ST Aka to Shiro no Sousa File (2014)

This drama is about a team called Scientific Task-force, ST for short. The members are eccentric and have difficulty dealing with others on a professional and personal manner. They either hide from dealing with others, or cannot hold back any negative thought. In the case of Akagi, it's both. This dorama is actually a prequel to a 2013 special, so better watch it before watching this ;)

This drama had a lot of issues that I couldn't ignore, but I still enjoyed watching each episode on a weekly basis. I did not regret watching this and found it entertaining. It was more like cotton candy, that's sweet and fun to eat, but disappears quickly. You still have a faint sweet taste left in your mouth but nothing much and not for long.

On a more detailed analysis, while Scientific is in the title, we hardly deal with science. The most we get is some profiling. The dorama is typically episodic and cases vary. In order to make ST standout, instead of making complicated and require exceptional smartness to solve, they just really dumbed down the whole police force. For that reason most aren't that memorable to be honest. I remember one case where the evil guy admitted when really all they had was circumstantial evidence. What irritated me most was how the ST members were childish, and them acknowledging it was not enough, their behaviour was unacceptable that it was hard to suspend my disbelief

Acting vary from pretty good to alright. I felt that most other characters were just too young for the role, or to even be taken seriously. It felt more like they were playing pretend. We didn't get character development from all the team members, maybe 2 or 3, and the rest was their to fill space. We also had some other members of the police force where we get interaction with the characters which I found most entertaining but nothing too deep.

Okada Masaki is a sweetheart even though his character is a complete moron lol. It may be my first time seeing Fujiwara Tatsuya but I liked him here. He and Okada had great chemistry. I enjoyed their interaction and their scenes together were fun to watch. Hayashi Kento not only was he misplaced age wise, he also totally UNDERUSED. I still liked his interaction with Okada, but wished he was more forceful but they completely mellowed him down compared to the SP. Another underused actor was Watabe Atsuro who, after seeing in Bitter Blood thought he can do much more interesting and entertaining roles than he's offered.

The story isn't done yet, a movie will be coming up soon. The episodic format makes it that you don't really need to retain anything for the movie, so you don't really need to wait until the movie is available to watch the whole thing.

All in all, easy to watch without much commitment, entertaining but too silly.

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