What They Say:
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The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
With a show as humor based as Cuticle Detective Inaba is, when it does something unusual you have to just roll with it and enjoy it more. Such is the case here at the start as the episode gets listed as an “extra” and shifts us to a Cuticle Academy kind of story where Kei is a new student in the school, Hiroshi is one of the instructors and weirdness abounds. Soumei is a ghost-student who can’t seem to pass on and Yuuta dresses as a girl and is excited to put a leash and collar on Kei in order to lead him around. Add in a goat’s baa sound as the chime/bell for the school and it just gets weirder. And Kei is trying to play the straight man in it by being shocked by how unusual it all is, but it doesn’t last too long since he’s easily getting into the weirdness himself.
The show works through smaller stories in a fun way here that does help to flesh some things out a bit more. While we get the fun extra at the start that’s just full of weirdness, there’s also a tender scene where we see a young Hiroshi with his brother that’s done in a park where we see how he handled things at that age. Another tale brings us Don Valentine and Lorenzo going to a bar late at night in the rain and seeing how surreal everything is to the bartender, from how well behaved the goat is to the way Lorenzo wears the bag over his head. The two have been an odd combination from the start but there’s just something amusing about them as they have the feeling of two very old friends who enjoy each others company without any pressures at times like this.
The second half goes its own way as it plays more to how the series usually is, though it gives us a new interpretation of Don Valentino. The focus here is on a yakuza family head who is going to have some surgery done and the one contracted for it is Noah, who has promised to save his life. Unfortunately, Don Valentino has made a promise to kill the family head so he’s in a conflicted space about what to do since he has to honor both of them. It plays things more seriously here, but still has its humor, especially with the bullet holes that Valentino has that mirrors the Fist of the North Star. The smaller gags are what works here since it’s playing it all very straight – and slower than usual – as it gives it a very different flow from the usually overactive episodes we get.
In Summary:
Balancing the comical stories that are essentially just weird outtakes from the series with some flashback pieces to when various characters were younger, such as Hiroshi or Yataro, Cuticle Detective Inaba plays up the really short form storytelling well. It’s like they took an episode and split it into what a lot of those three minute shows do and just have fun with it. Some are more amusing than others and some are just really strange pieces that you can’t help to grin over. While the show has done well in the last few episodes with its expanding of the cast and managing the split stories, this one goes in a very different direction but works better than I would have guessed.
Grade: B-
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.
