DETECTIVE CONAN ANIME REVIEW: EP 44 - 54

Part four of many more of our episode-by-episode review of the Detective Conan anime. For some more background on how we're doing this, see the introduction to Part 1.

The Three Hotta Siblings Murder Case

Source

Anime Original

First Aired

January 20, 1997

Our Quick Blip

No good deed goes unpunished for Kogoro. This is the one with the two brothers and a sister, not the one with the triplets (Dense keeps getting them confused).

It happens a lot in this show that Kogoro helps someone in need and ends up wrapped in murderous drama. In this episode, Kogoro helps a man whose car has broken down and gives him a ride to his mansion. The guy insists that Kogoro stay for his birthday party, as repayment. There will be a feast!

The rich guy pulls out a vintage wine, Surilie Brothers 399, a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Ran asks Kogoro, is that a good wine? And Kogoro says, it's so far out of our price range, we can't even look at it. Drink it while you can!

But the family drama begins almost immediately. There are two brothers vying to take over their father's company, so they're all sucking up to him while trying to sabotage each other, and the father is saying things like, I bet you wish I'd died in an accident... and then in the middle of dinner, the estranged sister shows up, and there's yelling and fighting, and the whole table gets upended, and there goes Kogoro's dinner and glass of wine. Cry.

Instead, they end up having spaghetti in the side kitchen under the fluorescent lights with the butler, and all shaken from having witnessed this awkwardness.

And then the house explodes.

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The old man is dead, from a bomb in the whiskey case. Everyone in the room has a motive, except for the butler, who just started working here not too long ago. (Toggle whodunit...)

The Facial Mask Murder Case

Source

Anime Original

First Aired

January 27, 1997

Our Quick Blip

This is a good one to just watch and enjoy the mystery.

Like in Episode 21, everybody fucked with the crime scene for different reasons. (Toggle spoilers...)

In the beginning, Kogoro has just finished dinner at a Chinese restaurant, and he says, man, nothing beats authentic noodles from an authentic restaurant. And Conan is all, noodles are noodles. Conan is such a killjoy. No joy for life. He understands nothing. Noodles are noodles, but can Kogoro not enjoy something, and enjoy eating in the authentic Chinese restaurant? What has he done to you?

The Snowy Mountain Lodge Murder Case

Source

Manga Canon (Volume 10-11)

First Aired

February 3, 1997

Our Quick Blip

This is the episode with all the doctors and not any other episode you might be thinking of that also involves a snowy mountain lodge murder case. The characters-of-the-day are kinda interesting, but ultimately the puzzle is unfun because there's not enough information for the audience to solve it before Conan gives away the answer.

Kogoro, Ran, and Conan are out skiing, and they meet a group of student doctors who are on a ski trip with their professor. Kogoro and all end up invited to their lodge, where MURDER happens. The professor went to the other room to watch his favorite show, and later he's found gruesomely dead. He was stabbed multiple times in the back, which pierced his lungs, which means he must have died slowly and agonizingly. This means that the culprit is likely someone with medical knowledge and wanted to make him suffer. Yikes! Don't make a doctor want to murder you.

Yet, which person with medical knowledge committed the crime? This is another episode where everyone wanted the victim dead, but who actually did it? And everyone has been so suspicious, but some of them have to be red herrings. Attention everyone, I'm going to take out the trash now! And I've suddenly decided to go skiing at night!

(Skiing-at-night guy isn't the culprit, he's just a freak like that. His alibi was incredibly solid, because he had the lift ticket with the timestamp. And for once, such an incredibly solid alibi was actually genuine and not part of a ruse. This guy just likes skiing at night!)

While dying, the professor managed to set up a whole shogi-based dying message puzzle. In-universe, we kinda have to admire that this guy was in such extreme pain (to the point that all the doctors in the room went D: at the discovery of the wounds), and yet he still managed to invent and set-up this whole puzzle as a dying message. Then again, out-of-universe, it's just that the manga author is completely enamored with ridiculous shogi-based puzzles, and we're kinda not.

The culprit's alibi was... (Toggle spoilers...)

And the motive was... (Toggle spoilers...) ...thesis-stealing! The culprit's father died of cancer, and she was studying the same cancer and wrote her thesis about it, and then her professor stole it.

Overall, this was kind of a stupid episode. The puzzle involves the fact that all the suspects have shogi-related names, so you're probably not going to be able to guess anything unless you know about shogi. And even there, all the pieces were knocked off the table, so we didn't really get to see the dying message to be able to solve the puzzle ourselves. So it's one of those episodes where Conan just explains everything, but the audience couldn't have really guessed much.

