Kogoro and Conan are eating at a restaurant at Beika Gourmet Restaurant Street, an old alley where most of the restaurants have closed up shop. From what we see in the episode, it looks like only three of the restaurants are still open. Kogoro has come here, because this was an area he would frequent a lot when he didn’t have as much money, and he has nostalgia for it.

Their meal is interrupted by a demolition machine breaking through the restaurant’s wall. Hiroyuki Kisumi, the owner of the alley, ordered this to happen. It’s revealed that Kisumi has been harassing the remaining shop owners in an effort to try to get them to leave. Kisumi claims he mistook the restaurant Kogoro and Conan were eating at for one of the abandoned ones. It’s never outright stated in the episode, but the viewer has to assume that Kisumi is wanting to get rid of all the businesses in order to tear the buildings down and replace them with something else. That’s one detail I wish had been revealed in the episode, because I think it would have helped the audience to have a more concrete reason for Kisumi’s actions. I think forcing the audience to assume the motivation for Kisumi’s actions weakens the story a little.

However, as part of this conversation, Kisumi is blamed for the death of an older shop owner who died, saying the stress Kisumi was creating caused the man’s death. Kogoro and Conan witness the encounter between Kisumi and the three shop owners, and after it’s revealed that Kogoro is a detective, Kisumi leaves. This scene did a good job of portraying Kisumi as being a major jerk. However, I think that learning his motivation would have helped strengthen the audience’s impression of how much of a jerk he is.

Later, Kogoro finds Kisumi dead in the bathroom, and at first, it’s assumed that it’s an accident. But Conan points something out, and they realize he was murdered. Inspector Megure and Detective Takagi arrive on the scene and begin their investigation. Not surprisingly, it’s ultimately Conan who figures out the truth. However, we get a surprise when they find Kogoro interrogating the suspect who Conan believes is guilty. At first, it looks like Kogoro might actually solve the case on his own, but, unfortunately, it ends up taking Conan and his gadgets (watch stun gun and voice-changing bowtie) to get to the bottom of the case.

This wasn’t a bad episode, but it wasn’t quite as strong as it could have been. Parts of it felt a little rushed to me, and as a viewer, it was hard to feel the emotional impact that the ending should have had because the audience didn’t really get enough time to truly know the characters involved. While the story would have been strengthened by establishing more of Kogoro’s sentimentality for the alley, I’m not sure there would have been enough material to turn this into a two-parter. In the end, this feels like a story that needed more than one part, but there wasn’t quite enough to turn in into a two-parter. The writer likely did the best they could with the runtime they were allotted, but the story had to be weakened a little in order to get it to fit.

There was no preview for the next episode, so at this point, I assume there isn’t going to be a new Case Closed episode next week.

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