Kudo Shinchi wrote: Uh, Clash of Red and Black. Shuichi and Shinichi/Conan essentially circumvent their own allies (and in Shuichi's case, he really violated the chain of command) and make their own plan. Their justification (even if Shinichi/Conan never really says things like this, Shuichi does) seems to be that Jodie and James (and the rest of the FBI, for that matter) are just not up to it. They use the same justification ("yes, you are allies, but you're allies who aren't competent enough to realize our plan, and you'd ruin it if you figured it out.") in Scarlet Showdown, when Shuichi's fake death is revealed. If anything, Gosho has had Jodie and Andre display incompetence and has had them not get things as quickly as they should (just look at them completely stumped by such a simple mystery in Scarlet Epilogue), so that Shuichi's and Shinichi's/Conan's deceptions seem completely justified. Gosho seems to have no desire to have Jodie and Andre keep pace with Shuichi.
This is a rather uncharitable reading of their motives (
also where does Akai say that?). It's not a matter of the FBI not being up to keeping Akai's secret, just the basic principle that the less people in the know the less chance the secret has of getting out. Imagine if Jodie or Camel had come across Scar Akai and they knew Akai was alive and undercover.
The risk that their initial reactions would gave spilled the beans vindicates Akai's reasoning. This isn't really a matter of competence or not. Besides that, Akai has good reason not to trust Camel on the particular point of keeping his secret,
as Camel had already outed Akai once before. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm fairly certain Akai told James what he was planning. After all, James noticed the glue on Akai's fingertips when he grabbed him, and while non-canon, the scene at the end of movie 18 seems to confirm that James was in on it.
So Akai didn't really violate the chain of command.
And no, Gosho doesn't want Jodie and Camel to be Akai's equals; as I said, Akai is Gosho's pet and still the most special FBI agent, both as a member of the organization and as a player in the story. I just don't think that means that Jodie and Camel are
hopelessly incompetent.
(I was annoyed by that scene in the epilogue, though, especially right after Jode just figured out Akai's whole elaborate death plan on her own. I agree that scene was poorly conceived of and written)
By saying that if Jodie knew, she would've been fooled by Rei/Tooru/Bourbon as Scar Akai into revealing that Shuichi was alive, resulting in the plan being exposed and Hidemi/Rena/Kir being killed, he is essentially saying, "You're not up for this."
Which is on par with Shinichi's/Conan's misguided belief that the BO will find him out if Ran knows who he is.
In this case, Gosho brooked no counter-argument to Shuichi's and Shinichi's/Conan's position that, if people aren't at their intellectual level, those people must be misled, deceived, and kept in the dark... even people who are FBI agents, and committed to fighting the BO. Thus, Gosho lowered Jodie's competency, and Andre's (compare how he was portrayed when Gosho was trying to mislead us into thinking he was a BO plant in the FBI to every case in which he appears, after that... in fact, do the same for Jodie—compare her appearances in which Gosho was trying to mislead us into thinking she was Vermouth, to her appearances after it was revealed that she was an FBI agent) to justify them being kept in the dark.
I can get the rank and file FBI being kept in the dark, but Jodie and Andre, two agents who Shuichi probably knows better than most others?
And what if it was because he
didn't tell Andre about his fake death plan, that Andre messed up, in Scarlet Prologue? After all, Shinichi's/Conan's desire to keep them in the dark led to his seemingly—to them—random emphasis on Rikumichi Kusuda, leading to Andre's slip. He did say that it was on his mind because Shinichi/Conan brought it up.
Shuichi had no intent of telling James—he was forced to when James felt the glue on Shuichi's fingertips when he reached out to stop him from informing Jodie about what was happening.
He violated chain of command when he didn't tell James that Rena/Kir was CIA agent Hidemi Hondo before the BO went after Haido Central Hospital, after Rikumichi Kusuda died. Instead, he went behind his superior's back and made his own plan—Gosho portrays this as justified... thus, it comes off that Shuichi should be in charge, not James.