The Sports Club Murder Case

Source

Anime Original

First Aired

February 10, 1997

Our Quick Blip

The first sign of Kogoro's fear of heights

We were really surprised this episode was anime original, because it provides one of the first hints of Kogoro's fear of heights. It's less pointed at than we thought we remembered, but it does lay the premise.

This is another episode where we meet this one guy who is a jackass who makes enemies wherever he goes. He's dead. Who didn't do it?

The mystery itself is not that compelling and not that well-presented. The critical piece of evidence is... (Toggle spoilers...)

It's cute that, while Kogoro needs to work out to stay in shape as a private eye, Ran turns to Conan all, let's go check out the pool! :D

The Diplomat Murder Case

Source

Manga Canon (Volume 10)

First Aired

February 17 and 24, 1997

Our Quick Blip

Critically important canon episode that introduces an important character, and there are important events between Ran and Shinichi.

Conan is on the phone with Ran as Shinichi. He's got a cold, and Ran yells at him for never ever calling, and now he calls but he has a stupid cold. And Conan is all, I don't understand women. Why does she say all the time how she wants to hear from me, but when she hears from me, she's mad? That's because she tells Conan that she misses Shinichi, but she's also pissed at Shinichi. She wants to tell Shinichi that she's so mad at him for being essentially non-existent to try to convince him to take a good hard look at the situation and stop being an asshat. But she can confide in Conan that she cares a lot about Shinichi and is worried about him.

This also links into how Shinichi has no filter and no difference between what he thinks and what he says out loud. He cannot understand the concept of having a thought that you don't immediately say out loud. That's why he doesn't understand that Kogoro is not an idiot, and why he can't understand why Ran isn't gushing at him about how much she loves him when it's the first time he's called in a month. If he's only going to call once a month, the priority is telling him how much he sucks. Maybe call a bit more and have a pleasant conversation and maybe she'll be nice to you. Rather than you just admonishing her for crying and saying she better be grateful for the Christmas gift.

So, Conan goes back to the office just in time to see that a strange teenager is there questioning Ran about the whereabouts of Shinichi. Conan is sick, and Ran comments that both Conan and Shinichi are sick. The teenager is all, how do you know Shinichi is sick if you don't know where he is, and Ran reminds this brilliant, famous teenage detective all about the wonderful new invention of the telephone.

Yes, because this is Heiji Hattori, son of the head of the Osaka police department and famous high school detective of the West, and sworn rival of Shinichi Kudo, the high school detective of the East.

This would be lovely if Shinichi had any idea who his rival was, but this is the first he's heard of it, lol. Then again, Shinichi pays very little attention to things that don't matter to his own ego.

Heiji is here because he is always being compared with Shinichi, so he wants to see Shinichi in action to know if the comparison is at all valid. He questioned Sonoko, and she pointed him to Ran, since she's his girlfriend. Sonoko thinks Ran is hiding Shinichi in her house.

Heiji questions Ran about the content of her phone calls with Shinichi, and he points out that Shinichi never seems to ask Ran about how she's doing and what's going on in her life. His deduction is that the reason why Shinichi doesn't ask is because he already knows! He must be very close by and have some sort of means of spying on Ran!

...Easier answer: Shinichi is a dick who doesn't ask about how his girlfriend even is, and only ever talks about himself.

It turns out both are true! Shinichi is a dick, and he's nowhere near considerate enough to even pretend to ask Ran questions about her life because he already knows the answer, and he doesn't have enough social grace to be bored for a few minutes to let Ran tell him about her life and to keep any spark of their friendship alive. Like, wow, their phone calls apparently consist of, so what are the others doing in high school while I'm playing hookie. And I read this great mystery novel, let me spoil the ending to you!

Ran is weirded-out at the idea that Shinichi could be spying on her. She's perfectly willing to believe it, and Heiji's words are making her also consider, yeah, why doesn't Shinichi care about me...?

Dump him!

Meanwhile, Conan is there, sick as a dog due to his cold, and Heiji says he has something that'll fix that for him: chinese alcohol!!! It was meant as a gift to Kogoro and Ran to compensate for him charging in and asking them all sorts of questions about Shinichi, but he opens it up and gives Conan a cupful before anyone knows what's happening, including Conan. This alcohol is Baijiu (called Paichū in Japanese), and it can range from 35 to 60% alcohol!! Yikes!!!

But they are all interrupted by the murder of the day!

A client arrives, and she wants Kogoro to look into her son's new girlfriend because she's just too perfect. Her husband is a diplomat, and they can't possibly have any scandals. They all go together to meet with the husband and continue the conversation in his office....

