The Detective is Already Dead seems like the kind of show with an obvious premise: it’s literally in the title. So, this should logically be a detective story where, instead of having a brilliant Holmes-style character, that individual is a stiff. Bereft of life. Rests in peace. And instead we have the Watson, the Lestrade, or whoever else can trying to fill in some big, empty shoes when the need for a detective arises. Maybe we’ll even try to solve the murder of said detective! Wouldn’t that be an interesting premise?
Unfortunately, I don’t think logic has much of a place in this show.
We start with a main character, Kimihiko “Kimi” Kimizuka who apparently has the worlds weirdest luck (said to have stumbled on enough murder scenes that the police recognize him, presently forced onto an overseas flight by unknown persons for seemingly smuggling-related reasons) encountering self-proclaimed Detective, Siesta, who makes him her sidekick.
The case involves a hijacking terrorist, and then quickly catapults into the realm of the strange when the terrorist turns out to have a cyborg ear that can transform into deadly combat tentacles, Siesta has some mind control blood of some sort, there’s nonsense about a secret world-spanning organization… yeah, dispose of any idea that anything in this setting is normal.
Siesta proceeds to awkwardly force her way into Kimi’s life, insisting that he needs to become her globe-trotting assistant for real. Such a little thing.
She involves Kimi in another mystery, which slides through its genres and tones like butter in a frying pan. They solve the incident, it gets nonsensically connected to the same secret organization behind the previous one (making them sound like the small-minded cousins of Boogiepop’s Towa Organization), and Kimi being a middle school boy finally accepts Sidekick status, probably due to thinking with the wrong head.
Then, in a single monologue at the end of the overly long first episode, we learn that they went about her business until, through cause not announced, Siesta bit the dust as the title of the show requires.
And maybe I’m just cold for thinking this but… good riddance. She was kind of insufferable. The best way I can describe the way Siesta is written is this: take Haruhi Suzumiya but then surgically remove the parts that made her a unique, loud, fun character, leaving only her self-assured side and propensity to walk all over whoever she might happen to encounter, wrapped in this pleasant-seeming moe shell. Haruhi could be grating at times, but in a sense the annoyance was part of her charm because she was written like an actual person. She got excited, she was invested in all the stuff she was involved with. There were things she had trouble with (not on a technical level because she is, of course, Haruhi and things tend to go her way) and she could get down or upset.
Siesta isn’t like that… which is kind of okay with her being a character who will be spending the majority of the show in the past perfect tense. Her role is, ultimately, as a plot device, giving Kimi the skills he needs to thrive and also this massive dark cloud of lost love that can hang over him and lens his actions.
And there’s nothing wrong with that. When I talked about Gurren Lagann I may have mentioned how Kamina kind of had to die in order for the show to move forward, and how there was an extent to which he simply worked better posthumously than alive.
All the same, I do kind of wish that I wasn’t looking forward to Siesta’s untimely demise by the point where she’s axed without a cutscene. As much as he had to die from a writing standpoint, I still liked Kamina, and it stung when he met his fate. Or for a similar long-episode-one kill, it was a really effective moment when Ai met her maker over in Oshi no Ko, both because she got a hell of a death scene and because she was a likable, relatable person who we spent that time getting to know and coming to appreciate. Here? Please replace this girl with somebody better. Is Nagi Kirima free? Forty-five minutes with Siesta was more than enough.
I almost wish they’d just gone the Lost Lenore route, and introduced her gradually in that aforementioned past perfect tense. She could afford to be so relatively bland yet oddly “perfect” if we were only seeing her in bits and pieces, through the rose-colored remembrances of someone who liked her.
Ah, well, at least she’s dead. The title tells you as much after all, there’s no way that wouldn’t stick. Right?
As could be expected, Siesta taking a dirt nap doesn’t mean that Kimi is able to stay out of trouble, and despite his perspective on returning to normalcy after a year without Siesta (on the heels of three years with), trouble finds him. The first case takes the form of Nagisa Natsunagi, a girl of Kimi’s age who is looking for the legendary detective. Said schizophrenic pile of warm regards and verbal abuse manages to enlist Kimi’s aid as a substitute for the posthumous detective, since he can’t leave well enough alone.
Her problem, and I’m going into detail on this since it’s a huge setup, is that ever since she received a heart transplant one year ago, she’s been desperate to see a particular person, but no facts about that person are known to her. Kimi identifies this as memory transfer from her transplant organ, which the show at least lampshades as unscientific to a degree (not that it needed to, the ship of this thing being at all grounded in reality already sailed), and tries to brush it off but is convinced fairly easily to at least try to help her ID her heart’s former owner.
