The episode opens with Kogoro in the bathroom and realizing he’s out of toilet paper. We learn that Yoko Okino, the actress that Kogoro is smitten with, is around, so he can’t simply yell out to Ran for help. He contemplates calling or texting her, but envisions scenarios where Ran could still embarrass him in front of Yoko. He finally decides on contacting Conan, and Conan provides narration that Kogoro’s decision helps to crack the case.

After the opening, we go back in time two hours, where Ran discovers Kogoro eating butter sandwiches that had expired a couple of days earlier. She also notices Kogoro looking nicer and his desk looking clean, and it’s quickly revealed that Yoko Okino is coming over. After she arrives, Yoko starts sharing information about a case that she stumbled on while location scouting for her upcoming film.

At this point, the rest of the first half of the episode is Yoko explaining the situation and providing what information she has about the case, which ends up being a locked murder case at a villa. The case involves two brothers (one of which whose wife went missing a couple of years earlier and the missing wife is the sister of someone from the production team for Yoko’s upcoming film), as well as the wife of the other brother. It’s interesting to note that everyone there had an injury except for Yoko and the murder victim, which she thinks is just a coincidence. With this fact being pointed out, though, we know that there’s going to be importance to this. Yoko also shares a picture that the murder victim sent his brother, which Kogoro and Conan realize has to be a message… but they can’t figure out what it means.

Just as they realize this is a locked room murder, Kogoro suddenly has to go to the bathroom, likely thanks to the expired butter sandwiches… which, as we know from the beginning, is where he’s going to be for a while. After Kogoro leaves, there’s a knock at the door. It’s Wakita, the sushi chef who works at the restaurant next door. Wakita apologizes for eavesdropping, and explains that Kogoro had ordered sushi for this afternoon. However, Kogoro hadn’t called him, so he came to deliver the sushi. At this point, Wakita asks for a rundown of the information, and we get Yoko giving a more abbreviated version of her explanation from earlier in the episode. While I understand this is a realistic question for Wakita to ask, it led to the audience getting an explanation of the case for a second time so close to the first time. This just felt redundant to me. And it isn’t until right near the end of the episode that Wakita and Conan have enough information to finally make one observation about the case.

This episode basically spends its time setting up the case, and that’s about it. And with the way the story is structured, it’s going to be taking place entirely in Kogoro’s office. Unfortunately, this is going to limit the action for this story, since they’re not going to be able to go to the villa and investigate things personally. It appears this is a canon storyline from the manga, and this story appears to be structured in such a way that it works better in a printed format than in an animated format.

While I hope the next episode will be better, I’ll be going into it knowing it has limitations due to its storytelling structure. Hopefully what Wakita and Conan deduce will be interesting and help make up for the sluggish pacing and the limitations of the storytelling structure.

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