What’s it about? Nagumo Keiichiro was a genius detective in his teens, but has lost his touch—and his clients—now that he’s an adult. His depressed, chain-smoking, back-pain-ridden life is interrupted one day when a teenage girl named Mashiro turns up on his doorstep demanding to be his assistant. While reluctant at first, he takes her on after she proves useful on a case.
Some important context before we begin: while the episode itself doesn’t drop a number, a synopsis informs me that Nagumo is the ancient, decrepit, falling-to-dust age of 35. I’m not certain how old Mashiro is, but she’s too young for the bullshit this episode pulls, that’s for sure.
Credit where it’s due, she’s a pretty funny character when the show lets her loose. She’s the catalyst of some great slapstick, whether it’s an over-the-top fight with the yakuza, or a running gag about her having infinite storage space in her bra, from which she pulls everything from daruma dolls to flamethrowers. Admittedly it’s also fun hearing the warm, caramelly tones of Suwabe Junichi as Nagumo, playing “straight man” to her shenanigans. If the whole premiere had been this, I would have enjoyed it far more. But, well…
The introduction to this jaded detective/rambunctious rookie dynamic is Nagumo accidentally looking up her skirt, followed by wild slapstick violence where she accuses him of being a pervert, and he insists it was an accident, all the while the camera highlights her cleavage and skirt hem. He calls her a tender young girl while his POV latches onto a shot of her school uniform clinging to her thighs. To use the official media criticism terminology, ugggghhhhhhh.
Clearly, Detectives These Days is playing on a particular fantasy: a man yearning for his adolescent glory days feels he’s over the hill, but a hot young girl bursts into his life to pull him out of his slump and put his fractured ego back together. It would be easy enough for Nagumo to recognize his own younger self in Mashiro, or to feel paternal towards her in his lonely life, but neither of those are the framing this series has opted for. It’s jokes about Mashiro being young and hot, leaping at the chance to disguise herself as his girlfriend, revering him even as she teases him about being an old man. I can’t say if it’s setting up a romance, per se, but the direction of the fan service is crystal clear.
While the treatment of Mashiro as a manic pixie Watson archetype is frustrating enough, I’ve barely gotten to the bizarre way this show treats age. Nagumo is an old, old man, it insists, and he needs Mashiro to revamp his whole gig. I get the joke they’re trying to make: he’s leaning into old-school detective techniques and aesthetics and needs to be hauled into the modern day. With less obnoxious framing, that could be kind of fun—a loving parody of detective media, even. But what we get instead is a 35-year-old who doesn’t understand how to use a smartphone, and who needs to be yanked into relevance by aforementioned hot, young girl who has attached herself to him. It strains plausibility. Yes, Mashiro crashing through a window and coming away with no injuries also strains plausibility, but that’s a goofy cartoon visual gag. It makes much less sense, somehow, that Nagumo is so technologically incompetent, and just feels like lazy writing.
It also sucks that his chronic pain is a running gag. Like, again, I get what they’re going for: he can’t do cool moves and dramatic chase scenes anymore because he’s an adult and his lower back hurts. But while this is funny and relatable to a point, after so many repetitions it feels mean-spirited. Not to mention the fact that Nagumo collapsing from a back spasm is what lets him see up Mashiro’s skirt. Diversity win—disability used as a trigger for fan service!
I won’t belabor my point. You don’t need to be a detective to deduce that I did not enjoy this episode—it squandered any goodwill I had towards its slapstick action or genre jokes by hinging its premise on a sexist, ageist character dynamic and inviting me to oogle a teenage girl through the POV of an adult. I will not be following this duo on future cases.
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