The cycle is broken, happily.  Fugou Keiji has strung two good episodes together for the first time, and given how meager the competition is this season that’s enough to get me to commit.  My perception is that it took a few eps for the creative team to find their mojo, and given how strong that team (Ito Tomohiko and Kishimoto Taku) is, that makes sense.  It also fits with the dexterity this show has displayed tonally – these are extremely solid veterans at the helm here.

After last week’s comic turn, this time Millionaire Detective gives us a solidly engaging cop story.  At the same time it plants the seeds for what could be important recurring plot themes, involving both Daisuke’s family and the Modern Crimes Division.  Truth be told the sense is that the Kanbe reach is so pervasive that they’re involved in every plot point sooner or later.  There’s more to everything than meets the eye, and Daisuke’s family is connected with most of the stuff we can’t see.

“Poliador” is the name of the fictional Latin American country at the heart of this subplot.  Its president (Yasumoto Hiroki) is in Tokyo to sign some papers finalizing the construction of a dam in his country.  It seems as if Kanbe Corporation is a major benefactor to the President and indeed the main financier of the dam project.  The complication is that the dam is slated to flood the homeland of one of Poliador’s native tribes, and the President is rightfully leery of terrorist attacks in retribution.  If the Modern Crimes Division was assigned to security along with First Division for anything other than plot convenience that isn’t made clear in the episode, but there you go…

The original novelist behind this franchise, Tsutsui Yasutaka, is known as something of a far-right nationalist.  And even though the anime has clearly made extensive changes (Katou doesn’t even exist in the novels), with plots like this one does tend to get a bit worried about where the story will go.  Indeed, the native people are cast as terrorists here.  One of them, Ricardo (Ono Daisuke), is an embassy employee who’s behind the plot to murder the president in protest against the damn construction.  He kills the embassy chef (set up quite cleverly it must be said), and manipulates events so that the president and his security chief are locked in the panic room.  There, Ricardo has planted a nerve gas bomb inside the storage cupboard.

I have no idea if this story appears in Tsutsui’s novels at all, and if so whether Kishimoto-sensei softened it for the anime, but here the general tone is more “a pox on all their houses”.  Ricardo is a terrorist, but he takes pains not to (excessively) kill innocents in his attack.  And there’s no dispute that the president is corrupt.  The twist here is that Daisuke is present – not as security, but as the representative (Grandma is ill) of the Kanbe Corporation.  He winds up locked in the panic room too, and while he does manage to find out what’s in the bomb courtesy of HEUSC, for once he’s unable to do anything to save the situation (nor is Suzue, who crashes her bike avoiding a cat on her way to rescue Daisuke).

That job falls to Katou, who’s only able to do so because the groundskeeper has made a copy of the key to the panic room (which strikes me as extremely impossible) so he can use it for his jerk-off sessions.  There’s a lot of interesting stuff along the way here, such as HEUSC refusing to give Daisuke info about the VX gas – there are Kanbe secrets even he’s not privileged to share.  Daisuke also remarks to the president that he won’t be succeeding as the family head.  And then there’s old Nakamoto Chousuke (Kamiya Akira) of the MCD, who seems to know why more about certain things than he should.

The most interesting angle for me involves Daisuke, who’s still something of a mysterious figure.  I wouldn’t say he’s a black sheep in the Kanbe family but he’s clearly an oddball, and I’m wondering if his reason for becoming a cop in the first place isn’t because he found himself disgusted with the way his family made their fortune and simply wanted to do something less icky.  In my experience guys like Daisuke tend to be more motivated by boredom than anything else, but even last week I noted my suspicion that he had a childlike notion of wanting to do something positive for the world.