Asian Addicts Anonymous

While episode one of course set the tone for the series with ST not only struggling against their own personal demons and phobias, but also the higher ups that want to dissolve them, it mainly focused on Akagi’s and Yurine’s evolving relationship. This episode focuses once more on Aoyama—I just love her for whatever reason—plus Akagi’s and Yurine’s relationship. This week’s episode will delve into our loveable Kurosaki’s past. I’m curious to know just how he ended up like he does. His soft voice when we do hear it is just…I don’t know how to describe it, but I like it.

This episode revolves around two cases. One is a serial assault case where a person goes around punching people as hard as they can. This is a game to the culprit and really it’s just to see who they can take down with one hit. They post videos of this one YouTube or some such site like it. Matsuda actually brings ST in herself to solve the case. But…we all know it’s not necessarily because she believes in the scientific taskforce. While she is giving the case to Yurine, Takanashi gets a call saying there has been another victim—this time the person died.

Yurine rushes to the scene. It’s unforgiveable what this criminal is doing. Akagi pops up already looking things over. He quickly deduces that the victim was killed elsewhere and dumped there. Akagi believes the murder is a copycat and Aoyama backs up this analysis. She then gives the investigation team a choice. They can pursue the murder or they can pursue the serial violence case. Kikukawa takes on the serial assault case since Aoyama’s research has narrowed down the next assault to two possible locations. Tsutsui (his female partner’s name) wants to know why he’s putting so much faith in Aoyama’s geographic profiling. Kikukawa then reveals how Aoyama profiled his wife and found out she was having an affair. Tsutsui is startled by this news and more upset about the affair than Kikukawa himself who thinks its all his fault for being a cop and thus neglecting his wife.

With Kikukawa and Tsutsui out of their hair for a little while, Akagi vows to solve the murder case himself. He and Yurine check out the victim’s apartment trying to figure out his life. He lost his old job, but must be working somewhere since his rent on his apartment was current. Akagi notices watches with timers set for 30 seconds. Akagi being Akagi forces Yurine to run for 30 minutes. Yurine…being Yurine…does as he’s told while complaining constantly. He calls Akagi when the time is up and Akagi coldly tells him to run for two more kilometers. Once Yurine reaches Akagi, the forensics genius tells Yurine that it’s now his job to canvas the area and talk to people to see if they can discover more information about the victim. Poor Yurine.

It takes Yurine four hours to uncover any information. Akagi chides Yurine that he wasted a lot of  time. It turns out that the victim was a ghost writer for a very famous novelist. With this information, Aoyama begins reading all of the books by the author to do her profiling. Akagi, who himself still isn’t horribly keen on face to face conversation does ask Aoyama about actually talking with the author. Aoyama refuses saying she can find all she needs within the works of fiction. This does seem to disappoint Akagi. Aoyama pinpoints that the surviving writer must be the perp. The man is a rude, narcissist ass, but he’s not the murderer. Akagi can quickly deduce this from the man’s healthy appearance. Just in case, though, he does have the man submit a DNA sample to compare against a scrap of skin found under the victim’s nails. The skin showed signs of advanced skin cancer—it definitely doesn’t belong to the healthy writer.

So Aoyama’s profiling was wrong. And not just in that case. Sure, her geographic profiling was spot on, but the problem was she asserted the serial assaults was a one man job. It turns out that it’s actually a group of men and poor Kikukawa lands in the hospital after getting severely beaten. Aoyama and Yurine rush to the hospital where Tsutsui takes ST off the serial assault case and lies when she says everybody fails at sometime or another. Aoyama picks up on this and you know she’s beating herself up. She does seem very brash and uncaring, but she’s really sensitive. Takanashi has pegged her right when describing her as a different sort of person than Akagi. Like him, she has the potential of being a monster, but is still very fragile.

