Himitsu ~The Revelation~ – 19

Short Synopsis: Whoa! The train-massacre-arc is going to take up three episodes!
Highlights: Talk about a change in plot-direction.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10
Ah, so that’s what it was! The previous episode was supposed to be a huge question mark, only for this episode to shed light on what happened back there. The big twist: this arc is dealing with bio-terrorism: all the passengers in the train were somehow infected with a disease that first shows up on your fingernails. THAT’s why the killer looked at the fingernails of his victims, and THAT’s why the same symptoms showed up at Miyoshi: she’d been sleeping alongside these dead bodies (no, really) and carelessly caught the disease.

And I also knew something was fishy: Miyoshi and Suzuki used to date together, and Maki killed Miyoshi’s lover. There seems to be more than that, though. This episode did show a time where both of them were having a fight. And that Aoki: in this episode he actually tried to hit on (and kiss) her. That idiot caught the disease that way as well. I didn’t quite catch why he did such a thing, but we’ll probably learn that in the next episode.

I remember once noting that this series wasn’t good at characterizations. And yet I was shocked when Aoki revealed his fingernails. And at the same time, Aoki sure changed a lot in this episode, and became much more mature. I feel like this arc was really meant to show how his experiences with the MRI have influenced him, and he’s much more confident now than he was in the first half of this series. I think the first sign of this we saw was in the “don’t reach for that neck”-episode, where he just cut off the head of the dead guy.

I originally thought that it would be best for this series to keep to short arcs, and yet at the same time this is the longest arc of this series yet and it’s looking very promising. I’m really interested to how the creators plan to end this series, and this episode showed me that the best way to end was with a long arc, like this one. This is no Jigoku Shoujo, and for most of the time, it really needs its time to build up, it seems. The surprises worked great in the first half when the concept was still fresh (as shown by episode eight which STILL NEEDS TO GET SUBBED), but when talking about the second half, by far the best stories have been those that had two episodes.

Let’s see whether the next episode can surpass episode thirteen.