Normally, I try to have quite the preamble to these reviews, but this time I’m going to keep it short: ID:Invaded is a mystery taking place where it’s possible to use technology to dive into the subconscious of a serial killer in order to find clues about their identity or whereabouts. The rub is that those doing the dive do so as amnesiacs, taking up the role of brilliant detectives per fiction… and also, that they must be killers themselves to even try.
But you won’t know most of this, or really any of it, as the show starts.
Now, recently I’ve been hard on a couple shows for throwing the viewer right into the deep end with their opening. It was a necessary evil in Kemurikusa and a bit of scuffed nothing pretending to be a hook in MWZ. ID:Invaded shows us how it’s done as we start by descending into a strange and seemingly digital world where we find a divided man who knows nothing. He explores his “separated into pieces” trait, literally pulls himself together, and then begins to explore, ultimately finding a locked room murder scene in a world of open white, and in doing so realizing that he both knows the victim and knows that he is a genius detective meant to solve this murder.
We then glimpse outside the digital realm, where it seems like cops in the cyberpunk future can use technology that might as well be magic to reconstruct and deduce facts from these worlds formed of a murderer’s intent to kill. As the man, Sakaido, acts out his detective play, the cops in the world above search everything for the least clues, cross-referencing all information to seek the identity of the killer in real space. With some of the victims in the mindscape missing but not yet confirmed dead, the race is on to track the killer down before he finishes off the most recent people on his mind.
This task goes to a pair of cops Koharu Hondomachi (the young newcomer. Apparently old enough to drive and, you know, be a cop but you would never guess as much looking at her) and Kokuryuu Matsuoka (the old grizzled veteran). They analyze the clues Sakaido finds with the situation on-scene and track down the killer.
However, the killer (known as the Perforator, as he drills people to death) manages to give the cops the slip by impersonating a victim, and even takes Hondomachi captive, intending to drill her next. As this happens, not only does a version of her appear in the mindscape, but an apparition known as John Walker, who seems to get all the cops and mindscape natives alike bent out of shape does as well.
Desperate, Hondomachi manages to summon up enough suicidal intent to register her own mind in the system. Sakaido (briefly seen in his human form) is transferred to her consciousness, to once again “solve a mysterious death” (that victim seems to be an npc) and, in the real world’s concern, find the whereabouts of Hondomachi and the Perforator. This is successful, but does earn Hondomachi a new hole in her head, which she barely survives getting.
In the wake of this, we get a more full plot. We find in the real word that the “brilliant detective” is actually some sort of convict, now helping the police through this system, and that John Walker is a phantom who appears in these rendered serial killer mindscapes – once thought to be an NPC like the victim girl (“Kaeru”) whose apparent death the detective is out to solve but now considered some sort of person or psychic entity who may be behind the creation of serial killers, possibly something like Psycho-Pass’s Shougo Makishima, except even more enigmatic.
This is handled in two episodes, and for the first half of the first episode we know nothing more than Sakaido. Which is to say, nothing. But here, the catapulting into a strange scenario is in service of something. The transitional images that actually open the first episode serve to hint, strongly enough to be more or less sure when combined with how weird it is, that the shattered city of the Perforator’s ID Well (to use the proper term for the mindscapes) is some kind of digital realm. With that piece, communicated through wordless imagery of little more than abstract shapes taking us to the world in question, we understand something of what we’re looking at when a divided man struggles with being physically incomplete. Within moments of watching him struggle with a goal, to get his bearings in this world, we come across a murder scene (a locked room murder, of a sort, at that) and are introduced to the idea that we’ll be taking this on as a detective matter, which has its own innate hook. Thus, even while we’re lost and confused and don’t know anything, we’re also engaged and entertained.
This helps not only get the show as a whole rolling, launching us right into the action the way these in media res openings are more or less supposed to, but it also softens the blow when the people on the outside start talking about “cognition particles” – evidently the physical trace of murderous intent in this setting, despite it being a fairly grounded and scientific setting – so that we don’t reject the idea of this technology. We already tacitly accepted it in Sakaido’s first scene, whether the explanation is high verisimilitude or not matters a great deal less than it could have.
