Category: Gosick

So, you’re a bad guy. You know that the good guy has something you really want, so you go to the good guy’s room and turn it into a mess in the hopes of finding it, but you fail to notice that huge suspicious cupboard that could hide a small person. Um, tunnel vision?

I really don’t understand the bad girl of this episode. So, she’s looking for a book that contains a letter that contains a rare stamp (the Penny Black, the first stamp in the world, and a misprint at that), that is left behind by a phantom thief. She finds the book, but fails to remove the letter and instead hides it at a bizarre place, only to knock down Kazuya when carries the book when Victorique already removed the letter. Not to mention the bizarre reason in which Victorique managed to find back the book. I mean, if I were to hide a book in a library, I’d look for a random place and then think of an easy way to remember its place. Not the other way around. And how did Victorique get this on her first guess? See what I mean by her “script logic”? Am I missing something here?

Anyway, I had some hopes for this episode, and it did tie together some of the threads that seemed rather random in the previous episode. The way it did this was forced and mediocre, but that’s not really a surprise for this show at this point, because I have to admit that piecing things together creates at least an interesting back-story> i just hope that this wasn’t the final episode of this arc, because it left so much unresolved, especially the backgrounds of these characters: who were they? This episode answered this for none of the characters involved: the bad girl: who is she and why is she the second incarnation of the phantom thief? Avril: where did she come from and what is her relationship with her grandfather and where did that letter come from? What exactly went on between Maxim and his sweetheart? I mean, leaving some of these backgrounds unanswered is no problem, but this was just too much.

One thing I did like in this episode was its clever use of a red herring: her bandaged hand seemed to suggest time and time again that she also decapitated that motor driver, and the entire previous episode seemed to hint that these two stories were connected… and they weren’t. Those wounds were just bite marks. I have to give that to this series: that’s a neat little twist.

Also, to nitpick a bit: “the train from England to Sauvure”… how did that work exactly in those days?
Rating: (Enjoyable)

Aaahh, I give in. Despite how incredibly flawed the mystery in this series is, I’m going to blog it and drop Dragon Crisis, but if Suite Precure next week is crap, I’m going to pick it back up. I know that I’m really juggling around series this season, but blame their strange airing patterns!

The reason why I originally chose Dragon Crisis over Gosick had a lot to do with my assumption that Gosick would only be 12 episodes long (I mean, how much work can you put on Mari Okada anyway). The characters were just too annoying, and because of that I wanted to give Dragon Crisis more a chance to impress me in a second half, despite being much more cliched (hey, there have been plenty of series that start out really cliched, but get more creative and interesting as they go on). But guess what? Gosick is going to be is going to be 24 episodes long. This actually allows the characters to develop and the shows to evolve. Besides, the stories are small and compact, so there should be plenty to talk about.

Don’t get me wrong though, this episode still was pretty flawed. I’m really not sure why Bones put the director of Heroman of all things on this thing, and it shows: this is miles away from their best work. The one advantage that this series has over Heroman however, is that this time, the source material is actually pretty interesting. If you don’t look at the execution, but just at the story, I admit that this show is pretty interesting.

In this episode, the creator pretty much presented two stories for Victorique, and especially the first one was pretty bad: Kazuya states exactly all of the clues that are needed to solve the mystery including a daydream that just… makes no sense, both in the way that he told it and the fact that Victorique connects this daydream to the culprit. That’s exactly what I mean by that Victorique isn’t a genius at all, and how she simply has access to the script of this series. In comparison, a real genius detective would be Sakon, from Ayatsuri Sakon: that also is a series in which people have been murdered by ingenious plots (but not too ingenious to the point where it gets ridiculous), and Sakon mostly spends his time carefully gathering clues and examining his surroundings, before relating all of those together. In Ayatsuri Sakon, we really get to see Sakon’s thought process. In Gosick, we get none of that.

Instead, we just get some interesting stories. It makes no sense, but I do like how most of the mysteries in this series aren’t standalone and how they eventually become connected with each other. This show outright sucks at the “how” of its mysteries, but one thing I like is that the creators wait really long to explain exactly why things happened. This allows you to fill in some of the details for yourself. At the very least, I can see that the original source material of this series had some very interesting ideas. But was Victorique also a Mary-sue like she is in the anime version, or was this completely different?
Rating: (Enjoyable)