Kagi no Kakatta Heya SP

Enomoto (Ohno Satoshi) returns with a TV special to one of my favorite Japanese mystery-solving dramas: Kagi no Kakatta Heya. This is a much needed extension to the series, seeing as how the main drama ended on a very ambiguous note, in fact, it was rather out of nowhere and unsatisfactory. Have you been wondering what happened after our resident genius flew off to who-knows-where? This SP will help you get closure to a nice series, but perhaps, not without a price.

First let's look at what actually happens in this SP.

  
Our cast of regulars, Aoto (Toda Erika) and Serizawa (Sato Koichi) are mostly the same as usual. With past influence by Enomoto, they keep looking out for locked room cases, and Aoto in particular can't help but try to do something for the people who come to talk to them.

Serizawa falls into a new case while he's doing his normal lawyer duties, when a client is found dead in a locked house. He puts on his usual airs pretending not to care, but since he's oddly being targeted by a strange character, he keeps trying to get everyone to pay attention to him and the case.

Aoto meets Enomoto again while she's helping such a pair of people, as he's been called for work as a security guy by those same people. She instantly gets Enomoto to solve the current case, but it so turns out that its "culprit" was the "fake-culprit" of Serizawa's case.

  
So they dig in deeper with the case, now armed with the power of Enomoto. It doesn't take him long to figure out the real culprit, but just when they go to confront him, they find him dead in a locked room. So much for that bust.

  
The remaining is just solving this last mystery. There is only one person who is obviously suspect (Fujiki Naohito), but it takes some going back and forth to figure out just what kind of tricks he used. Of course, in the end, when faced with Enomoto's superior skills of observation, he is touched to be noticed and just confesses to his crime.

So what happened to Enomoto?

  
After he took off at the end of the main series, Enomoto travels the world for months, collecting antique locks. When he comes back, he opens up his own "security shop". The only problem is, the shop itself is so secure, it is not conceivable that any customer can actually come to shop. Enomoto says this is intentional, though, as he only serves clients that were referred by another client. To top that, the items offered for sale are things like night goggles and door picks. Aoto wonders if he just serves thieves, but Enomoto flatly denies it.

So now that we know what Enomoto's been up to, wonder how he could actually achieve all of this? So does Serizawa:

- Where did you get the money?
- Savings.
- How did you save it?
- I worked hard.
- You went all around the world.
- Savings.
- You're the owner of the shop?
- I worked hard.
- How could you save so much?
- Savings.

Verdict

The SP was nothing more than two more episodes on top of the main series, in fact, it felt a lot like the 2-episode story of the last two episodes of the first season. While the explanation of what happened after the main series was really short and it felt like nothing even changed - doubly making you wonder what kind of an ending to a drama that was - it still did provide answers. I think rather than watching this SP with a 1.5 year gap from the main show, watching it directly after the final episode would provide a much more satisfactory series ending.

My problem was, somehow it just didn't feel as good as the show used to be. So, wondering if it's just my perception change during the time gap, I went back and watched one of my favorite episodes: The one with the broken house and tennis balls. Indeed, the main show was better. I can't really put my finger on why, but the picture and directing in the SP feels worse, and overly green, a lot more than the main show. Even though the music and actors are the same, the aura it put off is too bland this time around. I didn't find the mysteries neither interesting nor compelling. In fact, the tennis ball episode was more interesting even though I even knew the solution to the mystery, but of course I didn't remember the whole thing.

I didn't like the SP as much as I like the show, but I'm glad they made it. I hope they make more mystery shows like this that are slightly different from the typical cop dramas! Fare well serving criminals, Enomoto.

In other news, I couldn't help but notice how much noticeably worse Ohno's skin got in just a year.