Holmes of Kyoto Episode 5: Finally A Rival for Holmes

Holmes of Kyoto has several problems, not the least of which is fairly little going on in most of its episodes. However, episode 5 feels like it would have been a perfectly good episode 2, with all the meandering and pointless dramas in between just nicely left out.

Perhaps I’m being unduly harsh when I say that there is more or less nothing in episodes 2 to 4 of note and realistically I could have happily watched episode 1 where we see Aoi take on her job at the shop and first learn about fake antiques and jumped straight to episode 5 where the maker of the fakes confronts Holmes. About the only point that would not make sense is why Holmes is dealing with the actor guy whose name I do not care to remember who keeps saying things that are translated as if he is some guy from a 90’s surfing movie (wondering if that is actually how he talks or if that is a translational choice but I can’t understand a word the guy says because of his delivery of his lines where everything sounds like it is coming out of a mouth that is half full of food – my Japanese is patchy at best and I can’t catch anything this guy is saying).

That essentially means we have three episodes that do nothing. While they might argue that they’ve established some sort of rapport between Holmes and Aoi, I’d argue that any relationship between them is superficially implied at best and just kind of forced on the audience rather than something we’ve seen develop. it might also be said that they wanted to establish Holmes’ supernaturally uncanny ability to solve a mystery in an instant but the ‘cases’ he’s solved so far have been pretty lame and realistically have done nothing more to establish his powers of observation than the first episode had already done. And really, if we’d gotten to this point sooner, I’d be more optimistic about this anime.

While the counterfeiter is clearly a little over the top in his ‘villainy’ at least it provides a simple and clear purpose for the story. Holmes is going to find his fakes and expose them, and he wants to outsmart Holmes. This is more direction than this show has had up to now and it is actually a basic enough formula that I’m kind of hoping they don’t stuff it up. Why Aoi is needed in this story, I am not sure and clearly this episode pointed out that she isn’t really needed as long as Holmes has some clueless individual along for his explanations of various art works.

Realistically, this anime is going to be swiftly forgotten once it is finished, but it isn’t hard to watch and this was probably the best episode we’ve gotten so far.

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Thanks for reading.

Karandi James