TANTEI WA MOU, SHINDEIRU.

DESCRIPTION

CAST

NOVEL ComedyTantei wa mou, Shindeiru.
MANGA ActionTantei wa mou, Shindeiru.
ONATantei wa mou, Shindeiru. Mini Anime
ANIME ComedyTantei wa mou, Shindeiru. Season 2

REVIEWS

• 

  killvivan

  40/100
  Another formulaic adaptation that tries to pander to everyone, ultimately at the expense of the story

  The Detective is Already Dead... except she isn't!?

  *SPOILER WARNING*

  The Detective is Already Dead was one of the most highly anticipated shows of 2021 which did not live up to anyone's expectations. The quirky title and the early teaser piqued my interest from the very beginning. I had been starving for a good detective/mystery anime for a while and this seemed to deliver everything I wanted across the board. However, I remember thinking that the character designs were oddly cliched and the illustrations strangely resembled a harem anime amongst what seemed to be some pretty exciting and refreshing new concepts. I should have noticed those massive red flags.

  The Detective is Already Dead is just another addition to the ever-growing pile of terrible light novel adaptations.

  

  The animation is mediocre at best, with lifeless backgrounds and settings with minimal details. Kimizuka's dry humour (which is actually pretty funny) makes the episodes somewhat tolerable. The show has annoying characters with character designs we have all seen before and is full of many, many problems but my biggest problem with this show is the story (the novel handles some of the issues I'm about to bring up but the anime just fails to do so).

  With a title like The Detective is Already Dead, I was expecting two things - good mystery writing and A DEAD DETECTIVE. The first episode already failed to deliver one of those. We get introduced to Kimizuka, see the beginning of his and Siesta's relationship as they solve a mystery, witness Siesta's superior intelligence and enjoy a well-animated scene during the fight on the aeroplane against Bat. However, the mystery was boring. Good mystery writing gives the viewer just enough clues to try and figure out the conclusion to a compelling problem without making it too easy. The viewer just watches and tries to process new information as Siesta explains the conclusion. AND THEN IT BECOMES A SCI-FI SHOW!? I was already tempted to drop the show as soon as we learned about the androids and SPES.

  

  The second episode introduces Nagisa (this is where the novel begins, which makes so much more sense from a narrative standpoint) who approaches Kimizuka with the dumbest mystery to date in all of fiction. The conclusion, once again, is given to us without much foreshadowing. The next few episodes are just... terrible. They introduce the obligatory light novel idol loli, Saikawa. This time around we are given many clues that purposely lead nowhere, only for us to be given the solution without any foreshadowing again. At the end of the episode, we see a small glimpse of the new character Char just so that she can be used in the upcoming flashbacks. Nagisa rarely contributes to the investigation. Each of the solutions until now required Bat's assistance, leading me to believe that Kimizuka is completely useless without superpowers. At this point, however, the show was just a badly written mystery story that I didn't particularly care for. The next few episodes completely ruined the show for me.

  

  The show decides to show us Kimizuka and Siesta's adventures... even though the show is called The Detective is Already Dead.

  These episodes are comprised of nonsense mysteries with unsatisfying conclusions that are centred around the new antagonist Hel... until she's completely forgotten and replaced by a different loli, Alicia. However, Alicia is then revealed to be Hel amidst horrible attempts at romance between Kimizuka and Siesta. We then learn the members of SPES are actually aliens (I was just done by this point lol). Siesta dies and her heart is taken by Hel. The twist that Nagisa was another of Hel's personalities was surprising and tied up a few loose ends but it was definitely not satisfying nor was it worth the garbage exposition dump I was forced to sit through week after week. It was also confusing because (unlike the novel) the anime never made it clear that Kimizuka doesn't remember how Siesta died.

  

  The last few episodes introduced Saikawa as the new crutch for Kimizuka to lean on instead of Bat. We meet Char and are expected to care for her despite her being the most poorly-written character with no development at all. The final mystery is just terrible. I couldn't care less for Chameleon and his plans. Then episode 11 really threw me for a loop.

  Siesta manages to switch consciousnesses with Nagisa... even though the show is called The Detective is Already Dead.

  

  The final episode was befitting of a show such as this. An unsatisfying, random ending just like each of the mysteries until now. I am definitely NOT looking forward to any future instalments of this series that try to appeal to the mystery-media demographic, only to throw that all away to pander to unoriginal, formulaic harem fans with a few random twists sprinkled in to pretend it is still a detective story. 40/100 for effort.

