The big danger of this second season is the entire premise of it: the way in which the lead characters have completely forgotten how to be detectives. I mean, it’s original, but this also means that they’ll be pretty much goofing off instead of doing detective stuff. That’s what this episode was about.
Just… nothing happened here. This really was the characters goofing off on and on. They were just randomly fighting with each other, and playing Jenga of all things. For most of the first half of this episode, I thought that the creators perhaps finally lost their inspiration. And then everyone started sleeping.
The dream sequences were just hysterical. Dreams intertwining has been done before of course, but this one did it with such energy that it just immediately became funny. It was also completely absurd when people suddenly started using their Toys in order to manipulate these dreams. My favorite was turning that clock into the giant robot.
Also, near the end of the episode it also became clear that the goofing off is intentional and part of the story. It heavily hinted that this won’t be the status quo for much longer. Why they decided to turn Hercule into a closet pervert, I have no idea though.
Also, regarding the animation: I found out that Seiya Numata, on top of designing the characters, has also been promoted to the chief animation direction for this series. For the first season he only did a few episodes (which really showed by the way), but here his influence is in every single episode. It’s really great to see that after Shion no Ou he finally can show his an animation across an entire series again.
I also love how different these two series look. Shion no Ou had a limited budget and some unconventional animators, and it turned into a series that made extremely good use of this limitation by making every shot count. Milky Holmes instead has a much bigger budget, and therefore focuses more in bringing life to all of the scenes. It’s all very addictive.
Rating: ** (Excellent)
The craziness has been toned down in this episode. The dream sequence was awesome though.