After the Perforator is arrested and detained in the stark white cells the ID-well using police have (along with Sakaido’s real world self), we get a serial killer of the week with a mad bomber. During the episode we learn that Sakaido’s wife and daughter were murdered in the past, and since he has to be eligible to generate a well to enter them, it’s not that wild a guess to suggest vengeance may have been achieved, as little as it seems to salve his depressed cop vibes. The mad bomber is brought in as well, but we won’t be seeing him again since Sakaido breaks him by talking from the cell across the way, to the point where he commits suicide. In the next, the problem is a copycat criminal livestreaming a victim buried alive… except it turns out, after a harrowing race against time, that he recorded his crimes.
As we investigate the primary “Gravedigger” serial killer (the one who was being copied), we get a few important details. For one, while the Perforator is tapped for the Brilliant Detective role, seeing as he is rather intelligent in some ways, he’s not really very good at it, meaning a lack of alternates for Sakaido is an issue. Hondomachi, back in action, seems to be quite cunning and deductive. She gets a lead on the real Gravedigger, a surviving victim of the Perforator like her. She deduces how his brain is miswired, crossing killing and loving impulses because of his brain damage. And, when tracking down his possible love interests, she manages to figure out that the woman she guessed is a freaky sadist and the mastermind behind the Gravedigger murders. In the scuffle that results she goads the primary killer into attacking, and ends up killing him when he comes for her.
This is enough to convince Matsuoka that she’s fit for the Brilliant Detective role herself. Though she seemed enamored with the idea, he tells her off by reminding her that it’s not a good thing, since being able to fulfill that role and dive into ID wells means that she herself has the makings of a Serial Killer. Honestly between her and Sakaido it seems like the “pilots” are on a line not dissimilar to Psycho-Pass’s enforcers.
Aside from that, John Walker appears in more ID wells through this, and the hunt for him intensifies. They find hidden microphones and cameras in the homes of the serial killers he may have induced, suggesting he’s a real person creating these killers, and the team even speculates that he has a machine similar to theirs that he uses to invade the subconscious of his victims, hence why he always appears as the exact same terrifying apparition.
Extra hands were going to be needed to help track the fiend down.
Since the case extends to Sakaido (or, in his mortal life, Narihisago) and the man who killed his daughter and he then killed, Hondomachi is rather quickly drafted to do some dives with her new alter-ego the Brilliant Detective Miyo Hijiriido.
However, she discovers a well-diving machine inside the well and becomes entrapped in deeper layers. As that’s happening, the director of the operation is arrested as John Walker, with so much evidence that any audience knows it has to be a frame job. The materials for a well are found at his house, and both Sakaido and the Perforator (Brilliant Detective name: Anaido) are sent in, hoping that they can find a similar machine, reach Hondomachi, and then be pulled out one layer at a time. The old director, hearing this, fears that it’s the obvious trap it seems.
In the well within a well Sakaido experiences, he’s his Narihisago self, before his daughter was murdered and his wife committed suicide. In this recreation of the past, he goes off the rails by hunting down the responsible serial killer early, and gets the self defense excuse for the battle there. In the wake of it he meets a girl and the nominal owner of the well, Kiki Asukai. She also just happens to be the exact spitting image of the ever-dead Kaeru.
Kiki, who was being researched in real life, has a problem in that she has some unexplained and uncontrolled psychic powers. If she gets worked up, her thoughts project into the minds of others, and in her dreams she’s tormented by an endless procession of serial killers, both those who have killed in “real life” and ones who have yet to, who come to live out their murderous fantasies on her dream self. And it seems the first of that number, who invited the rest in, is the man with a cane himself, John Walker.
Narihisago tries his best to save Kiki from her torment, but it seems that talking serial killers to death isn’t enough. As she grows weaker, she fears she’ll become something that distorts the world. Sure enough ,as she did in the prime timeline, she vanishes mysteriously, leaving coma cases in her wake.
After this, Narihisago is led to a part of the city where he runs into Hondomachi, and the discrepancies between them (in time as well as in opinion, with Narihisago having come to the idea that the world with ID wells was just one of Kiki’s dreams while Hondomachi, only in 20 subjective minutes, still knows it as a well within a well) cause the world to begin to break down. So, Narihisago has to lose his happy family again.