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• 

  ZNote

  23/100
  So unsure of itself that it has to somewhat undo its own premise to hold interest.

  SPOILER-FREE!
  Trying to come up with something creative for a genre can be a real challenge. As more and more stories are written and told, one can only imagine the desire to make your own story stand out against the endless expanse of others. The problem only gets compounded further when you keep in mind that every anime season contains about forty new shows or continuations from previous seasons. Cast the line into the lake and hope that someone bites.

  The Detective is Already Dead, on the immediate surface anyway, sounds like an interesting idea from the title alone. There are about three mysteries that are already up in the air – when did the detective die, how did the detective die, and what are the ramifications of that event? It manages to captivate the imagination almost right away, as though the title is insinuating that this story has to be unique. Uniqueness, of course, does not automatically translate to entertaining or good, and it’s only when the episodes get rolling that we see what’s behind the curtain.

  ---

  Kimizuka Kimihiko is a junior high student with a condition that makes him find his way into various unsavory or worrying conditions. One day after being forced to take a piece of luggage at an airport, the plane he’s traveling on gets hijacked. The girl sitting next to him, named Siesta, claims to be a “legendary detective,” and ropes in Kimihiko to stop the hijacking and expose an underground organization. Visited by Siesta at his place and pestered, Kimihiko agrees to be her sidekick and they solve various mysteries together. Jumping ahead a few years, we learn that Kimihiko has entered his final year of high school, but that Siesta had died one year prior. Kimihiko is approached by a girl named Natsunagi Nagisa who requests his help in order to find someone that she doesn’t know.

  With such a crazy premise, the first episode manages to leave a strong initial impression. Siesta’s interjection into the hijacking scenario already paints a mysterious picture as we’re not quite sure what to make of her, both in terms of her intellect and physical capabilities, leading to an action sequence. The battle on the plane was not only well-animated, but also informs the audience that the show will feature seemingly-supernatural elements at play. Although the idea of a character with a giant stinger sticking out of his head might seem silly, care and attention was clearly taken to make the first scenario land with an action-packed, energized punch.

  The energy gets stopped however when that sequence is finished, and even more shortly after that with Nagisa’s introduction proper. Since the end of episode one reveals that Siesta has since died, The Detective is Already Dead needs to have a new character act as a vehicle for getting the drama going, and Nagisa fits the bill, albeit poorly. Her “finding someone” mystery not only gets solved quickly, but also could be seen coming from a mile away such that there is no surprise at the big reveal. Because Nagisa comes into the picture so soon, it also means that Kimihiko is not given enough time in the show to properly grieve the loss of Siesta, who he worked with for three years.

  So Nagisa is here to stay, but her involvement in the next mystery involving a teen idol is so minimal that it makes me question why she’s even there. She has the drive to be a detective, but lacks any of the finesse or refined critical thinking needed for the job. If this was supposed to be a kind of role-reversal, to have Kimihiko now assume the role of detective for a sidekick who doesn’t know what it takes, it didn’t succeed, in part because the mystery surrounding the teen idol wasn’t compelling. Even beyond the idol mystery, the writing appears that it’s forcing her into the material rather than naturally.

  Nagisa’s presence also points to a problem with the show’s structure. The episodes are presented out of their events’ chronological order, meaning that the show switches between Siesta being alive or dead. Telling a story out of order is nothing new, but there needs to be some overarching reason for it or, failing that, a compulsion to make the viewer not care about the episodes not being in order. Because the overall sense of mystery and character is so weak, it comes across more as a gimmick despite the telegraphed hints during the past segments. It also seems like the show is acknowledging that Nagisa is not interesting enough because of her background and little screen-time, so the show abandons her in exchange for going back to the past and showing more of Siesta and Kimihiko’s dynamic.

  But I didn’t feel compelled to watch that, either. Siesta and Kimihiko do not work as intriguing characters, either individually or together as a duo. Their dialogues and conversations don’t come across as two characters who are close or have a particularly special bond, as their dynamic is too dependent on both of them being so sarcastic or antagonistic with one another, playful or otherwise. It struck me less as funny and earnest and more that the writing was trying to demonstrate how witty it wanted to be, but couldn’t be. Sarcasm is fine in moderation, and having a genre-savvy witty remark every once in a while is okay, but to rely on those so heavily is not a substitute for depth. Even though The Detective is Already Dead drops numerous hints that Siesta and Kimihiko are developing romantic feelings for one another, this implies that the characters are well-constructed enough to create such a development.

