The second season of In/Spectre is less dominated by a single mystery for the entire story, and is instead broken up into a series of smaller mysteries – generally not one-and-done cases, as they usually take a few episodes to resolve. However, it does mean that if the Steel Lady Nanase mystery seemed to drag for you in the show’s first season, this might be more your speed.

This season of In/Spectre follows Kurou and Kotoko as they take on a series of shorter, individual cases – generally all murder cases. One is proving a human’s innocence on behalf of a yuki-onna, another is finding out what supernatural entity is killing fish, and a third is persuading a wealthy man’s family not to make deals with supernatural entities to carry out a hit for them. Further, for the majority of these, Kurou doesn’t even have to use his “die and manipulate probability as he regenerates” power.

Instead, this ends up leaving Kurou as being the straight man to Kotoko, in addition to being the Watson to her Holmes. He serves as someone for her to bounce ideas off of, and to think through problems with, as an audience proxy. It’s a less involved role than from earlier seasons, but considering that ultimately we have less action sequences this season, that’s fine.

However, this expanded straight man/funny woman relationship does have one significant shift that may be obnoxious to some viewers. Specifically, at least once an arc (sometimes multiple times), Kotoko will just spit out some particular sexually explicit detail of her and Kurou’s sex life – something they have done or something they’re going to do – to complete strangers. To be clear, we don’t see anything – the lewdest thing we get is some hand-holding – but there are some sex acts described this season that I’d never heard of before.

Otherwise, I really liked this episode’s mysteries – especially the third arc of the season. Also, the sexually explicit dialog wasn’t particularly an issue for me, so I’m glad we were able to get this season, and I hope we do eventually get a third.

In/Spectre Season 2 is available for streaming on Crunchyroll.

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