SHOSHIMIN: How to become Ordinary

Episode 7

Warning: this review will contain spoilers for a book from 1934. As far as I'm concerned, this is well past the statute of limitations on spoilers, but people get picky about those things. The book concerned, is, of course, Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, Hercule Poirot's classic case that ultimately resolves with the seemingly ridiculous “they all dun it.” But while that's become something to be made fun of, most notably in the 1985 film Clue, in Christie's day it was a revelation—and one Poirot ultimately decided to live with because of the reason behind the crime. That's because the victim of the crime was involved in a horrible kidnapping, one loosely based on the Lindbergh kidnapping in 1932, which resulted in the death of the child. It was an unthinkable crime at the time, all the more so because (whatever came out later), Charles Lindbergh was a national darling.

What does all of this have to do with this episode? That's a fair question for most of its run. We do get a very clear shot of Kobato reading Murder on the Orient Express at the start, and we see him returning to it several times throughout the episode, so that's one very good reason. But the final scene is what brings us most clearly back to it when Osanai's mother receives a phone call saying that her daughter has been kidnapped and demanding a ransom. Since this is what happened with little Daisy in the novel (and little Charlie in real life), and despite the delivery of a ransom both turned up dead, the connection is an alarming one.

Or it would be if this show regularly indulged in that degree of danger. We've seen before that this series is happy to imply much more dangerous situations than things turn out to be—such as the bike thief who turned out to be a low-level scalper. This episode is very keen on throwing as many terrible warnings as possible in our faces, with the kidnapping and the drug dealer/user gang that Kento is investigating for his girlfriend. She's concerned that her sister has fallen in with a bad crowd, but a lot of this seems to come from hearsay and rumors of the sort that most middle and high schools have—you know, about how A-ko is totally doing drugs that B-suke is selling, and OMG, did you know that they're sleeping together?! That doesn't mean that such things aren't happening but it still feels more like a red herring than anything, given the general way things have played out in past episodes. There's also an uncomfortable hint of racism about the way the purported drug dealers are discussed during an episode with clear advertising for a reggae festival.

All of the threads will doubtless come together next week. This, like with the bike thief storyline, clearly divides the plot into set up and solution across two episodes, and honestly, everything could turn out to be fever-dream levels of red herrings based on Kobato's current reading material. But I love an Agatha Christie reference, and I'm curious to see how much truth there is mixed into all the clues that have been dropped. Kidnapped or not, Osanai's sweets odyssey has had some rough waters to sail through.

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SHOSHIMIN: How to become Ordinary is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.