So far this season I have not seen a lot of knock-out shows. One anime that has seriously caught my attention is “The Detective Is Already Dead.” Spoilers for the first three episodes!

That’s an odd rifle she’s holding. Looks like a musket but doesn’t act like one.

Siesta is the detective. In fact, the “Legendary Detective Siesta.” I fell in love with her immediately. A combination of attractiveness, intelligence, and physical ability makes her a formidable opponent. She believes a good detective is already on the case before the crime even happens. We know little about her except her code name and that she is the “legendary detective.” We never know her age so I’m assuming she’s older than her sidekick.

Standard looking anime hero.

Kimihiko Kimizuka is the sidekick. He’s a boy with a knack for finding trouble. (I was a little disappointed when he started out as a middle school student. I assumed from his behavior that he was much older than his canonical age. But this is a shounen fantasy, so you try to match the audience.) Siesta picked him as her sidekick because he seems to attract criminal events like light draws moths.

Lost her heart

Nagisa Natsunagi is the second female lead. Siesta dies for as yet unknown reasons but her heart gets transplanted into Nagisa

The first episode established a relationship between Siesta and Kimihiko. They are on a passenger jet when out of the blue, Siesta asks Kimihiko to be her sidekick. Almost immediately after this, the plane is hijacked. Our friendly neighborhood hijacker is an enhanced human with an ear that sprouts extremely long tentacles as weapons.

Siesta had known about the hijacking attempt in advance because a good detective is already on the case before the crime even happens. Before he had ever met her, she had her future sidekick strong-armed into bringing a case on board that contained a rifle. The rifle allows her to defeat the baddie.

It would have been so much better had they not given away the story in the title. They did an outstanding job of getting me to care about our detective but they undercut it by telling me not to get too involved because the legendary detective is going to be gone. She managed to press every button I have for falling in love with a character and asking her to be my waifu, (Which Kimihiko eventually sort of does.) yet I can’t let myself go because I know I’ll lose her. I guess they can’t have me blubbering as I did for Your Lie in April, already at the end of episode one.

We don’t know how old she is but from her obvious curves, she is likely older than him, even though shorter. She is certainly vastly more worldly. Kimihiko looks a bit too muscular for a typical 6th grader and behaves with the maturity of an adult. Siesta simply moves in with Kimihiko. The day after the plane incident, she’s just there. Of course, K is an orphaned middle-school boy living alone, (Beat that trope to death!) so no real problem. His faint-hearted attempts to push her away fall on deaf ears. And then she turns on the cute smile and its all good.

And there is a bath scene! A very well-done scene. He’s in the bath. She is just outside the bathroom. He steps out of the bath. She opens the door and enters. He doesn’t react. She doesn’t react. They have a long conversation about the merits of the job she is offering. After a bit, he asks why she didn’t react to what she saw. She responds that she didn’t see anything more interesting than the arrival of the pizzas she ordered.

And how calmly he took the situation. This is no common trope going on here.

This potentially sets the field for a relationship that is both intimate yet not sexual. Is she asexual? Or just has a very mature perspective on such things? (It is how I’d expect a nudist to react. She doesn’t strike me as a nudist.) She deliberately stepped into the bath at that instant to have that conversation. Was it a way of telling him the relationship would just be platonic? Or was she giving him permission to be completely casual and comfortable around her?

There is a certain flirtiness about her that would drive me nuts. I’d say for a boy of that age to live with a woman of her beauty, charm, and intellect, lust would be inevitable at some point. Or maybe he is asexual, aromantic, or something else.

After the plane, their next mystery together is literally a variation of “Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun” where the villain turns out to be drug dealers who can be contacted by if one knocks on the third stall of the girl’s bathroom on the third floor in the old school building at twelve o’clock. An interesting choice of story for an homage.

There’s some cosplay. Kimi thinks about Siesta in a maid’s suit with cats ears, so at least he’s not on the platonic plan. Instead, they dress up as a bride and groom and she symbolically carries him over the threshold. (Actually out a window. After a suspect.) .

A bit later in an airport restaurant, Siesta goes to seal the deal. In exchange for being her sidekick, she promises to protect him with her life. He responds with what sounds like a marriage proposal.

Over the next 3 years, they have many adventures around the world together, always fighting evil. Then we fast forward. At the end of the episode, Kimihiko is a senior in high school. We learn that the detective has been dead for a year now. He is living a quiet life devoid of any purpose or excitement.

In the second episode, he is tracked down by Nagisa. His eyes are dull and he is listless. She asks the “Legendary Detective Kimizuka” to help her find someone. She’s hostile and chokes him. Then she smushes his face into her breasts.

He denies being a detective. He’s just a sidekick but agrees to hear her out. She is desperately searching for someone but she doesn’t know who. Kind of difficult to find someone if you don’t know who you’re looking for.

Kimihiko persists and learns that she had had a heart transplant about a year ago. Perhaps the heart brought with it memories of the original owner and that is what she’s feeling. All we need to do is find the original owner’s identity and maybe we can identify who it wants to find so badly. The audience can put the facts together immediately but it takes a trip to a prison and an old adversary to tell them.

Nagisa has Siesta’s heart. The person she was desperately seeking out was Kimihiko. Her prior life had been kept deliberately empty due to her illness. Now she has Siesta’s feelings to fill her.

Nagisa is okay. But she hasn’t really grabbed me. She is too much a typical pretty high school girl with the twist of some borrowed emotions. It may be too early in the anime for that to pass that judgement. I hope her character develops.

On to their first mystery together! A little loli idol is in danger of having her expensive sapphire stolen. Or is there something much deeper going on?

Damn! I was supposed to do this in three paragraphs and three images.