This brings the two of them, via a police contact, to the holding cell with the cyborg from episode one, who has super-hearing powers thanks to his cyber ear. He manages a positive ID on Nagisa’s new heart: it, of course, belonged to Siesta. Despite Kimi’s best efforts to avoid it, this results in a cathartic quasi-reunion with his old flame speaking through his new acquaintance, confirming that he was the person Nagisa was looking for.
Despite this, or perhaps because of it, Kimi tries to ditch Nagisa, telling her that she can live her own life no matter where her meat heart came from. But then the show would be over, so of course someone else needing a legendary detective pops right up before the two of them are out of line-of-sight from each other.
This someone is Yui Saikawa, a middle school idol star (as introduced by a random vtuber cameo).
Her problem is something that actually seems to need some manner of detective, as she’s received a letter from a thief promising to steal a particular something on a particular date. It’s pointed out that beefing up normal security or involving the police could be reasonable routes (mostly written off because everyone in this universe is a clown), but I guess having a detective try to catch a phantom thief is kind of a staple.
During the leadup to the day in question, Kimi notices something wrong, and manages to successfully defuse the situation, involving an assassin gunning for the idol on stage and that secret organization, SPES, trying to use her case to get the old sidekick and new detective killed. They also wanted her eye, as it’s a super-cyborg eye, but they convinced her that the detectives wanted it instead. Idol still wants to go for a bit, but they talk her down, ending with a friendship speech from Nagisa so that they can all shelter against the evil secret organization together.
The next bit ends up being an extended flashback to Siesta times. In case you’re wondering, she’s not really much better written here, attempting to lure out a heart-eating cyborg serial killer known as Cerberus, than she was in episode 1.
Which brings me to a digression on the character writing in this show. It took me a bit to place it, but I realized that the dialogue writing in this reminds me very much of the dialogue in Bakemonogatari. In fact, it’s especially reminiscent of the novels… except it doesn’t quite get there.
In Bakemonogatari, everyone is able to quip and snipe at each other on a moment’s notice, and they’ll often do elaborate routines of insults and wordplay that are presented as going back and forth with a fun rapidity to them, evoked in the novel by tending to put little to no description between large tracks of dialogue, perhaps with some narration. However, every character has a unique personality. Araragi largely plays the straight man in those exchanges, which is helped by the fact that he is honestly not the brightest of bulbs. Hanekawa is sweet and strict, Senjogahara is viciously acerbic, Hachikuji is temperamental, Kanbaru is overwhelmingly and perhaps sarcastically fawning – if you just got some of that dialogue, with no “said” tags or really descriptions, despite everyone being well-spoken and able to quip I think you could comfortably say who it was.
Here, everyone is able to quip, and characters are often inclined to do so… briefly. The Detective is Already Dead never goes all the way with these Monogatari-esque bits, never quite commits to them, but can’t leave them behind all the same.
In the second episode when Nagisa is trying to enlist Kimi and believes he’s lying to her in order to blow her off, she ends up reaching into his mouth very suddenly to go for the uvula, tells him to speak clearly when he can’t around her hand, berates him for getting spit on her… Hi, Senjogahara. Didn’t pack your stapler today? And immediately flips into loving affection, then normal schoolgirl mode where none of that seems to follow. Bye, Senjogahara.
This would be okay if it were just Nagisa. She’s explicitly got her transferred memory issue, which means she’s kind of multiple characters. But while not so extreme because she’s pathologically incapable of raising her voice, Siesta works a similar way. She’ll show some acid that’s reminiscent of that certain other leading lady, but just as quickly it’s gone and she’s talking all business or like a normal person for a moment. The scenes cut quickly and get down to business for the most part, leaving these outbursts strangely orphaned.
If you’re going to do a bit, do yourself a favor and go all the way with it. Giving me three lines of Monogatari’s witty banter followed by a dry explanation of cyborg SPECTRE’s latest scheme, followed by two more lines of Monogatari, followed by a brief conversation as vaguely normal high schoolers? It sacrifices being something on the altar of trying to be everything.
Anyway, they spar with Cerberus, who is a shapeshifter capable of perfect mimicry and also a werewolf (it happens) before encountering Hel, some kind of weird girl in a military uniform (she looks a lot like Nagisa with short hair and smaller boobs), and also the alleged supreme leader of the group. Hel overcomes Siesta fairly arbitrarily, captures Kimi, goes on about her crazy prophecy manual that says they’ll be partners in the future, something about Father, and shows off a weird monster.
