Tantei Gakuen Q mid-season impressions

I want to see if I cannot catch up with some of my drama watching in time to cover at least one of the upcoming summer dramas. My backlog of dramas I want to watch just seems to keep growing...

About half-way through the drama and things look like they have begun to kick into high gear for the final arc. In fact I would split the series into two arcs, the beginning arc from episode one to five that is more about bringing the team together to start working as a team then from six on it looks like it will be mostly just focused on Pluto, the organization operating in the shadows helping making the murders happen.

The mysteries have been good with being believable, if just a bit easy to figure out the culprit for some, and making sure they include the motivations behind the culprits. I have found that motivation tends to get glossed over in other mystery series as the writers tend to get too wrapped up in how the crime happened without thinking about why it would have happened. So it is nice to see this series avoid that problem.

While I have been enjoying the mysteries and all one thing that gets me every time one is solved is that Kyu (Kamiki Ryonosuke)will lecture the culprit. For a couple of the cases it worked out but for others it seemed like an ill-fit, as I doubt the murderer at the time was in any right state of mind to want to hear a kid tell them how wrong they were for doing what they did.

Kamiki is doing a good job of having to carry this drama despite being so young. I can really see why he was selected to play the lead in this series. And I am not surprised both him and Shida Mirai have gone on to be popular actors in their own right since.

Kyu and Minami Megumi are characters that do not take a lot to make you sympathetic to them, with Kyu seeming to take each case to heart and Megu having to deal with the fact that she remembers everything perfectly, which includes the gruesome murders they have to deal with.

Amakusa Ryu (Yamada Ryosuke) has become a much more sympathetic character from what we saw of him in the first episode. He still is mainly the brooding, loner type but you can tell that by the end Kyu will have won him over. I think the biggest indication of that is the fact that Kyu is willing to accept him no matter what his past is. And I am glad that we are getting to Ryu's past and already know a bit of it already instead of having it teased about until the end.


While this is not going to become a favorite drama of mine I am enjoying watching it and very glad I hunted it down to watch. I think the real test for it is how it will deal with wrapping up the Pluto plot line. It is something that could horribly wrong or really well depending on how it is dealt with. So off I go to complete this series.