I don’t know how to do this pre-review paragraph without spoiling what occurs in the episode. And I think that’s a good thing because it means that the episode was impactful enough to stick around in my mind. Is that for good reasons or bad reasons? Let’s find out.
The episode begins with the police investigating the scene of a crime, headed by a character I liked from the first big mystery – Sakurai, the detective. He’s my favorite supporting character, to be honest. Ain’t all stuck up and actually gets along with Takao. Anyway, when investigating the body of the victim, there were enough oddities for Takao to bring up the possibility of spontaneous human combustion as the cause of death.
…wait a minute, that was the name of last week’s episode! Just a fun little noticing. Nothing more, nothing less.
However, Takao decides to take this mystery head-on, causing her to need to look into documents about the case in general. Yay, we love research! Of course, one of the people there is intent on not dying via curse, no matter the cost. Pin that somewhere in your mind. We’ll get back to that later.
Anyway, they end up attending a funeral for one of the victims, with Takanashi noticing someone outside on a motorcycle. The funeral goes smoothly…until the coffin goes up in flames. Oh no. So now, investigations need to get done about how this occurred. While it was clear that it was something made at home, the big mystery was who did this. Though with behaviors that you may have noticed in last week’s episode and this episode if you watched it, you probably figured it out.
Takanashi also manages to figure out, after receiving a note while he was at work. He goes to meet the person alone (though he has a plan, so it’s okay!), where he sees the culprit for some of what’s occurred in these two episodes. And remember when I said he has a plan? Well, that plan was to make it seem like he was coming alone, for the other doctor we commonly see him with during the episodes to provide a sneak attack. And like brought up earlier, I can only confidently say that the person caught was responsible for some of the events of this episode and last episode. With a mix of no cool mind-palace segment, Takanashi being the one to figure out part of the case, and another death at the end of the episode, there’s still more to cover with this episode. The “next episode” thing does show that the title of the next episode includes the word “finale” in the title, it makes me confident that the next episode is the final part of this story.
Honestly, I’m thankful that we had that shorter mystery in Episode 3 to act as something lighter between two heavier cases. I don’t think I would’ve been able to handle this mystery as easily if we jumped to it directly from Episode 2. My prediction is that once this case is wrapped up, we’ll get a one episode mystery to serve as a bit of a buffer, then another three episode case with a two episode case to wrap it all up, since the series (or at the very least, the first season) is confirmed to be 12 episodes long. But of course, since this is coming out after the season it premiered in is over, we can see how accurate this prediction was. I’m calling that it’s not accurate at all, and everyone will look at that knowing that I wrote this before the first season finished and being like “well, that aged poorly”.
But I’m still excited to see where the show ends up taking this case. As was the case with Episode 3, there’s no way that a “curse” plays any part in this, as this show appears to be at least SOMEWHAT grounded in reality. This setup was great, and once the mystery wraps up next week, I can finally feel like I can properly judge this mystery.
Additional posts about Ameku M.D.: Doctor Detective:
Sara Talks Anime 
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