By now, Sherlock Holmes has been reimagined through the anime filter more times than I can count and to mixed levels of success. Usually, it's done more through the lens of inspiration—which is to say, having a character who's Sherlock Holmes-inspired but isn't supposed to be Sherlock Holmes. As I sit here typing this, we have that in the protagonist of the currently airing Ameku M.D.: Doctor Detective. Despite the litigious streak of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's estate, there's also a handful of actual Sherlock Holmes-es in anime—the most obvious example being Sherlock Hound. Sitting somewhere in the middle of this Holmes-ian sliding bar is Ron Kamonohashi from Ron Kamonohashi's Forbidden Deductions (henceforth RKFD), who's supposed to be a descendant of the iconic detective. There's more to Ron's lineage than just that, and much of that gets explored in the second season.

Everyone has their own take on what makes a mystery series fun to watch. The key to a fun mystery series is presenting mysteries that are solvable by the audience—and while there's more to it, the major thing this entails is no major off-screen discoveries that we don't hear about until the detective is explaining what happened. And RKFD's mysteries are generally the right amount of challenging—usually neither too obvious nor obtuse, and perfectly solvable to the attentive viewer. The key word is usually; there are a few exceptions to this, but none are egregious.

The conduit through which the audience can solve the mysteries is none other than the brilliant and eccentric Ron Kamonohashi, who feels like he was ripped right out of an anime from the 2000s: he has a signature food (or rather, syrup) that he's obsessed with, he likes hanging around corpses, he has a laid-back demeanor that contrasts a very tragic past, he has a lot of homoerotic chemistry with Isshiki that makes it so easy to ship them. If he had been around ~20 years ago, he would've felt manufactured specifically to appeal to fujoshi and Hot Topic-types who ended all their messages with XD. He instead ends up feeling like a time capsule of sorts—like a reminder of the equivalent of Tumblr sexy men from a time gone by. Intentional design or not, as someone who was forged in the fire of that era, I find him weirdly nostalgic and delightful. I can easily see why the same reasons might lead others to feel annoyed by him or to not “get” him. I loved him.

In the background of all the episodic mysteries is an overarching story involving the House of M—descendants of Holmes' nemesis, Professor Moriarty. They're trying to insert themselves into Ron's life for reasons that don't feel like they entirely make sense (but that I won't spoil for you, since this is something that gets discussed at the end). It's in this overarching plot that I think this series meets its only weakness. It often feels, at best, vague and, at worst, poorly explained. Luckily, it's not always centerstage of the mystery du jour. When it is, the series visibly seems to struggle to intertwine things in a way that fits. Fortunately, this more central mystery isn't always the focus, so it's easy to look past.

There's also the matter of Ron's culprit-killing disorder, which also gets explored and addressed throughout this season as a sort of secondary overarching story of sorts. We see Ron making efforts to deal with this, and the results and ramifications of that effort. It's funny just how wildly out of place it is that one singular character in an otherwise not-at-all-supernatural anime has a geass for no apparent reason. It raises many questions that we don't get substantial answers to. It's just another example of a story element that doesn't seem to have been thought through, based on how little and vaguely it's talked about.

Meanwhile, this series has consistently good art and animation. I love series creator Akira Amano's sharp art style, which was translated well into anime form through diomedéa. The direction, similarly, is consistent in its quality, and a great help for keeping the mysteries within the realm of solvability. The soundtrack isn't particularly memorable, but it gets the job done. The voice acting is great—particularly compliments to Junya Enoki's hilarious Isshiki, who sounds every ounce of the panicky detective putting on a confident front.

RKFD doesn't reinvent the wheel, but what it does, it does well. One doesn't have to blow the audience's minds with a constant stream of wild twists and turns to make a solid mystery—or rather, series of mysteries—and RKFD is a testament to that. While this second season flounders a bit in its attempts at telling a broader story in the background, it still feels like a good follow-up to the first season, if a bit samey outside of that broader story insofar as that it's structurally the same (new, usually unrelated mysteries that get solved in 1–4 episodes). For that reason, I imagine it might start to feel a bit repetitive if you were to try to binge the series in a sitting or two. Still, because it's so similar to the first season, I can safely say that if you enjoyed that first season, you'll almost certainly enjoy this one, too.