Except that the husband is dead! And it's a LOCKED ROOM MURDER that no one could have possibly committed!!!

While they are trying to find clues, Conan and Heiji both think to investigate the same thing at the same time and wind up bonking heads.

As the investigation goes on, Heiji deduces that Kogoro is a moron and that his famous deductions must be somehow coming from Shinichi. He's right, but he has no reason to be right.

Heiji is just like Shinichi in that he completely underestimates Kogoro, and worse yet, Heiji doesn't even have any reason to be underestimating Kogoro like this. While this episode certainly doesn't showcase Kogoro's brightest day, Kogoro doesn't have any real reason to interrupt this hot-shot teenager who keeps stealing the show. Kogoro doesn't feel like his ego is on the line here. (Although Megure is all like, dude, are you gunna let this annoying young punk show you up like this?)

And why should Heiji think that Kogoro's deductions must somehow be coming from Shinichi in particular? Couldn't it be some other detective or anyone else? Tokyo is a big city and everyone is a detective. Why not Shinichi's dad? Or Sonoko? Or Inspector Megure? Or the detectives from the North and the South? Or... (Toggle spoilers for characters that haven't appeared yet...) ...Akai, or Akai's sister, or Akai's brother, or Akai's brother-in-law, or Akai's cousin, Akai's girlfriend, Akai's rival, Akai's mom, Akai's ferret, Akai's ferret's brother-in-law? ✽ Or many other characters that we could also name?

So then, because Heiji imagines that the ghost of Shinichi is there listening to his thoughts, he's like, daring Shinichi inside his own brain, thinking to himself, yeah, Shinichi, beat that! Do you have any objections? I guess not! I guess that means I'm superior to you in this contest that you had no reason to even know was happening! For all he knows Shinichi is having a nap and has no idea any of this is going on. At this point in the plot, Shinichi is Heiji's imaginary rival.

Heiji is there deducing the deductions, but Conan's cold is taking a turn for the worse, and he says he has to solve this case on his own before he passes out, because... because he doesn't like this Heiji guy. Because he has to. Because his ego. But Conan passes out, the doctor is called, and in the other room, Heiji is giving his deductions, making Megure play the part of the dead body.

Heiji found fishing line in the garbage can of the other room, and he proves that the murderer could have used the fishing line to thread it through the pocket and past the crack underneath the door and therefore it was grandpa! And grandpa says yes, I did it.

Conan spontaneously combusts from the wrong deduction, and turns back into Shinichi, thankfully while Ran is not in the room. He puts on whatever clothes he can find in the closet and comes back to the crime scene, all hot and bothered. Ran initially goes to talk to him, and Shinichi says to wait for him, because first, he must solve the murder. The most important thing to do before he turns back into a pumpkin is solve the case.

To be fair, at this point it's likely that Shinichi doesn't think this cure is temporary, and that he's just back to himself now, and he'll have plenty of time to explain everything to everyone later. More like, he'll need plenty of time... And, to be fair, the wrong person was about to get arrested...

But everyone explains that they don't really need Shinichi's help here since Heiji has already solved everything.

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But it wasn't the grandpa, and Shinichi explains that, if you see, the key will not fall into the inner pocket as Heiji was theorizing, and there's no way it will, and there was fishing line hidden all over the house so that some of it would be sure to be found during the investigation, and the grandpa admitted to the crime for personal reasons even though he didn't actually do it, and the murderer is actually... (Toggle whodunit...)

This all being solved, Shinichi turns back into a pumpkin in this tiny, weird bathroom.

Shinichi regrets that he wasn't able to say all of the important things that he wants to tell Ran. At least he was able to clear up the concern that Heiji raised earlier - that he might be spying on her. Shinichi says that he's a detective, so he knows how she's doing by just the sound of her voice, so he doesn't need to ask. Yeah, but it's still polite to talk with your friend and show that you care!

Ultimately, Shinichi spent the majority of his time as himself giving his whole deduction show just to prove his superiority to Heiji, because one-upping this perfect stranger is more important to him than his relationship with Ran. Shinichi even took the time to have a whole private scene with Heiji, to discuss that in detectiving, there is no win or lose, only truth!!!! Or, more accurately: in detectiving, there is no win or lose. For you. As long as I win.

And even once he's Conan, and he has one last chance to tell Ran that Shinichi said something as he was leaving... and all he says is to make sure that they don't put Shinichi's name in the newspaper. Nothing about how Shinichi had to run, but he says he was very glad to see you, and he's so sorry that he couldn't stay longer... Nope, just, he remembered he had another case, bye!

