Well, whether it makes sense or not Housekishou Richard-shi no Nazo Kantei marches onward despite airing the most finale of finales last week.  And I’m glad of it – I like this show a lot, even if I would have preferred it choose to end with the white sapphire arc.  But it’s a peridot – a very ancient gemstone with a wealth of legends and myths surrounding it – that we continue the story with.  And once more the series’ eye is focused on the past, Richard’s to be specific.

Coincidence is the price of admission to Housekishou, as I’ve noted before.  It asks a lot if suspension of disbelief to go along with all the stuff that happens by chance on this series, and Seigi not just seeing Richard’s old governess on the streets of Ginza but offering to carry her bag is right up there.  Hell, she’s not even all that old and it wasn’t even that heavy a bag.  The thing is that these preposterous coincidences usually lead to interesting developments, so you just have to accept it as a bit of lazy writing and go with the flow.

For the record, I felt sorry for Jean Valjean before his encounter with the bishop too, and shame on you if you didn’t.  The apple has clearly not fallen far from the tree with Richard, but while it’s his mothers maiden name he’s adopted, his tastes seem mostly to have come from Chieko (Shinada Miho).  She’s the one who taught the young Richard and Jeffrey Japanese (though just why this was thought a necessary skill for young English gentlemen I’m not sure), the love of pudding (with black sugar, most commonly seen in Japan and little-known in the West) and the mannerisms Seigi has come to know and love.

More importantly, it seems that Chieko filled the role of mother for Richard that his own mother Catherine (Kojima Sachiko) was singularly unable to fulfill.  She’s an actress if I remember correctly, and seems to have been absent from the estate most of the time.  In theory she was going to reconcile with Richard’s father, an entomologist, and the whole family zip off to the Amazon.  But Catherine wants out, and she drags Chieko into a (rather silly, if we’re honest) scheme to drive a wedge between she and her husband using her supposedly stolen peridot necklace.

There are other complicating factors here, among them that Chieko seems to have been having an affair with the Count.  In any event she flees (from the Count, mostly) after the incident without even saying goodbye to Richard.  That’s why he’s used Catherine’s name in Tokyo, in the hopes that she might find and contact him.  Of course that’s where coincidence and Seigi come in, and the rest is history.  It’s a rather nice story, even if it’s all pretty unlikely in petty much every way.

While there’s nothing about this piece that lends itself to concluding a series, I suppose it had to come after the white sapphire incident to make sense (actually, I’m not even sure that’s the case).  But what happens in the final moments of the episode does suggest something more final, and that’s the sudden appearance of Seigi’s father.  I don’t recall that he’s been mentioned yet, but judging by his appearance and Seigi’s reaction it’s pretty obvious this is not a longed-for reunion on his part.