Apologies for the tardiness of this
entry; real life ensued. All is well and future In/Spectre episodes
should run closer to their air time.
Here we get the first real
“Investigation” of the series, as it’s being presented here –
What the Guardian Serpent Heard. By the end of this episode, I feel
like you should know if you’re going to like In/Spectre, because
while perhaps not as impressive or dramatic as the main plot, the
time this episode is spent doing what In/Spectre mostly does for its
Manga run: attempt to explain a mystery to the satisfaction of the
characters in the scene through a mixture of deduction and
hypothesis.
The main story this time is that a
woman dumped a murder victim’s corpse into a certain mountain swamp
watched over by a gigantic serpent spirit. On dumping the body, the
woman said “I hope they find him”. The guardian serpent would
like an explanation for this strange action: Why did the woman go to
the effort of hauling the body up to the swamp only to not conceal it
properly, and say such a thing?
Iwanaga has a few solutions for this.
She goes over the facts of the case, and examines them from multiple
different angles, each attempting to explain what the guardian
serpent heard. She analyzes the woman’s testimony after her arrest,
her motives for killing, possible alternatives to the ‘truth’ the
cops are reaching from that confession, and so on, all trying to give
a gigantic white snake a little closure as to why a corpse was
dropped in his swamp.
Iwanaga doesn’t really judge on the
topic of murder, she rather dispassionately picks apart what
happened, or at least what might have happened. Because, something
that’s obvious here that wasn’t in episode 1 is that Iwanaga isn’t
exactly concerned with the truth. Her analysis is a means of
reaching a satisfactory resolution, not the correct solution to a
puzzle. Essentially, she doesn’t care whether what she says is the
truth or a lie as long as it can be believed and ends the topic for
all involved. After all, she’s the Goddess of Wisdom for the
spirits, not a member of the Police or even a Consulting Detective;
it really doesn’t matter to her task whether or not the conclusion
she reaches is true, as long as it is sound.
This is one of the elements that makes
In/Spectre different than a lot of mysteries. Usually, it is the
truth that we’re trying to reach, but here finding the truth might
not even be the end of it if there’s some reason the truth isn’t
satisfying or final, which is an element that comes into play in the
main story that, according to the next episode preview, we’ll be
launching into as soon as we hear Iwanaga’s final answer to the
guardian serpent.
On its own, this episode is much more
sedate than episode 1; No one here really has much of a stake in the
outcome, other than the guardian serpent looking for peace of mind,
because no one is connected to the murder and body-dumping that’s
being analyzed. Which I’ll argue is actually good, since we need
room to escalate from what we’re seeing in this episode to what we’ll
be dealing with for most of the show.
There’s an interesting choice here,
presenting this episode ahead of the big plot that graces all the
posters and the opening. In the manga, “What the Guardian Serpent
Heard” is a later chapter, taking place (at least as far as I
understood it as a reader) after the headline story line, when Kurou
and Iwanaga have been together for some time and are already
considered a couple in truth and not just Iwanaga’s crazy insistence
(which is pretty funny this episode). It’s been placed before
instead, and I think there are a few good reasons for this.
First of all, it shows us how Iwanaga
actually works before the main event. The first episode may have
introduced her role, but not her methods. This does, without being
dependent on what comes before or relevant to what comes after.
Second, recontextualizing the guardian
serpent episode gives us a chance to see Iwanaga and Kurou growing
closer. In the manga, after the meat of episode 1 we pretty much cut
to three years later with the two of them on this big case, basically
as a couple. Not a lovey-dovey couple or even necessarily one that
the audience is 100% sure is legitimate, but a couple none the less.
I think the anime, by contrast, is going for a stronger romance plot
by having them still in the early phases of any sort of relationship
when we get the main plot and working with Kurou’s ex, which will
make the scenes between Saki and Iwanaga all the more pointed.
Third, the show so far seems to have
good pacing. True, this episode ended on a “cliffhanger” that
will be resolved almost immediately in the next one, but that can be
a style choice. It could very well be that, having storyboarded and
even scripted the main arc, the creators found that they didn’t have
twelve episodes of material. Iwanaga and Kurou have more cases than
just the big Steel Lady Nanase case, but you want to end an anime
with the climax of its biggest story, not a single episode tail of
“not relevant to anything” deduction. If they needed a ‘filler’
episode to, well, fill space, they chose a good way to handle it and
the absolute right place to put it, where it would ramp up into the
main event rather than interrupting or pointlessly hanging on.
For now, that’s all. Knowing the
source material, I think the story is still going strong, but because
there’s not all that much investment in the case of the episode, it
does also kind of show how In/Spectre might falter. For now, I don’t
think we have enough evidence to judge the show. We should get a
good deal more when we dig into the meat of the story next week.