The Detective is Already Dead – Summer 2021 Anime First Impressions (Spoiler‑Free)

Welcome back for round two of Yatta-Tachi First impressions! In case you’re new, or in case you’ve forgotten, this is how we do things around here: in the week or two before the start of each new anime season, we run a poll for our readers to vote on what series they’d like us to cover. We then review the first episode of the three series with the most votes. This season, those series are The Case Study of Vanitas, The Detective is Already Dead, and Sonny Boy. Of those three, The Detective is Already Dead is the second to air.

Thwarting a hijacking with the beautiful, silver-haired detective, Siesta, transforms Kimihiko’s young life. Their success kicks off years of crime-solving and confronting syndicates around the world—until Siesta dies. Left with questions, Kimihiko moves on. But now, a new case may open healed wounds as it connects to an assassin, a world conspiracy, and his dead partner! – Funimation

Let’s see what our team of writers had to say!

William Moo

This roughly hour-long premiere may feel a bit unwarranted because of the long exposition dumps you hear in this first episode. The Detective is Already Dead is less of an anime that deals with mysteries and more with the mystery surrounding one of our lead characters, Siesta. It has more in common with an action-adventure romance series if anything else.

Despite that, I feel I never really got to see more of her work throughout the episode, as things are either taken care of offscreen or glossed over quickly. Her odd-couple relationship with Kimihiko is thoroughly explored in the second half, as they’re investigating a string of Hanako-san incidents that we’re told the resolution of rather than being shown it. I guess that’s my biggest problem with the series so far and I wish the plot would unfold more naturally, rather than being force-feeding us with information.

We also know that after the meeting, Siesta and Kimihiko spent a significant amount of time together, but we aren’t shown what happened or how Siesta died. The episode leaves us on a somber cliffhanger, so I’m curious to see how it approaches Kimihiko’s narrative next.

Kaley Connell

Guys. Don’t. Just don’t.

There is nothing good about this show. The voice acting is meh, the art is meh, the animation is meh, and the story is actually just shit.

You’ve got a middle schooler who looks like he’s a 20-something-year-old businessman and is for some reason ripped??, a girl with literally zero personality who’s just trying to be a moe version of Sherlock Holmes (To be honest? It’s not working. And I’m a HUGE Sherlock fan, so much disappoint.), you’ve got some stupid plot that’s half wannabe-sci-fi-mystery-solving, half let’s-sexualize-middle-schoolers, and it all accumulates to be 45 minutes of actual hell. The Detective is Already Dead takes what sounds like an awesome premise and turns it into one of the worst piles of anime garbage I’ve ever watched. And readers, I’ve been watching anime since 2004. I have seen a lot of garbage.

Seriously, the only takeaway I got from this episode is that if you take every cliche trope and put it together in the worst way possible, this is what you get. And had it not been for my crippling OCD, I would have DNF’d the shit out of this after the first five minutes.

Daryl Harding

To sum The Detective is Already Dead up in just one line, “What kind of contrivance was that?”

Everything about this show is either just too much, too little, or just “what?” The main characters are supposedly middle schoolers, who speak like seasoned adults and look older than the (of course) missing parents.

The animation is all over the place, though one cut of animation in its first half that had no right being as detailed as it was–in fact, up to that point in the episode, the anime’s animation was so dull and ordinary, I couldn’t pay attention to the weird words coming out of the legendary detective’s mouth.

And the tone is everywhere, one minute we’re fighting on a comically large plane that would put the runway from Fast and the Furious to shame, to the next at a school festival playing dress-up and hunting ghosts, to the next minute talking about death.

I will say one thing, if the first episode was only 24 minutes, this would have been a complete drop. Whatever The Detective is Already Dead was cooking up on that plane, I wanted no part in. But the second half of the double episode was a step up, with Siesta’s and Kimi’s very adult relationship being a little fun to watch, once you forget they’re MIDDLE-SCHOOLERS.

Seriously, has no one contacted child services yet? There’s a kid that hauling WEAPONS through customs.

Though even with the second half being marginally better than the first, that margin is only as big as the unimpressive vegetable on Kimi (who again, I might add, is a middle-schooler!).

I have two schools of thought on The Detective is Already Dead, either the series was rushed in production, leaving only sprinkles of what could have been or the team behind it just wasn’t up to the task on any front, and by looking at the staff list, I’m thinking it was more of the former. Now that’s all the thoughts I’m probably ever going to have on this show ever again.

Wondering where to watch Summer 2021 anime? We can help with that!