At this point I think it’s fair to say that Fugou Keiji: Balance:Unlimited fits that old Seinfeld line about dissecting cartoons and gossamer.  There’s not that much original going on here, and there’s stuff that doesn’t hold up to logic very well when you really think about it closely.  Yet I find it entertaining – quite robustly so in fact, and all the more so over the past few episodes.  If I enjoy an episode immensely as I’m watching it, does it really matter if it doesn’t fully hold water on reflection?  That’s a bit of a philosophical question, I suppose…

While I can sympathize with Daisuke’s desire to know the truth of what happened to his mother, I’m kind of bad to my original assessment that he’s just not a very good man.  That Tsutsui Yasutaka fetishizes rogue cops is hardly surprising given his worldview, but Daisuke takes it to another level.  A nice high-tech holding cell in his estate for just such an occasion as this, where he can keep Takei-san prisoner and interrogate him (and drink Hibiki) for as long as he wants.  And Daisuke makes his priorities very clear when things start to go seriously ass over teakettle back at the mansion while he’s away on a spy mission.  He’s very much a consequentialist sort of guy.

The secret to all this seems to lie in the semi-mythological third laboratory, which Chou-san searched for 19 years ago and never found.  “Adollium” seems to be what the Kanbe family – and HEUSC – and desperately (and murderously) trying to cover up.  Suzue comes to the quite logical realization with HEUSC is not to be trusted when she catches it deleting search links related to the investigation – though honestly, this is one of those head-scratchers because why the heck would they even be using HEUSC at this point?

Chou-san has hoisted every death flag in the catalog, and he appears at this point to have basically come here specifically to be killed. Taking Takei – who had a preference for staying alive – with him is a pretty selfish act.  Why, one wonders, would Chou-san not have a gun with him?  Why would a man presumably in his sixties (if that really was Shigemaru Kanbe) have such an easy time killing two professional cops, even older ones, with just a knife?  No explanations are forthcoming and I expect that will continue to be the case, but like I said this show works better when you don’t quibble.

Daisuke’s parents are played by a couple of headliners – Miyamoto Mitsuru as Shigemaru and Noto Mamiko as Sayuri.  I don’t think there’s any question that Shigemaru killed Sayuri – Daisuke appears to have witnessed the act or its immediate aftermath.  So he knows what happened to his mother – what he’s really searching for is the “why”.  What was so important that it split his parents up and led him to kill her, and is still spawning murders to silence people almost two decades later?

That’s where Katou’s part in all this comes in, as he’s the one with the investigation of the third laboratory dumped on him.  Considering all the secrecy it’s pretty easy to find – a family villa seemingly only a few miles from the mansion.  That’s where he and Daisuke are when Shigemaru shows up at the mansion, knocks out Suzue and kills Chou-san and Takei.  Daisuke makes his choice – the truth is more important to him than Chou and Takei’s lives, and by inference Suzue’s too – but he doesn’t find the smoking gun he’s looking for even so.  Shigemaru may have emerged as the villain of the piece, but his son is no angel, that’s for sure.