Milky Holmes are trapped on a prison island of despair. Will they remember what it means to be a detective in order to escape?
What They Say
Milky Holmes has a brilliant idea! If they’re going to use the detective academy to build a pavilion, why not just have them build the pavilion somewhere else? They set off to Hakkei Island, in Yokohama Bay, to convince the owner to let them build the pavilion there. But Hakkei Island is a prison, and as soon as they get there, they’re captured and put in jail!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
At the end of the last episode, Henriette told the girls of Milky Holmes that, due to their negligence and incompetence, the Holmes Detective Academy was at risk for being shut down and turned into a pavilion for the Detective Expo. Desperate to prevent this from happening, Sheryl decides to stop fooling around, get it together, and simply find another place for the pavilion to be constructed. And where better to build it than the island just off from the local beach? Nero decides she’ll be able to swindle the deed and seal away from the island’s owners, so the four girls board a mud boat and sail off. The boat dissolves in the seawater, leaving the four girls stranded on what turns out to be Hakkei Island Sea Prison, where all of Yohokama’s criminals are kept. Milky Holmes is captured by the warden, who looks like a reject from Fist of the North Star, and his Future Boy Conan-esque minions.
What an sublimely ridiculous episode this is. The girls are soon put to work alongside the other inmates harvesting sea cucumbers that wash up on the beach. The horror is all too much for Cordelia, who once again retreats into a world of fantasy. She’s been a personal favorite of mine since episode 2 of the first season, where her brief captivity in the Holmes Academy’s brig led to delusions of persecution and fantasies of being Joan of Arc. In the PSP game, Cordelia is apparently a responsible older sister character, without any outrageous lapses of sanity. But here, her reactions, from a Kazuo Umezu-inspired face of sheer horror when she steps on a sea cucumber, to her hearing cues of “Bohemian Rhapsody” in a prison work song provide a great deal of the humor.
The episode’s other big star is Arsene/Henriette, who goes into disguise as a shoujo waif in order to find the treasure of “hope” that has apparently been hidden somewhere in the prison complex. Her fragile beauty entrances both the girls of Milky Holmes and the spectre-like prisoners of this dread island, and together, the group is able to find an old man who had tried to escape and gone missing. Though his escape ultimately failed, he found a tapestry with a prophecy, much like the one from Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds, in the warden’s office. With this information, Arsene and her companions help to shepherd the girls toward their roles as detectives once again.
Yes, this means that Twenty once again shows up in this episode, in disguise as a prison guard. I’ve never really been a fan of Twenty, as the humor he brings to the table is bizarrely, unnecessarily sexual and would seem to alienate many viewers who might otherwise like Milky Holmes. His behavior in this episode is so ridiculous that even I couldn’t help but laugh, especially when he flails about using his prehensile nipples as whips. I still enjoyed it when, fed up with the sea cucumbers, Cordelia transforms into a rampaging hatebeast and scares the perversion right out of him.
In the end, Arsene discovers the treasure is nothing but a flower, and leaves the girls of Milky Holmes to their own devices. Big mistake. Upon plucking the flower, the prison compound collapses into its component sea cucumbers. The girls then lead the prisoners to freedom, having seen the cruel warden as nothing more than a merciless “bad guy”, and feeling as though they’ve saved the day. Later that night, Henriette shows the girls footage of the prisoners rioting and burning Yokohama to the ground. G4 works together to gather them all up, and once again saves the day.
Milky Holmes spends the rest of the night in lockup.
In Summary
An enjoyably ridiculous and manic episode. Milky Holmes remembers that they are supposed to be detectives, but don’t really seem to get what detectives are. Still, they show real progress and competence in this episode when Arsene points them in the right direction and keeps them from fighting amongst each other. Will Milky Holmes get its act together before their arch-rival just decides to give up and stop helping them? We’ll have to find out next week!
Grade: A-
Readers Rating: [ratings]
Streamed By: Nico Nico
Review Equipment: Sony VAIO 17″ HD screen
