Short Synopsis: The criminal of this episode takes an innocent woman and her baby hostage to demand an investigation by the MRI-department.
Highlights: Rather formulaic conclusion.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 6,5/10
Hmm, this was one of the (if not the) weakest episodes of Himitsu. I can understand the point it was trying to make: the people from MRI are very privileged, at how they’re able to look into the minds of the dead, so outsiders would go very far in order to know thins that otherwise would remain a secret forever. The guy who was taking the hostages has had to live his entire life with the thought that his mother committed suicide, but this didn’t feel right. When the person he suspected to be the biggest suspect for coming up with this lie died, he forced with his little hijacking the MRI to take action.

And indeed, his mother was murdered by this guy. They find out the truth, then return to the place of the hostage (at the last possible second… I hate it when they use that plot-device) and tell him what happened, after which the criminal breaks down in tears, just because of the words of Amachi. It was rather forced, to say the least.

I guess that this is indeed the big disadvantage of this series: it’s excellent at storytelling, but it rather falls when it tries to get too close to characterizations. We just knew too little about the kidnapper to really care about the guy.

Short Synopsis: This episode is about food (no, really).
Highlights: Surprisingly dark, and at the same time Minamo’s antics were hilarious.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10
This episode returns to the essence of RD Sennou Chousashitsu: Minamo and how the Metal affects people’s consciousness. Now I also understand why the previous of the previous episode was nothing but food, because this time Haru was set out to rescue a number of food lovers who were lost in their own desires.

I must say that this series has such a fascinating understanding of human nature. These people basically were on the metal, 24/7, enjoying all kinds of delicious foods. Because their consciousnesses were uploaded to the metal, all the virtual food felt surprisingly real, but at the same time this was ruining their real bodies. They would become so used to the uber-delicious food that no food in real life would taste good anymore, and this episode, they became crazy over the taste of just ordinary water, simply because they hadn’t tasted it in so long.

This episode also showed cases where Souta had to take care of cases where people tried to stimulate their own senses so much that they simply died, which also nearly happened with the gentlemen (or at least, that’s what their avatars were at the time) in this episode. It’s a pretty freaky idea. Overall, the messages of this series have been light and optimistic, about a future where the limit to express your creativity knows no bounds, and at the same time it makes it seem so easy to lose yourself in this virtual world.

And Minamo was so adorable in this episode, with her fear of bell peppers (or at least, that’s what I think she meant). These characters can literally talk about food and still remain utterly enjoyable. Especially considering the entire first half of this episode was nothing other than Minamo, sulking over her fear of bell peppers, and the only thing that distracted me was a rather bad video file that kept glitching.

Short Synopsis: Jack, André and their families help Porfy in his search for Mina.
Highlights: The themes of saying goodbye pop up again.
Overall Enjoyment Value:7,5/10
Really, it seems like for every season, half of the good shows seem to concentrate themselves on the same day. This time it’s… Tuesday. Especially since Mission-E, Natsume Yuujin-Chou and Porfy’s raws will always show up too late for Monday, and in the evening there’s Ultraviolet, RD and Himitsu for me to blog… and here I wondered why the rest of the week was so quiet. ^^;

In any case, my usual summary for this show may get shorter, because there are so many other series to blog today. This episode starts as Jack, Michael and Porfy search the different coastal cities for any trace of Mina. A big person in Palermo shows up, who turns out to be acquainted with Jack’s father, and who’ll promise to search for Mina as well. He doesn’t seem to like André and his hate for Americans.

The next day, it’s time to go to the church again, though the focus falls at Jacks father and André’s father. I couldn’t fully understand it, but they took a note-book and crossed a few names out. At the end of the church session, the pastor took a moment to ask those who were present whether they’ve seen anything about Mina, but nobody turned up. When Porfy, Michael and Jack return back home, their father suddenly appears in an apron (it seems that he felt like cooking a bit) and Bobby (Jack and Michael’s older brother) has gone to America. André meanwhile makes his people search Sicily for Mina. It’s his father who finds the clue they need.

When Michael learns about it, he quickly wakes Porfy and André tells him the things he knows: apparently, she was in the company of a woman and two gamblers, and she went from Palermo to Rome. Porfy then immediately prepares to got o Rome, but Jack has a little surprise left, as it seems that jack’s father has his own private plane, which makes Porfy able to catch up a lot of lost time if Mina went to Rome, just by boat. Jack checks what the plane’s code-name is (”Heart Thief” :P) as the plane takes off, Porfy says goodbye to Sicily and the episode ends.