Siesta rides to the rescue in a random mecha she presumably found under a rock or something (it happens) and battles the monster, because being a detective in this universe qualifies you for Pacific Rim in miniature
The battle doesn’t go so well, the monster gets out into the city, and Siesta seemingly sacrifices herself to take on the beastie and Hel, since evidently this mech isn’t as good at the tackle-explode strat as D.Va from Overwatch. Siesta survives the boom, she and Kimi have a tearful happy reunion, and then Hel reveals that she too survived by attacking. This… doesn’t kill Siesta despite a lead-in to the arc suggesting we’d get her dead, and we just sort of segue into a bit where Siesta is injured and Kimi has to deal with a sassy lost child (Hi, Hachikuji).
We putter around for a while, it’s implied Siesta and Kimi had a drunken H-Scene after celebrating her full recovery, that sort of stuff
Good question, Kimi. Bad timing.
Mercifully, Siesta does come off a little better over time, as we actually address that she has a personality in her lack of humanity. Granted, in a “show, don’t tell” sense she seems about as human as anyone in this show through here, which is an improvement in how watchable she is, but there are at least a few moments where her focus on rationality seems her downfall.
This is especially when it turns out that the sassy lost child, Alicia, is some kind of weird alter-ego for Hel, who is still coming out and doing murders. Kimi wants to protect the innocent kid side, and even pulls a gun on Siesta when she seems ready to execute Alicia in order to kill Hel. The baddies then make off with Alicia/Hel and drop the location of their secret island base, after which Siesta is all about rescuing Alicia.
I said better, it doesn’t necessarily mean good.
This then brings us to a boat with a weird blonde chick who calls Siesta “Mom”, which we saw at the start of the arc. Kimi and Blondie split off from Siesta and confront the true boss of SPES, a being called Seed. Seed is a space alien who wants to take over earth as a spawning ground for its own kind.
And here I thought the plot of Moonraker was goofy.
Kimi peels off, finds Siesta, and we get round two versus Hel. Thanks to a critical interruption, Hel wins this one, ripping out Siesta’s heart in order to replace her own failing blood pump, meaning the phenotypical resemblance to Nagisa is probably no accident. That would make Nagisa quite the one-woman cast as being herself, Hel, Alicia, and Siesta all in one (as well as the fulfillment of Hel’s lame prophecy of becoming partners with Kimi in the future)
Back in the present we address this not at all, and just continue with the plot that we completely abandoned for close to half the show’s running time where Kimi, Nagisa, and Yui put to sea, running into Blondie (Char, properly) on a cruise ship where, according to Char, there is something Siesta left behind.
You would think this would be a huge bombshell. Granted, we know from Alicia that Kimi is willing to take the side of an alter ego, but as soon as the super-hearing cyborg told him that was Siesta’s heart in Nagisa’s chest, he should know by the fact that he had to watch as Hel ripped out and absorbed said heart, that Nagisa must be another component of the multiple-body multiple-personality jumble of Hel and others. You’d think it would lens his reactions, running into his waifu’s killer. Even if he doesn’t think badly of Nagisa, because she seems to be an uninvolved persona, it should push him somehow.
Are we… not supposed to notice this obvious fact? Is this supposed to be setup for a big reveal somewhere down the line that our 2.0 detective is going to get hijacked by Ganon, rather than a massive elephant in the room? The eyes match, the timeline matches, the organ matches – everything tells you, as close as can be done without spelling it out in giant neon letters, that these are somehow in this crazy world of alter-egos the same character. Sure I don’t know when or how Hel turned into Nagisa (or back into Nagisa, or into Alicia who turned into Nagisa), but any other conclusion would be bonkers even for this show.
Instead, their chemistry stays exactly the same. Even after she was fleshed out a bit in the huge flashback, I’d say Siesta still loses to Nagisa in terms of actually being personable and watchable, but it’s now close seeing as Nagisa just usually defaults to a rather dere Tsundere when she’s not being (accidentally or deliberately) wildly inconsistent.
Of course, she does rather quickly get kidnapped by SPES forces, hoping to hold her hostage in exchange for Siesta’s bequest. Does SPES not know where their important high-up went? Seems like an organization of world-spanning intent with literal alien super-science could probably keep track of something like that.
Anyway, the kidnapper turns into a giant lizard monster and brawls with Kimi after the kidnapping is foiled, which knocks him into a flashback to Siesta’s death where it’s revealed that she intended for her personality to grapple with and overwrite Hel, sacrificing her life so Alicia (now Nagisa) could have a future. That would answer a lot of my prior questions if it wasn’t implied strongly that he was only getting these memories back now. Thus, Kimi gets his second wind to fight back, only for Nagisa – controlled by Siesta as shown through her eyes turning blue – to show up and shoot the lizard guy down.
