First things first – I genuinely liked the second episode of Cop Craft.  It might be the first real overperformer of the season expectations-wise, though obviously it’s still very early.  I thought this ep built on the potential of the premiere and delivered a more satisfying result in every way (and the premiere was pretty good to begin with).  I’m still not crazy about Tirana and I see no good reason why she had to be a loli character design – this story would have been even better if she’d been an adult woman (technicalities be damned, let’s not kid ourselves about Tirana).  But then, Gatoh or no this series is still based on a light novel.

This ep basically took a two-pronged approach that was simple, effective, and is rarely observed in anime these days.  We got a fair amount of patient world-building – a very interesting premise is being constructed around the fairy dust phenomenon, one with a lot of permutations.  And it gave us a ton of detail that served to flesh out Kei as a character.  It’s the small stuff that turns characters from flat archetypes to fully-realized people – stuff like Kei having a cat allergy and keeping Kuroi around anyway.  And his relationship with the coroner, which made the tenor of their conversation quite interesting.  There was lots of subtext here – and subtext is something most anime just don’t bother with.

While Tirana still grates on my nerves a bit, I did like her snippy interaction after she dispatched the suspect at the start of the episode.  Kei provoked her and she took the bait, but it’s clear he was testing her after a fashion – and just as clear that he saw what he needed to see.  He’s an interesting guy, Kei, and in Tirana’s defense I can see why he gets under her skin so much, but once it was clear their goals genuinely overlapped he pretty much declared a cease-fire and she wasn’t too proud to observe it.

It’s clear that however you want to describe it, this “Mildey” that we’re dealing with is magic by human standards.  Tirana informs Kei that it’s being used (presumably by the evil Marzaney sect of necromancers) to basically animate corpses – theoretically long-term uses of fairy dust, though another possibility reveals itself later in the episode.  If ground up fairy royalty has that sort of power it’s not surprising that nefarious sorts from either world would exploit them to abuse it, but it seems pretty clear we’re only looking at the tip of the iceberg here.

The exchange we see later in the episode raises many more questions than it answers.  The chief of police is crooked for starters (or a guy who looks eerily likes him, as it turns out)- but is it simply about the force being underfunded and understaffed, or was their more to his comment about overthrowing governments?  While the dealer he transacts with is the fairy Elbaji, it’s clear that the real power is the Marzaney wizard who works for him, Zelada (Ohtsuka Houchu).   Elbaji tests his prototype “fairy bomb” on a couple of cops with horrifying results, but claims that the production model might have a radius of 5 KM – and Zelada claims he could control “five or ten thousand” corpses.  This is clearly a whole lot bigger than a missing fairy princess.

Ultimately this is a buddy cop show, yes, but there’s more to it than that.  Still, that side of the show has to work for the series to work as a whole, and so far it’s promising – mostly because Kei is such a complicated and interesting man.  There are moments where you can see a bond of mutual respect an even affection growing between he and Tirana, and her calling him the Semaani word for “fearful kitten” (Kae, which sounds just like his name) was a nice touch.  But she’s the loose cannon, and he’s playing the straight cop role at least for the moment.  I hope at some point Tirana sees one of her reckless solo forays blow up in her face, so she gets a sense that this is not her world, and maybe Kae is someone she ought to respect enough to listen to.