Category: Himitsu ~The Revelation~

Short Synopsis: Two policemen end up murdered.
Highlights: Solid episode, and a bit more background on the MRI-team.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10
Christ, this episode took bloody ages to come out. I finally managed to locate a version of this episode on Share (Perfect Dark didn’t help much either). And if this was the only series, then okay, but the same thing happened for Porfy no Nagai Tabi and Ultraviolet as well. A raw for Porfy appeared with a delay of more than four days, and Ultraviolet’s fifth episode still hasn’t shown up. What happened?

In any case, it again took me a while to figure out what really went on in this episode, but it turns out that this was about a group of three policemen, of which one accidentally shot an innocent criminal. He convinced the two others to keep everything a secret, and he kills the wife of the policeman who was beginning to suspect what he had done, making it seem like an accident. This policeman then out of revenge for his wife starts killing off the three policemen.

It’s ironic, how out of all four policemen, the only one who was really evil and started everything was the only one who lives. He’s going to jail, indeed, but the bastard did drag three others into the own problems he created, in an attempt to get away from his responsibilities.

There was a bit of experimental animation here and there, when a scene changed from one location to the other, there was this neat transition-effect. IT worked pretty well to give a bit of energy to the whole episode. Mahou Shoujotai used a similar technique once, where it also put emphasis on these transitions on purpose, in order to keep the viewer on its toes. The effects are quite interesting.

Short Synopsis: A blind director gets murdered by a strange figure with a kabuki-mask on.
Highlights: Finally! Some quality characterizations!
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10
Blegh. Here I am, criticizing this series for failing at characterization, and then it comes and puts down a cast of great characters for this episode to work with. This episode was much, much better than the previous one, simply because of its endearing and well-defined characters. I may not have understood everything of it, and yet I loved this episode, and it finally reminded me why I originally fell in love with this series.

This episode was probably the best in terms of random chatter between the members of the MRI-team. The guy with glasses should speak more often, because his chemistry between the rest of the members is really interesting. But then again, this was really an episode where he could get into his element, with the victim being a movie director, and this episode revealed that he’s a fan of movies.

This episode also had an interesting parallel with a certain episode of Real Drive: the one with the blind artist. Both episodes show the imagination of someone who has lost his or her sight. Himitsu shows literally what it is that he sees. It’s mostly darkness, but I can imagine how he would sometimes get visions like that.

Short Synopsis: The criminal of this episode takes an innocent woman and her baby hostage to demand an investigation by the MRI-department.
Highlights: Rather formulaic conclusion.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 6,5/10
Hmm, this was one of the (if not the) weakest episodes of Himitsu. I can understand the point it was trying to make: the people from MRI are very privileged, at how they’re able to look into the minds of the dead, so outsiders would go very far in order to know thins that otherwise would remain a secret forever. The guy who was taking the hostages has had to live his entire life with the thought that his mother committed suicide, but this didn’t feel right. When the person he suspected to be the biggest suspect for coming up with this lie died, he forced with his little hijacking the MRI to take action.

And indeed, his mother was murdered by this guy. They find out the truth, then return to the place of the hostage (at the last possible second… I hate it when they use that plot-device) and tell him what happened, after which the criminal breaks down in tears, just because of the words of Amachi. It was rather forced, to say the least.

I guess that this is indeed the big disadvantage of this series: it’s excellent at storytelling, but it rather falls when it tries to get too close to characterizations. We just knew too little about the kidnapper to really care about the guy.

On a completely unrelated side-note: consider Soul Eater dropped at this point. I’ll still continue to watch it, but I just don’t feel like blogging it anymore.

Short Synopsis: A woman with red high heels commits this week’s murder. The question: who do they belong to?
Highlights: Interesting twist to the love-triangle.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10
Interesting how this episode didn’t feature Aoki or Maki as the main character, but instead it showed how Okabe stood in the centre of attention. We’re back to regular stories, and the victim this episode turns out to be a rich businessman who was fooling around with a few too many women. The twist, though is that two of these women used to be each other’s lovers as well. Really, women can be scary when they’re serious…

In other news, this post by Usagijen got me thinking. And now that my initial fanboyism over the premise seems over and I look back at the past episodes of the series, then I do agree that it hasn’t been perfect. I agree with Usagijen at how this series lacks subtlety in its messages. The messages are definitely there, but they feel much more like a list of taboos than that they’ve really provoked any real thoughts. I once mentioned how Himitsu was the smartest series of the spring-season, and with this I take that back. That honour falls much more to series as Amatsuki and Real Drive.