However, the boss fight has about a zillion health bars to get through, letting them talk out their issues in what is said to be a last hurrah for Siesta. They confirm that the possible H-scene wasn’t but that they would have liked it the other way around, go on and on about their years together or apart in abstract, and through this meandering and oddly directionless talk, eventually get that boss down.
This could have been a really powerful scene, but it needed to be kind of short to have the punch it wanted to have.
With the crisis resolved we get a little emotional work with Nagisa, going over what comes next with no real resolution for the tangled web of feelings or the goal of taking down SPES, and the show finally ends.
So, first and perhaps most critical impression: this show has an issue when it cones to presentation. It presents as detective fiction, and wears that badge loudly and proudly. But I think it’s a little confused over what the qualifications for a detective, rather than a secret agent or super hero, are.
And, to be fair, there are overlaps. Sherlock Holmes can give a more than fair account of himself in a fight and occasionally has to. Batman, a crime-fighting super-hero, is often described as a great detective. But it still comes off as… off base when, in episode 2, Nagisa pulls out news articles about a high-school hero intervening in crisis situations and saving lives to “prove” that he’s the Legendary Detective she wants on her case.
Further, the picture given of legendary detective work is more about globe-trotting, extreme situations, and battling a shadowy evil organization. This isn’t the resume of a prime detective like Holmes or Poirot, it’s the resume of James Bond, notable secret agent and… not really a detective. There are some overlaps in the skill set, but the stories are told differently. A detective, in fiction, is someone who uses logic and reason to solve intellectual puzzles. A secret agent, in fiction, is someone who can follow a trail of clues to a properly dramatic ending conclusion. Bond may be depicted as pretty bright (depending on the era), but he relies a good deal more on charming, spying, or other “boots on the ground” work to get information that he can then use. He rarely deduces anything.
By in large, the “detectives” in this show play out more like James Bond characters. And that’s fine after a fashion. I’m rather fond of James Bond. But when you’re loudly and proudly presenting yourself as detective fiction and deliver James Bond, you’ve got a problem with your optics.
The show does go and lampshade this at one point, but when looked at from a meta angle, the excuse is weak.
Do you need me, show?
Sure, Siesta sees herself as a detective, claiming a detective’s job is to protect people, but why write her and market the piece this way? It’s just annoying advertising.
Very little good comes of misrepresenting your work. There have been a couple notable successes in bait-and-switch genre tricks, and many, many failures of mistaken marketing.
And you might ask why this is important. Having watched the whole show, can I not just appreciate it as what it is?
Well, to an extent, I can. But on another scale the show is choosing what rubric to be graded on in how it announces itself, and while it’s never kind to be graded on the wrong rubric, the detective fiction standards are particularly unfriendly to pieces that fail to live up to the concept. A good mystery, particularly a classical detective fiction mystery, is among the hardest things to write for good reason.
I had considered a long analysis going through the famous ten rules of detective fiction, but I’ll spare you all for another day since the ultimate takeaway is just reinforcing the idea that they’re inapplicable because that’s not what this show is.
So, how about that analysis, for what it is?
The Detective Is Already Dead is a scifi-fantasy secret agent thriller, with perhaps more than its fair share of romance and comedy.
Working through that backwards, the comedy is… there, making light of a number of scenes by having the characters banter even when they really shouldn’t. It’s fine most of the time, but sometimes unfit.
The romance does at least give us the weirdest romantic polygon I’ve seen in a while where Kimi and Siesta liked each other, but were too busy bickering until Siesta died. Now there’s tension between Kimi and Nagisa, made more complicated by Kimi carrying a torch for Siesta who seems to ship Kimi with Nagisa from beyond the grave. Also Hel wanted Kimi as her partner and Alicia was at least a bit clingy. And all four of these women currently exist in the same body, that’s mostly Nagisa with notes of Siesta and unknown quantities and qualities of Hel and Alicia lurking beneath.
But the romantic chemistry in this ranges from standard to substandard. I actually kind of like Kimi/Nagisa as a setup. If this were just about Kimi having to come to terms with the death of his previous beloved in the face of someone who connects with him, perhaps with the slight complication of a more mundane heart transplant letting him see something of Siesta in Nagisa, there would be grounds for some really dynamite drama. Unfortunately, Siesta has a pretty persistent ghost with a marked influence on Nagisa, and there are the other two jokers to mostly not worry about.