  Not to mention that as a character, Siesta is too overpowered and skilled at solving crimes. One of the traits that is established early on is that Siesta does not like to act until everything is understood. Taking part in a mystery where the detective has already solved everything before the viewer even gets a single clue doesn’t make me feel like a participant. Having everything solved or with a character who seemingly cannot get outfoxed also means that story events that are supposed to carry a lot of tension don’t carry any. The natural problem that arises from this is why should I be invested in something when I know that everything has already been taken care of long in advance? The draw to writing like this is that it attempts to leave the viewer with a sense of awe at Siesta’s intellect, that she was able to figure everything out and wow with the explanation at the end. For The Detective is Already Dead, it simply doesn’t work. Siesta’s conclusions always seem to be based on information that we either were not privy to, or were seemingly pulled out of thin air to justify her conclusions. So even when we learn about what happened to Siesta, and in the ensuing aftermath of the final arc, I just didn’t feel anything.

  And I felt perhaps even less for Kimihiko. Truthfully, I’m not even sure I can say that he HAS a character, since nothing he does or says inspires me to want to follow him or care about him. Some of the actions and behaviors he adopts seem so nonsensical, even from a dramatic standpoint. One particular arc halfway through the show involves him developing a weird relationship with another character so quickly that it rang completely hollow. And “hollow” could be said of the side characters and antagonists, most of whom brought no fascination or intriguing mysteries of their own.

  Where the show perhaps fails the most is that it cannot be consistent, either in regards to its tone within episodes or with its own plot threads. There’s a scene where a crime scene is found and an ambulance is called, only to cut away a minute later to apples being fed to one of the characters. The first episode decides to try having a romcom sequence in the middle of the second half’s mystery, which felt more like an excuse to put Siesta in a schoolgirl outfit and the duo to dress in wedding garments. Even after the time jump with their first meeting, Kimihiko doesn’t look like he’s aged at all. Him being a bad-luck magnet is, essentially, never referenced or alluded to again beyond the first episode. Worst of all is that Siesta, despite supposedly being dead, is seen quite alive through all of the various flashbacks, as I had already mentioned. Either have your character be dead, or don’t devote more than half of your series showing the period of time when she was alive. It’s almost as though the show is so unsure of itself that it has to somewhat undo its own premise to hold interest, or that it’s hedging all of its bets on the viewer fawning over Siesta at the cost of story. If you’re going to flashback to her being alive, make it brief, but make it count.

  ---

  The Detective is Already Dead was a failed attempt to inject variety into the mystery genre by emphasizing its attempts at drama. With two leads who are not interesting enough to carry the story, a mystery narrative that pulls too many out-of-thin-air maneuvers or blatantly-obvious payoffs, lackluster animation aside from the first episode, terrible pacing, unamusing comedy, and side characters who are too underdeveloped to matter, this was one of the more-frustrating and uniquely-disappointing anime viewing experiences I’ve had in 2021. It ultimately didn’t matter what the show threw at me, be it mechs, an idol character, or a guy with a giant stinger sticking out of his head – I was so uninterested in the story the further it went along. From what I’ve been told, the original source material is better than what the anime gave. I certainly hope, pardon the pun, that’s the case. I have nothing else to say aside from…I just don’t like this.

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• 

  planetJane

  55/100
  Maybe the real "The Detective is Already Dead" is the friends we made along the way.

  

  ---

  All of my reviews contain **spoilers** for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.

  ---

  “And thus, did my dizzying tale of adventure with Siesta begin….
  Until death did us part.”

