Himitsu ~The Revelation~ – 11

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.