. We’ve never seen these two actually build a relationship, it just suddenly exists. The fact that we’ve seen nothing to authenticate this relationship doesn’t actually matter because the characters are simply interacting now as if they’ve always been this close. It’s kind of off-putting seeing two characters with no shared history bantering back and forth like old friends but they still have to explain very basic things about their personality because they don’t actually know each other.
The mysteries might be luke-warm (and that’s being generous) but it is the relationship between the two main characters where this series really dropped the ball. They either needed to build this in a more gradual manner, or start us off with the characters already in an established relationship. What they’ve done is wholly unsatisfying and makes for some fairly forgettable viewing.
Previous Reviews:
- Episode 1: Not So Much A Mystery – More Antiques Roadshow
- Episode 2: We’ve Ditched The Antiques For a Pretty Bland Puzzle
Thanks for reading.
Karandi James
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Yeah, that’s about how I feel about it. The strength of the first episode was the relationship between the two MCs, and that’s been left by the side of the road like an abandoned puppy. I also don’t buy the psychological twists that Holmes can allegedly read that help him solve the cases: they seem too arbitrary to me.
I was still on the fence if I would start watching this, but now I’m pretty much convinced that I should not. And seeing as I am now watching 4 shows in total, for me that’s probably my limit anyway.
What did you end up with on your watch list?
I felt the same way. I looked at everything I’ve been watching and decided that this is one of the shows that has to go. It just doesn’t leave any impression on me. Not bad, just a thing that exists.
This is definitely on my list to look at cutting when I decide on my final watch list. I’ve already got one bland Aoi to watch with Kakuriyo no Yadomeshi. Not sure I can handle two at once.