Akagi calls out Yurine and Aoyama to Saegusa’s bar. He bawls her out for her profiling instead of comforting her like Yurine had hoped he would. Akagi demands that she look long and hard at her profiling and her immaturity. Aoyama goes to storm out, but stays and orders food instead. Akagi storms out and Yurine follows. Akagi vows to throw Aoyama away if she can’t realize her mistakes and walks off. Yurine doesn’t notice at first, but Akagi covered his mouth when he said that—it indicates he was lying. He really does care about Aoyama. She’s too much like him and he knows that isn’t a good thing and that it will also limit her profiling. That’s why he’s so harsh with her more so than the rest of the team (who are always not on screen all that often since we do tend to focus more on Aoyama, Akagi, and Yurine.

Our loveable Cap goes back to the bar and Aoyama is gone. She has finished eating and Yurine smiles at how clean she left her plate—it’s the cleanest he’s ever saw her be. Akagi, surprisingly enough, goes to visit Kikukawa in the hospital. He looks in on him and then leaves his mini Gakky doll in the window to watch over him. Um…you really wouldn’t want to wake up to that thing looking at you, would you? No offense. Anywho, it really does show Akagi’s sense of responsibility towards what happened. He’s not a completely emotionally unattached person.

Matsuda is furious with how things turned out with ST…okay, not furious. She’s happy. You know she wants ST disbanded very strongly for whatever reason. What I think is unfair is that she also seems to be gunning for Takanashi. She demands he take full responsibility for ST’s failure. Of course, Yuki overhears everything and repeats verbatim back at Matsuda. The lady in charge warns Yuki to quickly abandon the team. Yuki just gives a bright smile and says nothing to that. We all know Yuki won’t abandon the place where she belongs.

Yuki and Yamabuki go to visit Aoyama in the ST office as she’s spinning her wheels on the case. Everything she thinks of points back to the author as the killer. With Yuki’s and Yamabuki’s words of wisdom she is able to finally get things put together. She thanks them for their help and wonders who sent them—Cap or Akagi. Before Yuki can answer, Aoyama tells them to never mind—she doesn’t want to know. She quickly goes back to the case at hand. When she gets everything figured out, she seeks out Akagi and Yurine who are bickering yet again. She tells them to quit their flirting. LOL. She then lets them know she has re-read the books and realized there was a third writer who is more than likely the culprit. Cap and Akagi get a bit of a shock when they learn just who the murderer is.

While Yurine and Akagi head out to catch the murderer, Aoyama sends info on the next assault projection to Tsutsui. The young detective dresses like a high school student and draws out the first attacker. He runs when he realizes it’s a setup. He then runs in Kurosaki. The man acts afraid until his posse shows up. Too bad for them, it’s Kurosaki and not someone else. He easily takes them all down. He speaks his few lines. He gives the leader a sucker punch for Kikukawa and one hard one across the face for all the victims. Tsutsui rushes in and keeps him from doing any more harm.

Meanwhile, Yurine and Akagi confront the building manager. It turns out that this old man is really the long lost father our narcissist writer was looking for by becoming a novelist. When he realized that the young man was his son, he became the building manager just to be near him. The young man invited him to help write his books and the rest is history. He killed the ghostwriter because he was going to reveal the whole story about the author to the press. So…we at least get a bittersweet reunion between father and son at long last. Too bad his dad faces jail time and probably can’t live to see his trial date due to the advance stages of his cancer. What is the father’s advice? It’s time for his son to use his real name instead of a pen name.

Matsuda doesn’t seem too pleased with Takanashi’s report of the ST team successfully helping solve both cases. She tosses the papers in the air and makes Takanashi pick them up. I don’t like this woman at all. Nope, nope. Yurine and Aoyama go to the hospital to visit Kikukawa as he’s being released. He doesn’t blame Aoyama for his injuries at all and thanks her for doing her job and helping catch the crew of thugs. Tsutsui then shows the Gakky doll to Yurine who goes to the Saegusa’s bar. He can’t help but stare at Akagi with a great big grin.

These two. They are so cute together. I can’t wait for the next episode. I am enjoying this series even if it’s rather typical in the grand scheme of drama tropes and stories.