I’m not quite sure what was up with Jack’s father, but I do have a hunch. This episode showed how Bobby left to America, and in the near future, Jack and Michael too will depart to the United States, leaving their father behind. This seems to suggest that their father has problems of his own, and the list of names probably is the list of his subordinates, who were probably all sent away, so that he’d be the only one to take the blame of whatever trouble he’s in.

Overall, the big theme of this arc was the concepts of family. Now that this arc has finished, it does make sense, and I now understand how this arc and the previous arc are linked to each other: they both showed Porfy a different concept of a “family”, something that he lost entirely. The current arc showed how important the bonds are to the big families that live in Sicily, and how one would go through fire for the sake of his own family, while the previous arc was about having the warmth of a place to return to.

My interest in Porfy has been rather low for the past months, because I feared that the rest of the series would just be a string of random arcs, but thankfully they all turn out to have their own meaning to develop Porfy. And of course, this series is at its best after countless episodes of building-up, so I’m wondering where the Rome-arc will take this series.

Short Synopsis: Chinami and Maori investigate some rumours of Type-E being located in a random school in Hokkaido
Highlights: Interesting how Maori took over the role of “shy one”.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 7,5/10
I didn’t blog the first season because at the time of airing, there were too many other good shows. But this time, since I can blog so many different shows this season, I’m not going to pass up this chance. The thing I liked about Code-E was the sharp contrast between the light moments and the climaxes, so I’m really wondering what this series can do now that it moved out of high-school and moved on to some sort of serious plot.

This episode was less impressive than the first one, but that’s to be expected. We do get plenty of new information, though. One of Chinami’s former classmates in the first season has now become a teacher at Maori’s school, and we now know that Sonomi is responsible for finding reports for people with type-E. Ever since the previous episode, I kept wondering how Chinami and Maori would find these people with type-E, and I hope that the future episodes shed some light into how Sonomi actually does her job, but it seems that Koutaro also plays a role in this.

One point of criticism is that the characters may have changed, but their voices have hardly matured. The voice-actors should have put a bit more effort in making their characters sound a bit older, because they still sound like the high-school girls of the first season, though this shouldn’t be a problem to get used to in a few episodes. This series probably isn’t going to make it to Studio Deen’s list of masterpieces, but it’s fun to watch nonetheless.

Short Synopsis: This episode shows how Ayakashi also can friendly ask their names back from Natsume’s Book of Friends.
Highlights: Storytelling at its finest.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10
As for the shows I’m not going to blog:
- Hidamari Sketch is nice, but I’m getting a bit bored of Shinbou’s style ever since Zoku Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei.
- Strike Witches has an interesting view at modern Japanese folklore with its kemonomimi-ish mecha musume, but I wonder whether it can live up to its sister-series, Sky Girls.
- Ryouko’s case files has “I have no life so I’ll just tell my evil plans to any random Joe who happens to be passing by”-villains. It lacks subtlety, that snake came from nowhere, and it’s the big disappointment this season for me.

Natsume Yuujin-chou, however, is well on its way to becoming one of my favourite series this season, along with Blade of the Immortal. I really liked this episode. Like expected, the creators have a great way of characterization, and the entire episode is a bit unconventional, but it works perfectly. This episode’s message was also a pretty interesting one.

This series follows in the same veins as Mokke, where Youkai and gods have entire personalities, and only a select amount of people can see it. It’s a bit more mature, but that’s to be expected with the lack of ten-year old children. This episode sees how a small local god wants to get its name back, though when Reiko collected his name, she stuck it along with the name of another Ayakashi, who needs to be found first if he wants to get his name back.

Along with that, this episode addresses how people nowadays visit their local gods less and less. Our god in this episode only has one person who regularly visits him, and this is an old woman. At the end of the episode, she ends up at a hospital, making her unable to visit the shrine of said god anymore. Because of that, this god disappears in the end, despite having finally gotten his name back.

It’s interesting how important names are for these Youkai, and this isn’t the first series to address this fact. Tenpou Ibun Ayakashi Ayashi and Mononoke also played around with words like this, though Natsume Yuujin-chou is the most personal of the bunch.