  It may be difficult now, but try to think back to the opening week of this anime season. Alongside a number of rightly-hyped premiers by anime everyone kinda expected to be good, there was the comparatively obscure __The Detective is Already Dead__. _Tantei wa mou, Shindeiru_, as it’s known in its native Japanese, had, alongside heavyweights like __Sonny Boy__ and the second season of __Magia Record__, one of the most promising premieres of the season. Said premiere, “Attention Passengers: Is There a Detective On Board?”, combined witty dialogue, a gonzo, very capital-A Anime set of central conceits, __[a truly impressive fight sequence](https://www.sakugabooru.com/post/show/158854)__, and one of the season’s best and, let’s be honest, simply coolest characters, the titular detective, into an entertaining stew that had a lot of potential. (Full disclosure; I may have a soft spot for “basically Sherlock Holmes, but an anime girl” as a character idea.) The episode ran through the need-to-knows with the lightning speed and self-confidence of a pulp novel. The secret organization SPES and their army of cyborgs are threatening the world! It’s up to our hero, the legendary detective Siesta, and her straight-laced assistant Kimihiko “Kimi” Kimizuka to stop them! It opens a mile in the air during a plane hijacking and ends in a high school, our leads pulling a drug bust on a dealer in a bunny costume. Capping it all off was a wildly romantic sequence at the episode’s tail end, followed by the header quote in the closing narration to hit us with the emotional coup de grace. Our hero’s been dead the entire time! How will her heartbroken assistant carry on without her? It remains one of the year’s single best episodes, and nothing else I am about to say can or is trying to change that. Episode directors Shin’ichi Fukumoto and Marina Maki should be proud. I bring all this up not to belabor a point, but to make it clear that, yes, there was a period of time–however brief–when people thought this might be, at the very least, one of the season’s better anime. Twelve weeks on, where its reputation is somewhere between “trainwreck” and “widely-dropped laughingstock” that can seem hard to believe, but it’s true. On one level, the answer to the question “what went wrong?” is extremely simple; none of those strengths remained present for the remainder of the series, and some dropped off earlier than others. But on another, Detective is a downright fascinating case of a show almost systematically undercutting itself at every turn. Detective started falling apart as early as its second episode, and despite some intermittent highlights throughout, it never really recovered either. We can start by making one thing very clear. Detective‘s problems do not stem from its premise. They’re certainly not helped by it, but it is very possible to tell the story of a life in the past tense. To focus on what the bygone has left behind, to examine how the people around them move on or how they fail to move on. Detective doesn’t entirely fumble this, but it misses more often than it hits. In fact, its handling of this premise reminds me of nothing less than the largely-forgotten __Blast of Tempest__, which had many of the same issues for some of the same reasons. The core problem is simple; if the central character of your show is dead or otherwise MIA in the present day, she needs a very strong supporting cast. And Siesta, like that show’s Fuwa Aika, simply does not have one. She is a compelling character in search of a compelling anime. It is largely her who renders the show watchable at all, as all the other characters are so underdeveloped that she appears deep as the ocean by contrast. Instead, she gets Kimi, who, to his limited credit, does work out an entertaining straight man / weird girl dynamic with Siesta. They form a fun duo much like their archetypal ancestors (say, Kyon and Haruhi) did. *Yes that’s still Siesta in the top image. Listen, just roll with it.* - There is also Nagisa, Siesta’s replacement, who is in almost every sense a much less engaging character, but who has the benefit of being the recipient of a heart transplant from none other than the late detective herself to at least arouse some mystery. The remaining characters are so thin that they are barely worth mentioning. There’s a chuuni-ish idol complete with an eyepatch (Yui Saikawa), an ambiguous foreigner with some ill-defined relationship to Siesta (Charlotte Anderson), and a mysterious child (Alicia) who turns out to secretly be the evil mastermind (Hel) in disguise / assuming another personality / something, it doesn’t really matter. *The fact that the episode where an idol pulls a revolver on the main character is one of the less interesting ones is not a great sign.* - This lopsidedness of the cast ends up directly informing the episodes. As a general rule of thumb, those that center on Siesta and Kimi tend to be either genuinely good, even if only in a cheesy sort of way, or at least bad in a funny way. Those that focus on other characters are much less interesting. Sometimes they’re flat-out boring, which is a far worse crime than being ridiculous. Beyond that, on a narrative level the show makes very little sense. The actual story is very simple, cataloging Siesta and Kimi’s attempts to take down SPES. And later, Kimi’s retirement from ‘detective’ work and eventual resumption of that same goal again, this time with Nagisa. But the show’s structure is so bizarre that it can be difficult to follow any of this. Why, for example, if the show’s central conceit is that Siesta is dead, does a huge chunk of it take place as flashback to when she was alive? These stories being told in this fashion adds nothing to the show. It makes it marginally more confusing to follow, but deliberate obfuscation is not the same as