Once he's back home, Conan realizes that it must have been the alcohol that caused his transformation. He goes to drink some more, thinking that one big cupful would cure him forever. Yeah, that's totally how medicine works. But Ran catches him and takes the bottle away from him, because oh my god, you're seven. Shinichi mentally complains that he's in high school... and then remembers that, oh yeah, even at his actual age, he's also too young to drink anyway.

The Funimation dub also gives Ran the line, "I have to go through this with Dad, I won't put up with it from you, got it?" Good point that Ran would be hyper-vigilant about this sort of thing, and for that reason...

But yeah, this case marks Heiji's first appearance. Ran points out that he looks so much like Shinichi, making him the fourth Shinichi lookalike in the anime. What even is the deal with that?

Overall, this case is a good introduction for Heiji. During these events, he ends up being a bit of a jerk, but that works out well, because the audience doesn't know if he's good or evil yet. However, at this point, he's definitely an antagonist, in the sense that he's making things happen.

The Library Murder Case

Source

Manga Canon (Volume 10)

First Aired

March 3, 1997

Our Quick Blip

Some important conclusions are drawn about the previous episode.

Conan has been out sick with his monstrous cold, and today the Detective Boys have come to help him do his book report at the last minute. Just because he was sick, it doesn't mean he gets any leniency about anything. The book report is due tomorrow. The rest of the kids had three more days, and Conan gets to be suffering for three days and then do his book report at maximum speed. Now, Conan has the mind of an adult, but it's still not fair. They would have still done this cruelty to a normal child. Just, school.

Conan complains that the child-suitable books at the library are shit. We don't know if it's because Conan won't read anything that isn't Sherlock Holmes, or because this library legitimately sucks.

After the events of the last episode, Conan thinks he now has the cure to his little problem, but if that's the case, he realizes that this will be his last chance to spend time with his elementary-school friends before he turns back into a high schooler that they would want nothing to do with. So he's decided to have this one last hurrah with them. Which is weirdly considerate of him. Conan has spent most of his time with the Detective Boys groaning and rolling his eyes at the fact that they're seven-year-olds. Maybe it's one of those things that he can see how important it was now that it's almost gone...

Unfortunately, this book report activity is derailed... by MURDER! The cops come in to inquire about a library employee that has been missing for three days, who was last seen at the library with the head of the library. Ayumi's reaction to the cops arriving is hilarious (and the Funimation dub already did our joke).

The cops look all over the library and can't find the guy, or the corpse thereof, even though Inspector Megure is pretty suspicious. Ultimately, they go home for the day.

The kids instead hide in the library until afterhours, sure that they will be able to find the corpse that must be stashed somewhere in the library. Conan noticed some weird books, so he looks closer and finds out there's a whole hidden shelf of fake books full of cocaine. Like, a metric ton of cocaine.

And now they're looking for the body. Unfortunately, the head of the library noticed that someone is still in the building, and he's coming to murder the children. The anime team drew him in the shadows with glowing red eyes, and yeah, he deserves that sort of evil depiction, since he's plotting to murder all four innocent children, just because they're there.

Ultimately, Conan deduces where the body is. Earlier, they set off the weight limit of the elevator, but because they are children, how could that be? Conan had forgotten that he only weighs 18 kilos right now.

As a side note, when Conan turned into a child, he obviously lost mass... maybe that's what that smoke and glowy effect is about - his mass is converting directly into energy and radiating away. But how does the inverse happen? When he returns to his teen-aged self, where does the missing mass come from? Reabsorbed from the world around? Does his metabolism regenerate a whole teenager worth of body? Yikes, remember puberty? All in one minute? No wonder he screams.

So yeah, the corpse is on top of the elevator, which was the extra weight that triggered the weight limit earlier. The kids earlier were all "We want to find the body! :D" but now that they get to see the elevator coming up in the empty shaft with the corpse on top, they're regretting their excitement.

And then, inside the elevator, is the murderer. They are chased all around, but ultimately the kids knock the bookshelves over in a domino effect and trap the guy. They came pretty close to dying though.

After this whole horrible adventure, Conan says goodbye to the kids, not telling them that it's goodbye forever, although Ayumi gets a presentiment, just like Ran did in the amusement park.

Conan returns home, steals the bottle of alcohol, and brings it to Agasa's house. Before Agasa can stop him, Conan chugs the whole thing, which does nothing but make him super drunk. Agasa presumes that it only worked the one time, and now Conan is resistant, and there's no amount of alcohol that could fix this now.

