In all honestly, if Pod Cops aired on any day but Wednesday or Thursday, I might have dropped it after the second episode.  But midweeks are as usual pretty slim in the anime department (and this season is lean generally) so there’s less of a hurry to pin myself down.  And for sure, this was the best episode of the first three for me.  Even though it used the same two chapter format, it felt less rushed – at the very least, these two stories were more fully fleshed out.  And they were easily the most interesting so far, by far.

I was a little worried about where things were going to with the introduction (via being ticketed for speeding by Kawai while on an unmarked car pursuit) of Minamoto Seiji as a rival of Fuji-san’s.  But he turned out to be a very capable and likeable guy, and was very well-portrayed by Suzuki Ryouta (who looks like a seiyuu breakout candidate to me).  The first story mainly involved an old lady who declares that she’s going to shoplift so that she can see Minamoto-san, but it’s Fuji and Kawai who get sent to deal with her.  She turns out to be a lonely, bitter old bird fed up with her daughter and grandson ignoring her, and with a good deal of vitriol for women cops in general.

I would imagine this sort of thing isn’t unheard of in a country as full of old people as Japan.  Minamoto shows some serious moxie here, taking it on himself to intervene in the case and guilt trip the grandson into spending more time with the old lady.  This is rose-colored fiction to be sure, but that’s the sort of positive impact you’d like to think police officers would be looking to make in a country with almost no violent crime.

The other chapter has the pods being called out to investigate an at-home death (I guess in Japan they don’t automatically call the coroner) that happens to be at the home of the precinct delinquent, Yuuta.  This was a very effective depiction of what this sort of task must be like for cops – and it can’t be easy, especially for a newbie like Kawai.  The suggestion is that there could have been something untoward happening here (the deceased was the father-in-law of Yuuta’s mother) but it turns out she was taking excellent care of him to the point of exhaustion.  I wouldn’t exactly call this a happy ending but it was sort of redemptive in a sense.

Much more so than the first two episodes, this one found the right balance between seriousness and whimsy, and Minamoto made a nice addition to the cast.  I think it’s inevitable that former cop managaka or not this is going to be a pretty sanitized look at the police experience – and that’s fine, as long as it doesn’t devolve into full-blown copaganda.  There are good stories to be told in this corner of society, no question about it, but the jury is still out on whether Hakozume: Koban Joshi no Gyakushuu has the chops to deliver them consistently.  I’m certainly more hopeful on that score than I was a week ago.