And when Siesta was alive, she and Kimi have… trouble. I didn’t end up despising her as much as right after episode 1, and I dare say Siesta was even growing on me a little, but the romantic developments around her were still never handled well. The three year gap from epsiode 1 to the flashback around her death is probably the biggest issue: Kimi and Siesta act a lot like that’s the very next case, based on how they banter around their romantic topics (seeing as episode 1 got them in cosplay bride and groom outfits, much to Kimi’s embarrassed interest), so it feels like nothing managed to happen rather than a strong bond forming.
So, how about that main plot? Even looking at it as a Secret Agent affair rather than a legitimate attempt at detective fiction, it’s got some issues. After all, they’re not entirely unrelated genres.
Part of the issues is that the universe in which this story takes place is very thinly sketched. Without worldbuilding that’s grounded, whether in earth as we know it or a solid and well-expressed concept, you lose a lot of focus and interest in the chase that’s theoretically going on.
The first fantastical concept we’re made aware of, and the most important, is that of cyborgs. Or “half androids” as the show calls them. We’re told that these “Android” organs have incredible abilities, and can be grafted onto otherwise normal humans, and that the secret organization SPES does this in order to create dangerous agents.
And that would have been enough. I compared this at first to the Towa Organization, because that’s a fairly similar pitch. There, they can make artificial humans with seemingly supernatural abilities, and they use those as agents. There are other supernatural concepts in Boogiepop, but they’re all pretty related.
Here? Well, SPES does sort of come back. We don’t comprehend their goals or why anyone would follow them. Even their own agents don’t seem to get it, with Hel being notably a bundle of strained motivations. We have cyborgs, okay, so we’re presumably in a techy setting.
Then we’re introduced to Siesta’s blood, where if she loads some into a round for her gun and shoots someone, it permanently hexes them so that they, having her blood, can never attack her again. That seems odd and random. By the end it would seem to be the power of Siesta’s possibly android heart, but does she have the same origin as the SPES agents, or is this just a thing that can happen in the setting?
Then we get a werewolf.
Then we get a weird sword girl with Geas powers.
Then we get a giant monster with the stated ability to belch toxic gas.
Then we get a mecha that’s clearly unrelated to SPES.
Then we get some invisible intangible freaky agent.
And the sword girl can turn into a loli with a different persona. And she can steal hearts to replace her own that she was forced to stab, because geas powers can be reflected with a pocket mirror.
And there are aliens. Plant aliens. The plant alien runs the whole secret evil organization to conquer and/or destroy the world.
And Siesta’s mind can be housed in her heart and overwrite sword girl’s consciousness.
And this can create an entire additional persona who is somehow both kind of Siesta and kind of her own person, and they have tea in a dream garden.
And the giant monster from before sprouts flowers with memory-wiping pollen, that was also turned into a drug that the secret evil organization was pushing on middle school kids for some reason.
Oh, and the invisible guy also has cyborg tentacles and can turn into a big lizard, which can then turn into an even bigger and more dinosaur-ish lizard.
And Siesta’s ghost can possess the new persona on request, which doesn’t morph her body like the shifts between Sword Girl, Loli, and New Girl, but does change her eye color.
It’s pretty clear that the whole thing is in full clown mode. Anything goes. Nothing is too weird or too stupid. Precedent is not needed, and we can make up new rules as we go along.
This is flagrantly no way to write a detective story, still really no way to write a secret agent thriller, and hell it’s really no way at all to write a story. It’s fine if your turn your brain off and just roll with it, but it’s not good.
James Bond movies have had some very… silly setups, with sci-fi gadgets, unknown chemical agents, and even a mystical undying avatar of Baron Samedi at one point. But at least each movie keeps to only one or two implausible things, and they’re all the same genre of implausible: near future “seems like it might work if you squint” science fiction. Well, except the Loa, but he was a really exceptional case who was only used for a movie-end stinger in any way that seemed at all supernatural.
Constraining the weirdness lets the audience feel like they understand what exists and what is possible in this universe, and therefore to create a sense of understanding the stakes and the situation. We know that if Bond doesn’t stop the weird killer orchid chemicals or Blofeld’s sterilizing terrorism plan, or whatever else the doomsday device of the film is, there’s not going to be a magical deus ex machina that will fix it for him. That makes the scenes tense and effective. Here, we have no idea what will come next and understand only that we can’t have a clue what will come next, so what are we getting invested in? If the writers are in a corner, they’ll just have something weird happen. Again.
And with that, I feel like I’ve given The Detective Is Already Dead enough of my time and effort. I do respect, to an extent, that it’s trying a lot of things, and that it’s not always deficient. But it spreads itself so many ways, that it just can’t hold together as a production. Since it’s fairly watchable, all things considered, I’ll give it a D+. But in my opinion, this show really is dead on arrival.