Summer. On a beautiful island fraught
with tension between the natives and a team of developers keen to
develop its natural resources, a detective begins to conduct a fresh
investigation into an old murder case after his retirement, and is
mysteriously found dead. A member of the team decides to pursue the
matter...
The gimmick of the Galileo drama series
can be summed up as Sherlock meets Numb3rs. You get a
kick out of watching Professor Yukawa Manabu rely on pure logic,
mathematics, and some physics concepts to solve the whodunnit.
Midsummer’s Equation, like The Devotion of Suspect X before
it, abandons the whodunnit narrative almost entirely. Here, there is
no question of who did the proverbial Mr Black in and how, but it’s
the motive question, the “whydunnit” – why people do terrible
things to each other, for each other (and who?) – that is more important and
constitutes the real mystery that needs to be solved, and elevates a
simple murder mystery into a subtle and moving drama.
Keigo Higashino’s script has an
older, more mature Detective Galileo grow out of the eccentric
‘weirdo’ character type introduced in the drama series, so that
he develops the personal empathy needed to solve not just a murder,
but understand the mystery of human behaviour, but also to manage the
consequences of the murder mystery being solved. In this instalment,
the physicist comes across as not just a genius but a sage.
Midsummer’s Equation shines as an
ensemble project, with Masaharuu Fukuyama and Hikaru Yamazaki
portraying an almost father-son relationship on one hand, and Anne
Watanable, Gin Maeda, and Jun Fubuki as the prime suspects, a family
with secrets everyone keeps from everyone else. One could say that
it’s the tension between the two different family dynamics (and the
brilliant acting and cast chemistry) that propels Midsummer’s
Equation, and not the narratology of the murder mystery.
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