Another big minus for this series is also that it’s not that good at characterization. To compare it with Jigoku Shoujo (now that I think about it, a rather similar series), that series knew perfectly to first establish its characters and then to start toying with them, and it did so for fifty episodes with excellent results. It feels that the characters in Himitsu lack a bit in personality.

And then there are the abundances of male fanservice. As the same with a female’s clothes getting ripped apart á la Sekirei: it’s annoying, and this episode has a good example of it when Okabe and Aoki have to pretend to be a gay couple (pelvic thrusts included) in order to find out information. (is it me, or are people quicker to whine about fanservice for fangirls than the fanservice for fanboys?).

So, why do I still love this series? Well, for one thing it does have a great sense of storytelling: it knows when to reveal what and how much, and how to keep the viewer interested, but that isn’t the most important thing. It’s the way it plays around with irony, and that’s something that it does perfectly. I first noticed this with the infamous episode eight. The murder itself already was disturbing, but what made that episode so incredibly awesome was that it took an innocent girl who even could spark some romance, and at the end of the episode showed that she was the entire opposite of that. After that, this series has continued to play these games, for example in episode 11, where the real culprit got revealed, or episode 13, where Maki basically could have saved the lives of 30 people. This episode has it too: it continously refers to women with high heels being murderes, and at the end of the episode we see Okabe, having a date with his wife who wears red high heels. That’s what makes this series so great.

Short Synopsis: The second episode of Maki’s background. We get more insight into why Suzuki went crazy.
Highlights: I’ve spent a few minutes, figuring what to write here without spoiling everything… but failed to come up with anything sensible…
Overall Enjoyment Value: 9/10

Holy crap… it’s episodes like these where Himitsu’s strength really shines. While watching an episode, it may seem like an average, though rather paranoid episode, but then the episode ends and everything comes together, and everything suddenly becomes 10 times more awesome. I still have no idea how the bloody hell the creators manage to pull this off, but this episode remains absolutely amazing.

The big revelation in this episode (which came quite fast, actually) was the fact that Maki had met this crazy mass murderer before he died. The guy tried to shoplift, but was caught easily by the shop owner. The guy looked miserable, so Maki decided to let the guy go with a warning. He even gave him some groceries, because he felt pity for the guy. After that, the guy started brutally murdering 28 people and caused Maki to kill Suzuki, which is the big reason why Maki is still being haunted by this event: there’s no way not to feel responsible for it. Suzuki also wanted to protect Maki from the truth, because as it turns out, the fact that Maki spared the guy had a major influence on the killer, up to the point where he fell in love with him.

However, after he just watched 28 bodies being mutilated beyond belief, there’s no wonder that his mind became unclear as hell. All he could think off was to not let Maki see what he just saw, though he failed to shoot his own brains. This is why his mind got preserved, and in this episode, Aoki finally got the courage to watch it.

On a side-note, I can’t wait for the eighth episode to get subbed and see the reaction of those who watched it.

This episode started out strangely straightforward for a regular Himitsu-episode: a number of boys mass-committed suicide, and saw the image of a boy just before they died. It seemed a bit too obvious for them to just have died, while being haunted by a boy whose death they were responsible for. And indeed, this episode turns out to be much deeper. Those who have been waiting for Maki’s background can rejoice, because this episode really gives the details of how he ended up shooting his partner.

It all happened during the investigation of a horrible mass-murderer, who murdered twenty-eight people and left their bodies in the most horrible states. When he was caught, he ended up killing himself. Katsuhiro (Maki’s former partner) was in charge of examining his brains, but when he looked at it, he turned crazy, shot the MRI-device containing the murderer’s brains and when he attempted to shoot Maki as well, Maki was forced to kill him.

In the end, this same murderer turned out to be behind the mass suicides. At the end of the episode, we’re given the reason of hypnotism, but that can’t just be everything. You can’t hypnotize anyone to do something against his will, let alone kill himself, so perhaps he combined this hypnotism along with whatever caused Katsuhiro to go crazy.