The Golf Driving Range Murder Case

Source

Anime Original

First Aired

March 10, 1997

Our Quick Blip

This is a great one for Kogoro. It seems lots of our favorites, especially about Kogoro, were anime original episodes actually.

Kogoro has accepted to appear in a televised charity golf event together with Yoko! But he doesn't know how to golf. So, he goes to the driving range, on the ultra cheap at 6 in the morning, and for some reason brings Ran and Conan along. For moral support, maybe.

Because Kogoro is an absolute disaster at this one sport. He cannot hit the ball. The ball doesn't even move. He swings beautifully to be fair, but completely misses the ball. He says that he doesn't like sports that use equipment beyond his body. Ok, fair. He likes judo and he was a catcher at baseball (if we recall). He has difficulty figuring out where things are. The club is not part of his proprioception and it shows.

Ran and Conan are mostly there heckling him though. Ran in particular is like, keeping count of how many embarrassing failures in a row has he done. That was your twentieth miss in a row! (toot toot)

Conan is so bored with this, he decides to just walk around to see other people hitting the golf ball, which sounds like the pretty much most boring thing ever, but at least it's better than watching someone not hitting the golf ball.

A group of businessmen arrives to hit some golf balls before work. The boss is present, and one of the underlings is such a brown-noser. He gives away some of his golf balls to his boss, and he's always going NICE SHOT after every hit and wagging his tail all around. Even Kogoro is like, ew. And Kogoro can brown-nose with the best of them.

For all of this adoration, the boss explodes. He hits the ball, and a bomb goes off. (Toggle spoilers...)

In the post-credits, Kogoro does end up participating in the televised golfing charity event. Yoko is doing okay, we guess, but Kogoro manages to do even worse. He loses the grip on his golf club and it goes flying directly into the camera, destroying it and knocking down the poor camera guy. We hope they could recover the footage, because that must be amazing to rewatch.

The Legendary Kiri Tengu Murder Case

Source

Manga Canon (Volume 11)

First Aired

March 17, 1997

Our Quick Blip

A special hour-long episode, and the mystery is okay, but we had even more fun writing about it here.

Given that this special hour-long episode was sponsored by Playstation, we presume this was when the Detective Conan anime really started becoming something of a sensation. In this special episode, the anime added a whole re-introduction of the premise of, I'm Conan, but I'm secretly high school detective Shinichi Kudo etc. etc.

During this recap, Conan narrates that he's hunting down the two men who shrunk him, the men in black, codenamed Gin and Vodka. This is the first time in the anime that their names are stated.

If you have only been watching the anime, this information comes out of nowhere. Maybe you think you must have missed an episode or forgot a detail, but, no. In the anime, Conan never had any means of obtaining this information, and it's just getting dropped now during this recap for the sake of giving these characters names, and the audience is expected to just take it and not think about how Conan even knows this.

This is entirely the fault of the anime team. In the manga, Conan learns the codenames of the men in black in a natural way, back in Volume 4. Conan is on the same train as the men in black, and when he bugs their seats, he overhears that the crooks are codenamed Gin and Vodka, and that's how both Conan and the reader get to learn what to call these characters. However, when that story was adapted into anime episode 5, the anime team for some reason changed Gin and Vodka into two ridiculously-coincidental lookalikes who just so happen to shop from the same Criminal Fashion Catalog. So, the scene where Conan bugs their seats can no longer serve as a namedrop for Gin and Vodka, because they're not there… and there never was another point where the anime team could have invented a situation where Conan could learn their codenames in a more natural way, and upcoming in Episode 54, their codenames are going to be important to already know, so the best the anime team could come up with was to add this awkward namedrop during a narrated recap in Episode 52. Bummer.

It really is odd how the anime adaptation of Detective Conan is usually so faithful to the manga as to adapt scenes panel by panel, and yet sometimes they decide to change something that catastrophically breaks major plotpoints like 50 episodes later. ✽ And we still don't understand why would they go and change the plot in a way that makes it so much less exciting. It's like, omg, the protagonist has finally stumbled into the main antagonists that he's been hunting for! Wow, how intense and exciting! Let's adapt it into the protagonist thinking he's found the main antagonists, but actually, they're just two randos in black. Fooled you! *blows raspberry*

It seems that Funimation also thought it was just completely unsatisfactory to drop the names of Gin and Vodka during a pre-episode recap. Instead, their English dub of the series has Heiji allude to this information for Shinichi to pick up on during their private scene together near the end of The Diplomat Murder Case. While we agree with the motivation behind this change, this unfortunately has drastic implications regarding the character of Heiji as he appears in the Funimation dub. It is implied that he already knew from before he arrived that Shinichi was transformed into Conan, and that his shrinking is because of the Black Organization, and that Heiji intentionally gave Conan the alcohol knowing that it would change him back into Shinichi, and that Heiji already knows so much more about the Black Organization than Shinichi does, including the codenames of its members and that they know or care if Shinichi is still alive and are trying to find his current whereabouts, and Heiji doesn't share this information with Shinichi in a friendly way, but instead rather antagonistically (and even with a jab at how Shinichi can't hold his liquor). None of these implications are actually true about the Black Organization or Heiji (except maybe he would actually tease Shinichi for being such a light-weight). We think this is all waaay too much to alter just for the sake of dropping the codenames of Gin and Vodka.

