10 Second Anime - Bungou Stray Dogs - Episode 22

Poe challenges Ranpo to a battle of mystery solving. Atsushi infiltrates Moby Dick but Akutagawa complicates things.

Episode 22 - Part 1 "Poe and Ranpo"

Part 2 "Whereabouts of the Skyfaring White Whale"

Heh.

With two chapters of stuff happening, there wasn't any time for the opening or closing credits.

It's pretty chauvinistic to think that the fake Japanese version of Edgar Allan Poe could best the real one in a battle of mystery solving chops, but it's their anime, so we can let the pseudonym of Tarou Hirai take some credit.

From what I can find, the only reference to Poe having a pet raccoon came from a terrible movie from 2012 starring John Cusack called The Raven. Thankfully, the anime version of Poe never called the raccoon "Karl."

Poe's power is titled "Black Cat in the Rue Morgue," which puzzles me because the first ever murder mystery, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, had an orangutan as the killer. Oh, uh, spoiler alert on a 175 year old story...

Poe's title in The Guild is "Chief Architect." I wonder what that means, besides having detailed plans of Moby Dick.

Poe's power seems to be the first one I've seen in this show that actually needs the namesake author to write a novel. Louisa writes overly detailed scenarios. Kunikida writes a diary. But Poe took six years to write a novel to trap Ranpo. It has to be a murder mystery that the prisoner has to solve to get out of, but he never can because the prisoner takes the role of the eventual killer. Sneaky.

Agatha Christie used the unreliable first person narrator as a murderer who foiled the great Hercule Poirot in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. For a time, that is.

The fun part of this half of the episode was Yosano trying not to tell Ranpo that he has no powers so he could actually solve the mystery in one go like he always does.

Yosano couldn't use her powers within the book, but Ranpo had no problems with batting aside suggestions using deduction. His "gift" apparently covers induction, where he can assemble theories to connect clues together.

Yosano's glasses became Chekhov's Gun. Ranpo actually gained some self awareness about his normalcy, at least compared to the other gifted agents, but in the end, he has to maintain the fiction because he'd look pretty stupid figuring it out this late after the fact.

The second half of the episode lead directly from the prize of the wager between Poe and Ranpo: the detailed schematics of Moby Dick.

I'm calling the White Whale Moby Dick now because Herman Melville finally called him that. Everywhere so far in the show people and text have said White Whale, but if the dude who actually made him says Moby Dick, I'll defer to him. There's got to be an Ahab somewhere though, right?

I liked how Dazai was just half a step behind Ranpo in figuring out how their suggested scenarios would play out. Ranpo looked bored as hell, though.

Dazai's and Ranpo's plan to use Atsushi as the lone infiltrator took into account that most of The Guild would be gone as they prepared to burn down Yokohama again to look for this certain book.

Atsushi shook off his self-doubt again by saying, "I've only ever regretted the things I didn't do."

The wrinkle in the infiltration plan was Akutagawa going rogue. I have problems on why the flight crew of Moby Dick would still receive a transport helicopter when the pilot didn't respond to radio communications. They were just about to use the Moby Dick as a huge bomb crashing into Yokohama. Some operations security should have made them more cautious. Oh well. Akutagawa gets his rematch against Atsushi. As he coughs up blood.

Atsushi should make quicker work out of him, but Akutagawa might have an extra sense of desperation, so who knows how it will play out. Francis F is still on board and he can kick Atsushi's ass without any use of his powers. Things look pretty rough for Atsushi. Might Kyouka flying around in an unmanned C-130 prison plane crash the party? We'll have to see what Dazai comes up with.