The mysteries deepen as the interest continues to wane.
What They Say:
Yajima, a man who has just gotten out of prison, pays Shinjurou a visit. It turns out that he’s an old friend of Kaishou and he asks the young detective to break a secret code. Folded inside of a purloined book from Kaishou’s library is a piece of paper from Yajima’s own personalized manuscript paper with a series of numbers written on it. The decoded message indicates a planned rendezvous, which leads to the suspicion that Kaishou and Yajima’s wife had an affair while Yajima was incarcerated. But where are the Yajima children, who suddenly disappeared one day?
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Un-Go adds a new mystery this time around as it gets underway as it introduces to an older man named Yajima. Yajima was imprisoned for quite some time as he ran into some laws that were passed back when things were very chaotic and his criticism of things led him to be thrown into the slammer. Before getting out a week prior, he was visited by someone who seemed to have something very specific in a roundabout way to say to him and left a piece of paper filled with numbers that seems to have an even greater meaning. Because of Shinjurou’s reputation, he’s the first one he went to see after getting out in order to solve the mystery.
Unfortunately, this is the kind of episode where as events progress, things just become less and less interesting. Yajima has his issues since coming back into the real world after being in prison for awhile. One of the harshest is that his wife has suffered blindness during that time as she had spent time trying to solve a mystery herself, but that lead to more and more problems for her. Yajima himelf is not coping well in general either or with her in particular as there’s a disturbing nighttime sequence in which he gets close to strangling her to either put her out of her misery or his own. It’s not terribly clear who is suffering more, though she’s certainly gone around the bend herself.
In Summary:
While there is a mystery of missing children involved here and something that Yajima feels very personally connected to, very little in the episode actually makes for compelling viewing. The more I watched, the less interested in it I became. There are some fascinating elements to it but it’s something that hasn’t really established itself well and it’s left absolutely not caring or being all that interested in the lead characters or their supporting cast. Even worse, those that have come into play for specific mysteries to be solved are even worse off because they don’t become interesting or engaging in the slightest outside of the RAI that we had a few episodes back. Everyone is just so bloody bland that you wouldn’t particularly care if the whole place went up in a terrorist attack.
Grade: D
Readers Rating: [ratings]
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDS-R70XBR2 70″ LCoS 1080P HDTV, Dell 10.1 Netbook via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