But anyway, Gin and Vodka are not actually relevant to this particular episode. After all the reintroduction, we see Kogoro taking the family on a vacation to see the cherry blossoms. Kogoro muses that while there are cherry blossoms in the city, it's just not the same as viewing the cherry blossoms in the countryside. Conan rolls his eyes, but dude, Kogoro is right. Conan has no sense of atmosphere. And why is Conan so against the idea of Kogoro getting any joy out of life? It must be all misery and sarcastic eyes at all times.

Unfortunately, on the way home, the rental car winds up getting not one, but two flat tires. Is the road covered in nails? How does that even happen?

Conan notices a nearby shrine, and they go there to ask to spend the night. Before they even get to say hello, the head monk starts ranting about, no journalists and no cops and no snoops, I know you're here because of that and you're not looking into it, nope, not on my watch, go away and never come back! And Kogoro is there meeping about, ...actually it's just the car broke and we're stranded.

And the head monk goes, Oh! Oh! Why didn't you say so! :D That's customers. Haven't seen as many lately, what with the… well, you know. THE MURDERS. I don't like to talk about it much, as it's bad for business. At any rate, would you care for a bed for the night? That'll be 280 dollars! Thanks for your patronage! :D :D :D

Kogoro checks in his wallet and he's like... what with the trip we just took and the rental car, now with staying here, we're going to have no more money for the rest of the month. :(

Previously, Kogoro was considering if they shouldn't just sleep in the car and deal with it the next day, but Ran was getting spooked by the idea of sleeping in a car in the woods. Now, having walked into this mess and charged this ridiculous rate, if they maybe thought that you know what, the car in the woods sounded great actually... the head monk talks about, you know, THE MURDERS, and starts alluding to the presence of EVIL in the woods that comes out specifically on such rainy days. The tengu is in the woods! You totally want to stay in here. For 280 dollars. Plus tip.

For 280 dollars, you bet they're at least getting the complimentary tour of the shrine. To be fair, it is a beautiful place. It's on the side of a mountain and there's a waterfall coming down and over the side of the railing, and the cherry blossom petals flowing through the water from upstream, and just, wow. This would be great, if not for... THE MURDERS.

The monk giving the tour shows them the main shrine room and mentions that hey, we also do funerals by the way, if you wanna book :D What's wrong with him?!

Conan notices a door with a lock on it. He does the most logical thing, which is to go open the door and snoop inside. The monks mention that this is the "training room", where, if a monk needed "course correction", they'd be imprisoned in this empty closet with no light and a strangely super high ceiling, and they'd be left there to... "meditate". But it hasn't been used much, ever since... THE MURDERS.

Over dinner, Conan decides to ask more about... THE MURDERS. And what is a tengu anyway? The head monk explains that the tengu is the monster that feasts on the tender flesh of young virgin women... just like Ran!!!! Ran is rightfully creeped out. This guy is being extremely lech.

And what about THE MURDERS? The monks all freak out about being asked that. But once it's revealed that Kogoro is a famous detective, the other monks want to ask him his opinion about THE MURDERS, to see if the mystery could be solved, but the head monk shuts it down, and tells everyone to go the fuck to bed, never talk about this again, and Kogoro, as soon as it's morning, get the fuck out of here. Could he be any more suspicious?

When the three of them retire to the room, Ran has a whole conversation with her father about... by the way, the tengu... there's no such thing as tengu, right? Oh god Ran of course not, says Kogoro, next you'll tell me that demons and kappas exist too. Conan gives the whole etymology of the word tengu, thinking that will help. It doesn't help. So Ran pulls the mats really close together, and she's going to be in the middle mat.

The jerk doesn't snuggle with his girlfriend when she's scared! He sucks.

