Short Synopsis: Chiko now lives away from her aunt, in a mansion along with Tome. Haruka visits her and forms the “Detective Girls”.
Highlights: A rather silly episode…
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10
I’ll withhold judgment for the detective girls-arc of this series for now. Seriously, I have no idea what to think of it or what to expect, knowing the rest of this series. I really need to see the next episode to form a valid opinion for this series. The fact remains that this series has had plenty of light moments, which make you fool that this series is just goofing off, while they’re in fact just building up.

In this episode, Haruka and Chiko don’t really go and look for cases, but instead they get visited by a number of burglars. The process of catching these burglars was rather silly, especially since Haruka had act and claim her moment of glory (which involved her and Tome, crashing down some stone stair on a bike), but the few moments where this episode was serious were really good. Akine’s back-story gets completed, and it turns out that he lost his sister back in the war, and Chiko resembles his sister a lot. He also finally leaves Chiko’s aunt (which may have been a bad thing, as she’s probably going to hire someone tougher), and we still don’t know what these burglars were doing inside Chiko’s house. They were not normal burglars, because they still tried to attack Chiko, even after they were found.

Most of the humour in this episode was rather corny, but I do admit that I laughed at Haruka’s fantasies of the glamorous future missions of the Detective Girls (with Chiko as the invincible warrior, Tome as a seductress and herself as the fearless leader). The messy animation during the fight scenes also looked really good, and it surprised me. Bones isn’t really a studio that often experiments with its animation (in fact, I can’t remember having seen any experimental animation from them apart from this series).

Short Synopsis: Ran, Rui, Rin and Midori solve the case of the haunted resort building.
Highlights: Dialogue-heavy like no other.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10
Whoa! Since this is a NHK children series, you wouldn’t expect the dialogue to be so hard to understand, but Telepathy Shoujo Ran somehow manages to do it with this episode. Heck, the entire episode was one huge non-stop dialogue, with perhaps one or two seconds at which people weren’t talking. I really must say that for a children’s series, this series is pretty smart.

Okay, so if I understood correctly:
- Inside the resort, one of the guests who were staying with his family was killed.
- The one who killed him is an old classmate of his. The two of them killed (at least, that’s what I suspect, in any case they buried the guy’s dead body) one of their friends when they were young, and were too afraid to admit that what they did was wrong.
- They buried him at the place where the inn is right now.
- After the recent ghost sightings, the culprit wants to buy the inn, in order to get rid of the evidence and rumours.
- The culprit then killed the victim by throwing ice-cold water on him, to cause a heart failure.
- I didn’t quite catch why the victim had to be killed, but I suspect that he had enough of keeping their sin secret and he was planning to notify others of it.

This is why I love these NHK children’s shows. The kiddie series are of course to be avoided, but the series that air here can and will be surprisingly mature for their audience. Tsubasa Chronicle was about the only exception, but take a series as Dennou Coil, which very openly discussed the issues of death and forgetting about the deceased ones. Kaze no Shoujo Emily in its turn was very poetic, and also managed to slip in a number of deaths and mature topics, and Telepathy Shoujo Ran looks about to do the same. There’s of course censorship: the death are never referred to directly, and yet this episode was nothing short of a murder mystery story.

Seriously, I wish that Dutch children’s television was as good as this. I’m not saying that American children animation is bad, but nearly all of the stuff that makes it across the Atlantic IS, and everything is horribly dubbed. I mean, how else are these children going to learn any decent English?

Okay, enough ranting, my point is that I really liked this episode. For a murder mystery, this episode was surprisingly interesting, especially due to the lovable cast of characters, and even the ones that only appeared for one or two episodes are enjoyable to watch. I also liked how this episode combined both fake ghost sightings with real ghosts. That grandfather in bermudas was a nice touch. ;)

Short Synopsis: The plot thickens as Ranka’s ability to calm down the Vajra gets more and more important.
Highlights: Ozma gained a lot of depth in this episode.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10
Satelight, you disappoint me. With the huge budget of this series, you couldn’t even find a good voice-actress for the seven-year-old Ranka? Joking aside, this episode might very well be my favourite of the entire series. It’s really one of these episodes in which nothing much happens, and yet the plot is pushed forward a lot. It’s very much different from the intermezzos we saw in the first half of this series, which mostly goofed off. The selection of insert songs was also pretty nice to listen at, and complemented their scenes well.

Especially Ozma was awesome, with his brotherly worries about Ranka. Macross Frontier isn’t exactly your manly mecha-series, but this guy provides an appreciated exception to this rule. We now also learn (that, or I noticed this a bit late) that he’s been having an affair with Catherine. Strangely enough, it was also interesting to see Alto act more as a side-character. Interesting how some main characters make great side-characters, and side-characters make great main characters.

Speaking of side-characters, I do have one complaint. In this episode, we learn that Kuran has a crush on Saotome, but it felt really abrupt, which got me thinking about how little airtime she’s actually had in this series. I mean, she’s been really overshadowed by the rest of the cast of Macross Frontier, even though she’s got a pretty interesting character, and there are more people like that on this series. I also feel that Catherine needs more time to be fleshed out, and especially people like Bobby, Lam, Mena and Jeffrey Wilder have been horribly ignored so far.