Overall though, excellent episode. Can’t wait to see the second half of this story next week.

With an episode title of “Don’t reach for that neck”, I obviously became intrigued as to what this episode could have in store for us. Now that I finished this episode, I understand. This episode is about the thriller-part of Himitsu: a murder has occurred in a small mountain village, Aoki needs to get the victim’s body to headquarters, but the major problem is that there’s a huge typhoon going on. The road is blocked by a landslide, the car he’s in is stuck, and Maki can only pick him up at an open spot, about a mile away. So indeed, he ends up cutting off the head of the victim’s body so that he’s able to carry it to safety in time. *ehrem*

As for the thriller-part: the guy who was killed made an enemy out of the entire village with his arrogant behaviour and how he mistreated a certain woman. There were lots of people who could have killed him: her mother, her brother, a local guy who looked up to her. In the end, many potential victims end up chasing Aoki to make sure that he doesn’t deliver the head. So in the end the real culprit turns out to be the policeman who kept helping Aoki, and the others just acted because of their bonds of living in the same village, not wanting a comrade to end up in prison. I admit: the creators had me really fooled, and I never took that for a possibility.

This episode was really sneaky: it kept and kept throwing all sorts of red herrings over the place in order to mask the identity of the real murderer. Normally it would have been easy to spot the real murderer through this: the one who gets the least amount of attention is the culprit. The interesting twist however, is that the viewer is completely tricked to think that this policeman is just helping out and doing his job. This probably is because the guy had no intention of going against Aoki. Ah, I love how this series likes to play around with irony.

Another excellent episode from Himitsu. This time, it’s about mass murderers who have been arrested and have gone crazy ever since. In this episode, one of these guys gets murdered during a power outage. Because the security-cameras weren’t working at the facility where he was kept, there was no evidence except for his own brain.

As it turns out, it was a suicide. Being confined has a strange effect on mass murderers, and most of them will end up haunted by the people they killed. This particular guy has found emotional support in a white mouse, who he keeps talking to. When the power went out, his eyes blackened out, and he thought that the mouse was gone and on a whim he killed himself.

This was also a means to test out the capabilities of the MRI-team by a rather ambitious and annoying guy who was in charge of the facility, and as it turns out, the entire suicide murder was set up for this reason. This again brings up the question: these people are utterly useless to society, so do we have the right to just kill them off? I also couldn’t help but think “why don’t they kill the mouse and look at its brains”? This episode really showed how convenient it can be for someone to die, even though it’s morally unacceptable. It’s amazing how critical this series is of modern-day society.

A few episodes ago, I remember noting how I’d like to see the focus of this series go away from Aoki a bit, because the other characters hardly got any attention because of him. It seems like the creators answered my prayers or something, because that’s exactly what the past two episodes have done. While the previous episode was a bit*cough* extreme, this episode gives interesting insight into Nanako, how her parents divorced when she was young, and she grew up without her father.

This episode deals with a serial-killer, who in the end turned out to be a regular salary man who killed off his victims in order to vent his frustrations about his job. The interesting part was his wife, though. We all see this case through the eyes of one of his victims, which turns out to be the father of said wife. He divorced his wife a few decades ago, and he didn’t see his daughter ever since, but when he learned that she got married, he wondered whether she married the right guy, so he went to investigate, and found blood-drenched coats in the guy’s garbage. He couldn’t face his daughter, so in the end he tried to calm down her husband, which got him stabbed in the back.

Nanako thinks that she understands the feelings of the daughter, but instead the daughter starts yelling at her, asking her to leave. It’s not like she forgot about her father, but rather she wanted to forget about him, while Nanako has never attempted to forget the loneliness of missing her father.

OMG! WTF! When I started watching this episode, I had totally forgotten that this series comes from the same production-company as Shigurui. This episode was utterly incredible, but let me put up a warning: if you can’t stand gore or are female, then stay far, far away from it. God, that was disturbing. Here I was, believing that this series wouldn’t go beyond the incest and homosexuality of episode three.

I don’t even want to fully understand this episode. Even without knowledge about what was being said, the themes and messages are rock-solid, and they hit you incredibly hard. I refuse to spoil things, but let’s just say that Madhouse is an animation-company that doesn’t care about censors. Really, even Shigurui didn’t freak me out this much!

God, I love this series.