In the middle of the night, Ran needs the toilet, and insists that both Kogoro and Conan be awake and guard the bathroom door while she's inside. While Kogoro and Conan are there complaining that the tengu isn't real and who would even be scared by this stupid idea, a tengu appears. Kogoro screams his head off, but it's just Ran in a mask. For some reason, there was a tengu mask in the bathroom. Maybe it's branding. We mean, we've been in some pretty weird toilets around the world with some pretty weird branding. We saw one themed around foosball with smiling photos of people on the floor watching you piss and ceramic cactuses bas-relieved all over one wall... and the one that was essentially a mirror maze... and the one with vintage lady faces on all the wall tiles and the triangular shower... A tengu mask is not the weirdest thing we've found in a bathroom.

The next morning, all the monks have had terrible sleep due to the bloodcurdling scream in the middle of the night. Kogoro is supposed to leave immediately, but for 280 dollars, he's going to get his complimentary monk breakfast first!

Unfortunately, THE MURDERS.

The head monk is found hanged to death from the rafter of the training room. It comes out that this is the same as the famous murder that has been alluded about so far. Two years ago, another monk was found hanged just like this. The room has a ridiculously tall ceiling, so the body couldn't have been slung over the bars. And since there are no marks on the wood, it couldn't have been pulleyed there. And there's a big hole in the wall that couldn't have been created with human strength... at the time, the carpenter they called to fix the hole said that it must have been made by a tengu!! And that's how the story started. At the time, the incident was called a suicide of some sort, or blamed on the tengu, or something.

And now, it's happened again. The monks think it might have been suicide over grief that the head monk's granddaughter couldn't marry the dead monk, and now she's marrying someone else. But this is so obviously foul play that we can't believe anyone would even explore the suicide angle. Why would someone commit suicide by making it seem like an impossible murder, and like the tengu made him do it? (Toggle spoilers...)

By the way, this episode is the introduction of the Dr. Agasa's invention of the adhesive speaker that works wirelessly with Conan's voice-changing bowtie. This lets Conan put the speaker on Kogoro and have the voice seem to come from him, but in the meanwhile, Conan is free to move around without ruining the illusion that Kogoro is the one speaking. For this case, Conan sticks the speaker discretely right in the middle of Kogoro's forehead.

But what in the fuck was the deal with the head monk? (Toggle spoilers...)

This is the first time the Shadow Man representation for the culprit, with a visible body and face, appears in the anime. There's been obscured bits of the culprit in other episodes, but so far it's always been an arm in the shadow or other well-obscured features. This time around, we see the face... except that since we're not supposed to know who's there yet, they appear as a person of darkness. Also the culprit in this case (Toggle spoilers about the culprit...) is notably really short - like, only a head taller than Conan... this guy must be like, 140 cms at most. But the Shadow Man is always drawn as a 7.5 heads tall wooden anatomy model.

We're not annoyed at every instance of a Shadow Man. When the Shadow Man is used as a visual stand-in for when, say, Megure is explaining what he imagines the culprit might have done, we can accept that the Shadow Man is a mental construct, since Megure doesn't know who it is. But while Conan is out there in the grass, in bright sunlight, and there's the Shadow Man behind the tree... That's just silly. They could just have shown a hand on the tree, and we don't know whose hand it is. Or maybe omit this scene entirely, since it's not even relevant to anything - just for a double fake-out, of oh, no, is Conan in danger? Oh, don't worry, it's just Ran. But wait! There is still someone else watching from behind the tree! ...Who doesn't actually do anything. Very pointless.

The Mystery Weapon Murder Case

Source

Anime Original

First Aired

April 7, 1997

Our Quick Blip

The poor little bird. Don't worry, it lives!

The victim was a land shark who was about to tear down this apartment complex to replace it with a mall. Nobody in the room has anything good to say about him.

The one who found the body was his wife, and they were in the middle of a messy divorce. At the crime scene, there is a family friend (apparently their matchmaker) who visited to beg for some money to help in a desperate time, and the land shark refused, and it got to the point that the poor guy was seriously considering suicide over this, and he made it all the way to the edge of the roof, and was only dissuaded because he heard the wife screaming upon discovering the body. And there's also a guy who lives in the building - not only is he soon going to be out of an apartment because the land shark is going to destroy the whole building, but he also recently lost his small fishing shop because the same land shark bought it and demolished it too. While the shop owner was begging to be able to keep his shop, the land shark broke his merchandise and laughed at fishing. (Toggle spoilers...)

The Game Company Murder Case

Source

Manga Canon (Volume 12)

First Aired

April 14, 1997

Our Quick Blip

This is the "season finale" of "season 2". This one is actually about the Black Organization, for real this time.

