2015-12-21

The Perfect Insider

The Perfect Insider (すべてがFになる) is an 11 episode mystery series based on part of the novel series titled Everything Becomes F by Mori Hiroshi.  The anime adaptation aired in the fall of 2015.

    Nishinosono Moe is a prodigal genius and the only daughter of an affluent political family in southern Japan.  Since she was young she has been attracted to one of her deceased fathers students, now a professor, Saikawa Sohei.  The pair goes on a camping trip with Sohei's research lab to a remote island.  The intention for the trip is to meet a woman who has been exiled there for 15 years.  After she was cleared of the murder of her parents, Magata Shiki locked herself inside of a high tech research facility as a sort of self induced punishment.  From the facility on the island she used her genius to develop technology and code for businesses and other organizations around the world, earning herself praise and respect.


    Moe and Sohei trick their way into the facility, Moe using her prior meeting with Doctor Shiki as a pretense.  The staff welcomes them, knowing who each of them are due to their influence in certain academic circles.  Before they can have a meeting with the doctor the facility experiences a series of technical faults that lead to the discovery of the doctors dismembered corpse.  Not wanting to let an opportunity to test their mettle go to waste, Moe and Sohei work with the facilities staff to try and unravel the mystery of the murder before the authorities arrive.  They have to figure out how and why someone would enter the room that Dr. Shiki had been locked into for the past 15 years.  A room no one has entered or left in all that time.

    This was an interesting series that I had been waiting for since late 2014, but really didn't know anything about.  It is very dry and slow burning, too slow some people think.  From what I have heard the drama series moves at a more acceptable pace.  Personally I wasn't concerned with the pace but can see how it was stretched a bit longer than perhaps it should have been.  It is a classic locked room murder mystery with a few touches of techno-paranoia tossed in.  While the mystery of the murder is the primary purpose, the story also examines the psychological make up of the key characters.


    There is a strained one sided love between Moe and Sohei.  Moe is a jealous spoiled brat who's only saving grace is her extreme intelligence.  For the most part the intelligence doesn't come across and she appears to be rather dense and oblivious.  Sohei is ethereal in some rather over played ways, sometimes to the extent of annoyance.  The interesting character is Shiki and her sordid, monomaniacal past.  She is most certainly a sociopath.  The mystery unfolds in a conventional manner for this type of story, with a few twists and turns, but nothing outside of the realm of the reality it spins.  There are hints and clues and as the characters discover them they explain the process of understanding them for the sake of the viewer.  Somethings are explained that were probably unneccesary but over all the mystery was decent and the process was enjoyable.

    The show was OK, a nice change of pace from the normal anime standards but it wasn't anything spectacular or world changing.  I would like to hunt down the drama and do a comparison.  This story encompassed 2 episodes of the 10 episode drama


    The series was simulcast in Crunchyroll.  Sentai Filmworks picked up the license for the series so there will undoubtedly be a disc release in North America at some time.

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