The Perfect Insider

Episode 9

Mystery stories are generally about sleight of hand. Part of this is in how the criminal deceives the protagonists, obviously, but the greater part is in the author's hands. How a writer fools an audience into thinking a mystery is a solvable, “fair” collection of moving parts, and not what it actually is (a narrative where the author not only holds all the cards, but actually invented the deck), is what decides whether a mystery will be shocking, satisfying, insulting, or boring. Mysteries aren't about crafting puzzles the audience is just barely unable to solve - they're about maintaining the illusion that the audience might ever have been able to.

There are exceptions to this, of course, but The Perfect Insider isn't the most obsessive about its mystery storytelling, and so it's not one of those. This episode shifted from the character focus of the last two to wholly embrace the raw mechanics of the mystery, rushing towards the grand reveal as fast as possible. The police have arrived now, and our junior detectives are running out of time, so if they're going to solve the case, they'll have to do it in minutes, not days.

After a not terribly interesting scene of Moe getting jealous of Souhei's associate Gido, this episode jumped straight into sussing out Magata's last secrets with Moe and Souhei on the roof. Looking back over the clues, Souhei stated that “my hypothesis requires a way to get through that door, no matter what.” It was a line that nicely reflected what he'd said about his own reasoning style last week - instead of simply throwing out ideas, he figures out what end state he wants to get to, and then charts a course there by filling in the necessary assumptions with information over time.

But it was Moe who articulated the first big reveal this week, when she stated that Magata's murderer got in with Magata. Fifteen years ago, Magata entered her isolation chamber pregnant, and since then had been sharing her home with a child. This solution, absurd as it was, certainly made sense of some of the details of her living quarters. The random toys and preoccupation with sewing seemed a lot less incongruous with the knowledge that Magata was raising a child.

With the knowledge of how the “murderer” got inside the room solved, the next solution to find was how they escaped. Souhei was the one to figure this out, as he realized creating a getaway window was likely as long-term of a plan as Magata's isolation itself. Looking back through the lab's video logs, he pointed out that their tapes from that very day were missing a minute. That minute hadn't been removed - it had never existed. The lab's old systems had been recording time a minute fast for years, and when the group reset Red Magic, that reset fixed the timers and bumped the minute tracking the killer's escape into oblivion. With all that information in place, and more concrete knowledge of the Red Magic update and door programming courtesy of Moe's genius for calculations, Souhei prepared to reveal the truth to the detectives, lab employees, and Magata herself.

This was a fun and speedy episode of Perfect Insider, even if the mystery only continues to get more absurd with each new variable. None of the reveals here broke the existing frame of world assumptions, which is the important thing - these really did feel like solutions, and not like inventions out of nowhere. This episode didn't have any of the nice character bits or visual ideas that made the last two great, but it had other priorities, and overall I'd say it succeeded in accomplishing them.

Rating: B+

The Perfect Insider is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Nick writes about anime, storytelling, and the meaning of life at Wrong Every Time.