This is the first actual reappearance of the Black Organization in the anime since Episode 1.. It only took 53 episodes for the next shred of a plotpoint! Well, welcome to Detective Conan, the show with the slowest main arc you've ever seen!

And what do we learn in this episode? That all of the members of the Black Organization seem to have alcohol-themed codenames, and there's at least one more member beyond Gin and Vodka, called Tequila. (Toggle spoilers...) Or, well, there was. He explodes five minutes after his introduction. Rest in pieces.

In this episode, Kogoro is invited to the release party for a video game featuring him. It's apparently being released by Mantendo. On, we presume, the Mantendo 65. The game does sound cute: you play as a rookie detective and try to solve the murder mystery, and if you need help, you can play the Kogoro dating sim, and the NPC of Kogoro will give you hints.

At the party, Kogoro meets the developers and their drama. The first guy is all polite, shakes hands with Kogoro, and says he was the designer of the game! :) Another developer comes behind him, and goes... yeah! You stole it! Like you stole all your ideas! And girlfriends! Right, fellow co-worker? And there's the fellow co-worker, who goes... that was back in high school... I don't want drama.

Awkward. Well, let's go check in our briefcases at the coat check. Kogoro got coat check number 96. The Funimation dub injected a hilarious line here:

In the original, Kogoro just receives the number, but the scene is slow and deliberate because it is directing our attention to the number, but there is no important dialogue. We can understand the dub wanting to do something with this scene, which, actually, may make it superior, because the comedy masks the fact that this is a clue, and the added dialogue is in-character, and it's brilliant. It's not like the dub got to pick which number it was, but given the source material, they found the perfect joke to add.

Because these guys all cut in line between Kogoro and Ran, she ended up getting number 100. She goes, wow! 100! Lucky! Turns out, Ran is lucky today. They have an arcade set up with all the Mantendo games, and she totally demolishes Conan at a game that looks like Street Fighter as a character that looks like Chun Li. Then there's the punching game. Some loser tries it, and the developer points out that, if you go harder, the screen will flash more. As we are watching it, it's already flashing enough to be uncomfortable... This episode came out not long before the Porygon incident, and the standards for flashing light effects on TV shows were not yet in place. Next, the game designer takes a swing, and gets the full on rainbow effect from a good punch, and he brags that he used to be in the boxing club. All the developers want Ran to try it, and she tries to politely deflect, until they mentioned that hey, it's good for relieving stress! Ran thinks a moment about the stress in her life. She remembers that Shinichi exists. She throws a punch while screaming his name, and gets a perfect score. Conan immediately needs the toilet. For once, it's not a ruse.

The game designer shows Conan to the bathroom. On the way, they bump into a guy wearing a black trenchcoat. Conan asks about that guy, and the designer says, I don't think he works for Mantendo, I've never seen him before.

After dealing with his soiled pants, Conan goes to use the vending machine. There, the guy in the trenchcoat is using the payphone, and Conan overhears him say into the phone... Hi Gin and Vodka! This is Tequila. I hope you're having a good day at the Black Organization.

Some spy, just dropping all the codenames, not checking that anyone is overhearing, even if it's a child...

And yeah, apparently Tequila is specifically talking to Vodka, but he says, say hello to Gin for me. Well, Vodka is probably in Gin's lap anyway.

Conan manages to bug Tequila and listens to whatever he's doing... for all of one minute... (Toggle spoilers...)

And yeah, the mostly-arbitrary division of seasons made this into the season finale of season 2. We wholeheartedly agree.

In conclusion

It only took a whole other anime-worth of time ✽, but the main arc of Detective Conan finally took a step forward!

…Although it will take 50 more episodes for the next movement… Well, this is Detective Conan, a mostly-episodic crime drama series which happens to also have an interesting overarching plot about spies and assassins, which unfortunately moves at the speed of frozen molasses, even though we're here on the edge of our seats wanting to know more.

Besides that, this is the part of the story where Heiji is introduced. Heiji is one of those characters who doesn't show up every episode, but whenever they appear, you know it's going to be a big deal. We spent a while looking if there's a term for this type of character and couldn't find it, so we're going to say: kinda like Gary Oak. Also like in Gary's case, Heiji is a rival and also a friend to the main character, and many of his interactions and motivations are defined by this dynamic. And also also like in Gary's case, Heiji is definitely a fan favorite.

And now on to something a bit different: the first ever Detective Conan movie, The Time-Bombed Skyscraper!

References

• A review of Jaleo restaurant for the photo of their terrifying bathroom. We saw it in real life but didn't take our own photo.
• A duct tape strength test, showing that the duct tape can hold up 100 pounds of weight, but breaks when attempting with 150 pounds.