Bungou Stray Dogs Episode 5: Murder on D Street

This episode takes on a murder case with Rampo taking the lead. While everyone is cleaning up the office at the Agency after the raid by the Black Lizard group, Rampo announces that he has a job for a murder case, and he brags about his ability, Ultra Deduction, which he thinks is probably the best ability ever, and everyone in the office agrees and compliments him. Kunikida then tells Atsushi to go with Rampo, not to be his assistant, but because Rampo doesn’t know how to take the train and he can help him with that.

This was a simple case, because of Rampo’s ability. If you can still even call it that by the end of the episode with the big reveal. Rampo and Atsushi make it to the murder site by the river. The victim is a young woman, with three shots to the chest. She was recovered from the river and the police are looking for evidence by using a net. They catch something in the net and find out they pulled a man from the water, and whoa no way it’s Dazai haha suicide okay enough. So Rampo at first isn’t allowed to take on the case because the man in charge thinks his subordinates are capable enough instead of a private investigator. But in the end Rampo deems himself fit to solve the case by saying he can solve it in just seconds, even with the little to no evidence that’s presented.

Whipping out a pair of glasses, he puts them on and summons his Ultra Deduction ability and he points the killer to be the seeminly-innocent looking officer. Rampo was able to figure out everything like the killer, the location, the time of death, and everything. He put the officer on the spot by pointing out with a government-issued gun he would need explaining if there were three missing bullets. Before he could do anything crazy, the officer is reprimanded.

And so we get the confession out of him that the woman he killed was investigating the mafia and had found some crucial evidence, and that the officer was actually a spy of the man she was investigating. He warned her she needed to stop but she wouldn’t budge. Things happened, and she was accidentally shot. To cover up the killing, he shot her two more times to make it look like the certain execution-style killing Port Mafia is known to do, but this was different as he did not do an additional gruesome act of making her bite a stair step and kicking her head in from the back. This was hard on the officer because they were actually dating, we find out later.

We also find out from Dazai that…Rampo actually isn’t gifted. He doesn’t have an ability. His Ultra Deduction is just…well, nothing. I don’t know if Rampo is acting, or that he thinks he really does have an ability because he was being super serious and arrogant about it. The whole time we were led to think that Rampo used his ability to solve the case, but it wasn’t any ability. He just caught on to the details and figured it out, which is actually really amazing because there was hardly any evidence. But Dazai was able to solve half of the case, he admitted later to Atsushi, based on what the officer had said, and checking little details like the officer and the woman wearing the same brand and model of a watch, insinuating them being in a relationship. But how Rampo was able to solve where the location was and all of that, we never find out. He’s just amazing I guess.

This was an okay episode. This episode was mainly to introduce us to Rampo better, as the murder case won’t be important later on. Because the case was solved so quickly made it a little boring, but…hm. At least next week’s episode looks more exciting as Akutagawa is going to make an appearance again. Maybe we’ll see the cool things they show in the OP?