As that happens, Anaido recovers Narihisago, who tosses Hondomachi his research on John Walker at the last moment. Back in the first layer, Anaido reveals that he doesn’t get amnesia, and that he realized that this was, in fact, Narihisago’s well, causing him to wake up from being Sakaido and start to fall down the rabbit hole.
Before he does, though, he’s able to work things through with Anaido, and figure out what they have to do to live (as opposed to John Walker’s plans) and find Hondomachi. Hondomachi, meanwhile, uses Narihisago’s research and a chat with the well version of the Perforator to crack the secret of John Walker’s identity, pinning him down as the director of the project.
The two in the desert well are able to awaken Hondomachi to their level, and all three make it to the eye of the storm, from which they can be extracted. As Hondomachi shares her findings, though, the director makes a play, recovering Kiki Asukai from where she’s evidently been trapped in some sort of ultratech, presumably forming the core of the ID Well system.
This replicates the mass fainting she caused before, as her aura spreads out, sending everyone to various ID wells and dream worlds, with the consequences of dying in the dream being uncertain but not to be gambled on. The chief, as John Walker, plugs himself into one of the machines and kills himself, which drags him into the mental world as the true John Walker.
Narihisago and Hondomachi follow with machines, while everyone else seems to be dragged into the maelstrom of the unconscious by Kiki’s power.
As a chase through the mental realms begins, the officers outside track down the gear that let Kiki be contained in the past, so one agent can go in hoping to put her back in the bubble where things are safe.
Within the wells, Walker does a good job trying to trap the detectives, the Gravedigger kills her way to cross-jumping, and ultimately ends up shooting the Perforator when he takes the bullet for Hondomachi. The conversation between Hondomachi and Perforator is weirdly sweet and gives him a sendoff you kind of know he’s probably not coming back from, since he seems to be at peace finally. Gravedigger herself visits her lover’s well, but gets axed by the John Walker Phantom there almost immediately.
Eventually, they manage to trick Walker into a well within a well, where his phantom existence will be trapped in a reality beginning with his punching out and arrest. In reality, the way to Kiki is rough, but the officer taking it, who saved her in the past, gets there. They have a very emotional little chat, after which she accepts that she needs to go back in the bubble for the sake of the world, and the officer swears that, someday, someone will find a way to save her. As she enters containment, she, as Kaeru, is finally able to meet Narihisago/Sakaido alive, giving her the hope to carry on, perhaps with some catharsis regarding her existence.
In the end, everything is covered up, all the important characters other than Perforator recover from their comas (but again, he went out like he wanted to), and the mission to catch criminals will continue with a faintly brighter outlook. Thus ends ID:Invaded.
On the whole, ID:Invaded is a pretty good show. It has psychological play, emotional play, and more visual creativity than you can usually get out of a fairly grounded mystery, thanks to the conceit of the ID wells. It does, however, have two issues that I feel could drag it down for some folks.
The first is the pace. ID:Invaded is a true mystery, despite some scenes in the wells looking kind of like action at first glance. That means it is slower and more methodical than might be preferred by some audiences. This wouldn’t be worth mentioning except for the fact that the very conceit that best weighs against that also leans into it. Whenever a Brilliant Detective enters an ID well, they’re totally amnesiac, and have to figure everything out from scratch. There might be some lingering impression in intuition, but it’s always the same start: finding Kaeru dead and only then even realizing who the detective is and that they have their mission.
This means a lot of shots and lines of dialogue get repeated, both in multiple runs of the same well, and in the next well. Pretty much every one starts with a long establishing shot, the discovery of Kaeru, and the same monologue from the detective (usually Sakaido). The repetition has a point, so I’m not overly bothered by it, but it is noticeable.
The biggest issue for me is the main case, the John Walker case, that forms the backbone of the story and how it… doesn’t feel even a fraction as epic as it should.
The closest show to compare ID:Invaded to is Psycho-Pass, which of course I’ve referenced a couple of times already. And Psycho-Pass is a high enough bar that I would neither expect nor require this show or any other to actually meet or exceed it. But there’s only so far you can afford to fall short, and in one exact area, that of the villain, ID:Invaded falls short enough that I think it’s an actual problem.