actually being interesting. Something like __The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya__ or __Princess Principal__ is aired non-chronologically because in those cases, the approach helps develop the sort of story they’re trying to tell. (In the former case, Kyon and Haruhi’s emotional arc takes precedence over the literal events of the series. In the latter case, it is to build up mystery and selectively feed the audience information.) No such thing is true of Detective‘s clumsy halfway flashback deep-dive. And the fact that they are some of the show’s better episodes feels more like a happy accident than anything deliberate. It’d feel like course correction given the widespread but misguided criticism of the premise if that were how anime production worked. But it isn’t, so what gives? And what to make of the show’s *utterly baffling* organ transplant motif? Organs, namely hearts, transferring ownership comes up some three times over the course of the series, which is too often in a show this short to simply be happenstance. And let me make an aside here, folks, I’m not professionally trained as a critic, so I’m certainly guilty of occasionally missing things more properly literate sorts would pick up on. But I *am* a thinking human being, and it’s rare that I just come up completely empty when rattling a metaphor around in my brain. I have no idea what it could possibly mean. None of the possibilities I’ve come up with–the perseverance of love? Specifically the strength of Siesta and Kimi’s relationship? Some hamfisted ‘people close to each other should help each other’ thing? A religious symbol?–hold up to scrutiny. I am left to conclude that it is either a very malformed metaphor or it simply isn’t one at all. In the latter case, why is it in the show at all? That may seem like a minor point, but the same lack of purpose applies to many decisions made throughout the series. Elements like Yui’s job as an idol, the very fact that the antagonists are shapeshifting cyborgs, a weird micro-plot about priceless jewelry and another about a serial killer, the entire character of Hel, the fact that Siesta has a mecha(?!) at one point, even the series’ gratuitous Spanish subtitle, and the anticipated-and-then-quickly-forgotten cameo by Hololive virtual talents Matsuri Natsuiro and Fubuki Shirakami, seem like they were made less for any real reason and more simply because, well, they’re Cool. Or they’re the sorts of things that are “supposed” to be in light novels. English-language info is sparse, but the case appears to be that Detective is the first-ever published novel by its author, Nigojuu, which may explain some of the amateurishness here. Or, maybe it’s the other way around! Studio ENGI are not exactly a powerhouse, perhaps they butchered the material. Maybe the light novel’s defenders are right and all this somehow does make more sense in book form. Hell, maybe it’s somehow both at once. All this said, even with its frankly many flaws in mind, I can’t really hate or even actively dislike Detective. It has too many actually-solid moments and too many bad-in-a-funny way moments to have burned its goodwill from that first episode away entirely. A harsher viewer may write such things off, but I can’t pretend I didn’t enjoy a decent chunk of the show, even in spite of all its problems. That, and there is that Detective does get one thing right. Especially towards its end. Sometimes, people we’ve known all our lives can disappear like a dream at sunrise. Sometimes too, we do not even get the chance to say goodbye. This is the sole emotional string the anime manages to play correctly, and even then it’s oddly stingy about it. But aside from Siesta’s strength as a character, it is this that saves the show from being a total loss. As an even mildly adventurous anime watcher, you expect to take a gamble on some amount of shows that end up not exactly being amazing. Detective is, by any reasonable metric, middling, rather than outright awful. But that doesn’t make it good. Which puts it in a strange nowhere-zone, both in terms of relevance and in terms of simple quality. This is another of this year’s anime that will absolutely not survive the march of history, mentioned as it will be only as a curio or a “hey, do you remember that show with….?” answer. At best, perhaps some of the staff will go on to bigger and better things. In which case it will be an amusing trivial footnote. Call it a victim of the production bubble, call it just poorly-conceived. It is impossible to imagine Detective outside of this present time and place; mid-to-late 2021 specifically. It’s a born relic. Yet, strangely, from a certain (and I’ll admit, uncommon) point of view, that gives it its own kind of hopeless underdog charm. The show itself only just barely manages to scrap together something out of its primary theme of transience (and all else it attempts falls resoundingly flat, make no mistake), but in a meta sort of way, Detective is an ode to its own transience. Here for twelve weeks and then forgotten, as though it simply scattered into light the moment it ended. Like it was never there at all. It’s one of the great mysteries of popular art. Sometimes something that is utterly mediocre will, just for a moment, capture the public imagination or make visible an inner light, only for that light to be snuffed out almost immediately. Such is the case with Detective‘s few true highlights. It is one of the great enigmas of our species’ collective creativity. As such, one would be tempted to ask a great problem-solver, perhaps one like Siesta herself, what to make of it. But of course, such a thing is impossible. After all, **[the detective is already dead.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDzOrjFpceM)**

  ---

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