Not hopelessly—it's just that, for characters "in the know" about the BO, they should be far more competent. Shouldn't James and Jodie, and even Andre, know Shuichi well enough to know that he would do things on his own, make his own plans? Why did they all seem so shocked by him and Shinichi/Conan doing their own thing? I'm not saying, make them as smart as he is, I'm saying, make them smart enough to realize that Shuichi Akai will do ruthlessly pragmatic things and not tell them anything, and that he'll have help from Shinichi/Conan, someone on his level. Of course, this problem was compounded by the length of the Bourbon arc.
Kudo Shinchi wrote:
Allow me to add on to my earlier statement—the FBI have been dumbed down to make the BO more intimidating, and to make Shinichi/Conan and Shuichi seem even cooler and more on top of things.
I think Jodie and Camel have been dumbed down maybe once or twice to make the BO more intimidating (Sakura shrine case), but
I don't agree with your addition. Akai has always been a better agent than Jodie and Camel, but that doesn't make them bad anymore than Conan being the smartest detective in the series makes everyone else stupid. I just can't agree with this notion when Scarlet Showdown went out of its way to show Jodie's and Camel's merits as agents. (And yes, the scene in the epilogue is an example of exactly what you're saying. However, a lot of my dislike for it comes from it being inconsistent with the portrayal of FBI agents
within the very same case, not because it was yet another example of the FBI being dumbed down).
Since the Halloween Party case, Jodie has not made a deduction like she did, back then. Her deduction in Scarlet Showdown is just not on the same level.
This seems like a rather arbitrary judgment. What is it about her deduction in Scarlet that's not on the same level? If anything it's more impressive, because she made it in far less time, and the only clue that tipped her off was Conan's scared face, which could have meant any number of things. Instead, with only a fraction of the hints the readers had to figure out Akai's faked death, she put the whole thing together, with assistance from no one.
That's not the argument I see being made—rather, I see the argument, "This resolution isn't worth 200+ Files of waiting."
Maybe not in this particular thread perhaps, but I've certainly seen it made.
Vermouth in that recent case, Haibara to a degree after the Confrontation with Vermouth
Could you elaborate on this?
I'm not sure I see it.
These days, it's not, FBI Vs BO—it's Shinichi/Conan and Shuichi Vs BO. Since Clash of Red and Black, the FBI have just been along for the ride of whatever plan Shinichi/Conan and Shuichi come up with. Shuichi and Jodie were working together during the Halloween Party case—since then? Shinichi/Conan has become Shuichi's partner. The FBI had a plan to get Vermouth during her arc. Now what plans do they have? Have they launched any offensives, since then, or since Black Impact? Not really.
Her Halloween Party case deduction was about Vermouth and her past, while confronting her. Her Scarlet Showdown deduction? About a plan concocted by her own allies that she'd been kept in the dark about.
It shouldn't have taken her so long to realize that Shuichi had done a ruthlessly pragmatic thing... his fake death was right after he went behind her back and James, not telling them that Kir was CIA, and, along with Shinichi/Conan, essentially hijacked the FBI for their plan, even though neither of them had James' authority. Surely this should've made her think (along with knowing Shuichi for so long, and getting to see Shinichi/Conan in action for so long) that they'd teamed up, again, and kept her in the dark, again.
Shiho/Ai had pretty much zero involvement in Clash of Red and Black—compare her involvement in that to her involvement in Reunion with the Black Organization, or during the Halloween Party case. Shinichi/Conan has essentially boxed her out of recent developments—not telling her Shuichi's/Subaru's identity, not telling her about the Mystery Train plan (and again, Gosho ignores any kind of counter arguments against the "keep your own allies in the dark" position, indicating that he thinks Shinichi/Conan was unambiguously right to do it), and not telling her (as of yet, at least) that Rei/Tooru/Bourbon is NPA.
Kudo Shinchi wrote:I know a lot of people don't like the Haibara of today, but ultimately her current self represents the culmination of her character arc, where she has gone from being a cynical depressed person to someone who can find joy in life and who is having a second chance at a genuine childhood.
Couldn't agree more.
k11chi wrote:I can guarantee you thousands have already figured out the Boss's identity, as it's obvious.
Enlighten me.
“Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outre results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.”
“Education never ends... it is a series of lessons, with the greatest for the last.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and His Last Bow
"I have decided to stick to love... hate is too great a burden to bear."
— Martin Luther King Jr. (A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr)
, we here analyze too much too 