Part of it does once again come down to the genre, but while the pace was a necessary and proper element, I don’t think the villain’s involvement actually is.
First, to lay out the issue by doing that comparison with Psycho-Pass. Both shows (at least considering Psycho-Pass’s first half) are about catching an individual who is not a serial killer in the traditional sense, but who causes serial killers to come into existence, and is thus the Moriarty-style mastermind behind the villains of the week, as well as the event in the past that traumatized our grizzled and grumpy ex-cop.
Psycho-Pass is a mystery, but it’s more of a thriller in some senses. As such, we see scenes with Makishima well before his caught and get to understand how he operates and who he is. The authorities know who they’re looking for well before the end, and actually finding him and bringing him in is a difficulty in its own right, because he has his own plans that he’s moving forward with and that will bother everyone.
This serves to massively increase the threat we feel from Makishima. He’s not just a vague phantom, he’s a real danger who does horrible things to people we know and causes no end of suffering. We can hate him, and we can fear him.
ID:Invaded wants to be more of a pure mystery. You know, the sort with a brilliant detective. And those have a different requirement. In a fair play mystery, the culprit may not be revealed until the final page, and the struggle is to discern who they are from a pool of suspects and completely reconstruct their means, motive, and opportunity in order to present an airtight case.
The thing is, that’s not really what ID:Invaded does either. It kind of wants to have it both ways, and in doing so it fumbles both. Like a fair play mystery, it keeps its “culprit” completely concealed, rather than letting us in on their view or world in such a way that we could better understand and fear or hate them. Sure, we see the phantom John Walkers in the wells, but they seldom do much. Even in Kiki’s dreams while he’s identified as the first killer we never see him actually kill nor do we get a read on his malice. He’s just sort of… there. And while we see how Narihisago is able to induce serial killers to suicide by using his memories of their ID wells against them, we don’t see how John Walker is able to turn people into these gruesome serial killers.
At the same time, it’s not a fair play mystery because there aren’t really clues or suspects. True, the character is in the show and I actually think a lot of audience members are going to expect him to be the baddie before it’s revealed that he is, but that’s purely from meta knowledge. We understand that this show has only so many characters, and none of the others have personas that would even remotely allow it, meaning that either the shady old guy is the shady old guy or Walker is a complete stranger. In character, there pieces aren’t available until the very moment they’re assembled.
A good fair play mystery, or even mysterious element, has points where you can at least look back and say “Ah, this is where and why I should have known” that are diagetic, not just cues based on the laws of storytelling. And, further, you have to have proper misdirects and other routes, so it feels like the answer is emerging from a pool of things to consider.
This is, admittedly, quite hard. I’m not a mystery writer primarily. I do fantasy and science fiction, and it’s usually more YA stuff at that. But more than once in a manuscript I’ve included a mystery element and set up my breadcrumbs such that I’m worried it’s too obvious, only to have test readers tell me that it was shocking or even baffling. As the writer, I know the answer, so the clues leading there stick out like sore thumbs.
Point being, constructing a well-balanced mystery is hard, but point also being that ID:Invaded doesn’t manage to do it and I’m not sure they were even trying that much. The one frame-up is so transparently a frame-up it might as well be called out as such, and I think they believe having Walker deliver his big motive rant about justice in the wells and then getting him with a spring-loaded deathtrap (more or less) is a good substitute for actually deriving those facts from clues we’ve seen.
It’s not, and the end result is that John Walker can’t really carry the show the way Makishima does… or the way he needs to.
But in the end, that’s not a fatal issue. Hondomachi is great. Perforator is great. Kiki is great, and even gets some character ascribed to her from her posthumous appearances as Kaeru. Narihisago is… passable. Of the protagonists he’s actually the least engaging by far, despite getting the most screen time, but that’s only because he fits so neatly into a fairly standard archetype. The ID wells and the individual serial killer cases are colorful and engaging. Narihisago’s wild ride into Kiki’s well is a great emotional movement, even if I find the guy less compelling than the other characters in the show. It has blemishes, but it all basically works.
For that, I’ll give ID:Invaded a B. It’s a fine mystery, but not one I’m too sad to spoil. It’s a fun show, and one I would recommend, but with warm regard rather than awed admiration.