Short Synopsis: Ran, Rui, Rin and Midori solve the case of the haunted resort building.
Highlights: Dialogue-heavy like no other.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10
Whoa! Since this is a NHK children series, you wouldn’t expect the dialogue to be so hard to understand, but Telepathy Shoujo Ran somehow manages to do it with this episode. Heck, the entire episode was one huge non-stop dialogue, with perhaps one or two seconds at which people weren’t talking. I really must say that for a children’s series, this series is pretty smart.
Okay, so if I understood correctly:
– Inside the resort, one of the guests who were staying with his family was killed.
– The one who killed him is an old classmate of his. The two of them killed (at least, that’s what I suspect, in any case they buried the guy’s dead body) one of their friends when they were young, and were too afraid to admit that what they did was wrong.
– They buried him at the place where the inn is right now.
– After the recent ghost sightings, the culprit wants to buy the inn, in order to get rid of the evidence and rumours.
– The culprit then killed the victim by throwing ice-cold water on him, to cause a heart failure.
– I didn’t quite catch why the victim had to be killed, but I suspect that he had enough of keeping their sin secret and he was planning to notify others of it.
This is why I love these NHK children’s shows. The kiddie series are of course to be avoided, but the series that air here can and will be surprisingly mature for their audience. Tsubasa Chronicle was about the only exception, but take a series as Dennou Coil, which very openly discussed the issues of death and forgetting about the deceased ones. Kaze no Shoujo Emily in its turn was very poetic, and also managed to slip in a number of deaths and mature topics, and Telepathy Shoujo Ran looks about to do the same. There’s of course censorship: the death are never referred to directly, and yet this episode was nothing short of a murder mystery story.
Seriously, I wish that Dutch children’s television was as good as this. I’m not saying that American children animation is bad, but nearly all of the stuff that makes it across the Atlantic IS, and everything is horribly dubbed. I mean, how else are these children going to learn any decent English?
Okay, enough ranting, my point is that I really liked this episode. For a murder mystery, this episode was surprisingly interesting, especially due to the lovable cast of characters, and even the ones that only appeared for one or two episodes are enjoyable to watch. I also liked how this episode combined both fake ghost sightings with real ghosts. That grandfather in bermudas was a nice touch. 😉
