What’s it about? Sakuya Outsuki is the teenage son of a world-famous detective. Despite his assistant Lilithea’s encouragement, he has no ambition to follow in his father’s action-packed footsteps and prefers staying out of the limelight. Especially because he has a secret he wants to keep under wraps: when Sakuya dies, he doesn’t stay dead.
As far as I can tell, this has no connection to the series The Detective is Already Dead—the fatality stats for anime detectives are just really high at the moment.
Killed Again, Mr Detective? wants you to take it seriously, but alas I have to report it’s fundamentally very silly. The first clue is the extremely whimsical logic around what a private investigator’s work even is: “world-famous detective” exists as a viable career path, Sakuya’s dad is constantly away doing action movie nonsense like un-hijacking hijacked planes, and it’s perfectly reasonable for a teen boy (and his ethereally beautiful and mysterious assistant, who is also a teenager) to skip school so he can go undercover on a cruise ship. If the episode’s storytelling had more pizzazz, I’d be waving it off as a tropey yet fun mess. However, this premiere gave me very little to enjoy so now I’m nitpicking its clichés. Oops. Well, let’s get into it!
Despite his immortality gimmick—which is revealed only in the final seconds of the episode—Sakuya is pretty dull as a protagonist, so let’s talk about the weirdness around Lilithea. Remember how I said I have a soft spot for fiendishly loyal second-in-command characters? My love for that archetype comes with a big caveat, and Lilithea nicely demonstrates it here. She is Sakuya’s devoted and competent assistant, but to a degree where she’s basically a walking prop that holds him up, with very little else to define her character. Unconditional “I’ll kill for you” support loses its appeal when it’s just an excuse to have a pretty girl glommed to the side of a much-less-interesting and much-less-competent male lead. Or rather, if Sakuya is meant to come across as interesting and competent, the storytelling sure does a bad job showing us this, leaving the whole “partnership” feeling hollow.
She seems to exist to steer this listless kid from place to place. She organizes his clients and investigations, guides him in his investigative work, and is ready with monotone, slightly whispery infodumps about everything and everyone. Amusingly, her robotic delivery of knowledge isn’t consistent. Maybe it’s a subtitling choice, but it was a bit jarring and funny to see her rattle off highly specific stats about the carrying capacity of the cruise ship, but off-handedly refer to “some travel company” as if the details of that suddenly don’t matter.
It’s a nitpick of a small detail, I know, but it’s a lazy flourish that draws attention to the overall slapdash-ery of the writing. Lilithea doesn’t feel like a person, she feels like an exposition machine with an over-the-top character design, transparently there to be looked at by the audience members self-inserting into Sakuya. It doesn’t help that she’s introduced with a misty panning shot of her taking a shower.
The show gestures at deeper mysteries surrounding her, and to its credit it does try to give her one (1) character trait outside of her support-staff relationship to Sakuya (she loves playing darts!), but I find it hard to take it seriously with the rest of the framing. The other main female character isn’t much to write home about, either, though I guess I have to credit the range of characterization on display. See, Lilithea is very cool-headed and softly-spoken and intelligent, and Yuriu is a loud-mouthed, extroverted ditz. We meet her when she falls through the ceiling of the men’s bathroom because she was crawling through the vents searching for a missing cat, dressed in a princessy idol performance costume with way too many bows and a bit too much cleavage. What the hell, sure.
An immortal detective trying to solve his own murder is an interesting premise, and this premiere has done some criminally uninteresting things with it. I want to be entranced by the supernatural cliffhanger we’re left on, but I’m simply too distracted by the silliness around the female characters. The image the episode ends on is Sakuya waking up with his head resting in Lilithea’s lap; imagery that echoes all the promo posters and light novel covers. Maybe fans of the source material will be cheering for joy because they did the iconic thing, but I find it hard to stay intrigued when the female lead is essentially a sentient pillow.
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