4 Victims
No Problem
While not a game changer by any means, episode 2 of Special 7 gives us what realistically could have been a fairly solid opening episode to the series. Our rookie detective is introduced to the rest of the team (people we saw do stuff last week but had no context for) and then he rides along as Ichinose solves a quadruple murder seemingly easily. It isn’t exactly brilliant writing but it is fun enough to follow along with and they are certainly trying to plant some seeds for future use in this series though I don’t know that anything is going to come of it during the run time.
The one real thing hampering this episode, outside of the lack of tension as they went about solving the case due to not a lot happening and the case being seemingly unrelated to anything (probably isn’t unrelated when you think about what one of the culprits says but I guess that’s a later issue), is that each of the characters introduced in the unit is so incredibly one note. Admittedly, given their screen time thus far it would be hard to actually have created well rounded individuals, but each member’s personality seems to consist of one and only one quirk which is more or less summarised in their bosses ‘code’ name for them that nobody else wants to use.
That isn’t to say that these characters won’t grow as the series progresses, or at least that the characters won’t get fleshed out, but at the moment, given they clearly aren’t expecting to hook us with any kind of mystery or detective story, one assumes the characters are what we are supposed to be on-board with. About the only interesting aspect so far is that our rookie seems to recover from injuries way too fast, something that we kind of saw last week and this week even his clothes managed to repair and once again he didn’t say anything about it. Maybe that will be something of use later on.
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Despite my overall feeling that this is about as average as they come, I still kind of enjoyed the episode enough. I do like the start of the OP but then it kind of fizzles and that more or less sums up my current mood toward this show. There are aspects that kind of click and work and then there’s a lot that is just kind of there and maybe it will go somewhere by the end.
Despite that, episode 2 is definitely a better lead in to the story than episode one and it almost feels like they could have given us the information from episode one through dialogue or flash backs at a later time when it was relevant and we could have just started from here with the rookie joining the team.
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Karandi James
Special 7 is not so special, but here’s the episode coverage.
Images from: Special Crime Investigation Unit – Special 7. Dir. H Kosaka. Anima&Co. 2019.