Beneath Atami no Sousakan

This drama amazed me in a different way. It uses preconceptions of norms and what's expected of a typical police drama to hide an interesting level of detail out of plain sight. I initially couldn't tell what it was truly about just going from the stuffs provided via the official website. Certainly didn't expect the visual circus to shed its outer skin and reveal something quite literally out of this world.

I haven't seen all of Miki Satoshi's productions but his method of incluing sorta sets the expositional elements on center stage to spotlight the (underlying) content. While I admit that it's difficult to notice the hidden details on first viewing, all it took to uncover the majority of what's hidden was to rewatch the initial episodes.

Even in episode one, a second viewing would reveal a lot if you knew roughly what to look out for. Take the conversation that took place with the girls in the bus before their disappearance.

On the surface, it sounded like idle chatter. But I noticed that when they mentioned about the crane (which is regarded as something auspicious) being the "dead yucky animal outside their dorm", they sounded pretty happy about it.

Then when the driver spotted that old man lying on the road, he simply referred him as a "person" (or a "human being"). Which is odd, 'cos under that kind of situation, one'll probably say, "Someone is lying/has fainted on the the road," than to just say, "It's a person (human being)." Note that the driver wasn't the least alarmed during the discovery. Later, after he got off to attend to the old man, the latter asks if he was in the netherworld, which naturally didn't arouse any suspicion under that circumstance. The opening scene alone had all these things going on.

The station had a couple of oddities too.
The mascot and  no-admittance sign were more obscure but were nonetheless more examples.

One collective and quirky detail that I noticed is the use of "number puns "or "数字の語呂合わせ" as they call it in Japanese, I think. Though it's really more like an easter egg than anything important. You can find some examples and their explanations in [this post] I made on DA.

Another peculiar thing that I know viewers will be pondering about the random mentions of "the incident in Tokyo" in certain episodes, which points to nothing evidential in the series. Here are some decent theories I've come across:

東京事変's direct English translation.

Could they have merely been referring to the band behind the theme song? It'll be a new form of advertising if it's the case! The next speculated guess is the Great Tokyo Air Raid backed by what was said in episode three. Last one is an accident of sorts that happened in Tokyo, causing our duo from WAID to "arrive" in South Atami. I haven't been searching around much but these will have to do it for now.

A scene from episode 1.

Everyone knows '2' pointed to the culprit and also how it was linked to the religious plan and the mathematical formula. But what does it all mean? I have two theories on this, one is a probable reason behind the choice of the number and the other of why the latter subjects weren't elaborated.

The first one is the number '222', which was briefly announced over the PA system in the first episode at the hospital. It took a while for me to notice that the announcement wasn't as random as it seemed when I realised that it's made from three separate 2s. Which incidentally was the same number of subjects surrounding the series explained at the end, ie. consciousness, religion and mathematics. Interestingly enough, when I did an online search on this number, I found only two related matches.

One was a mystery site, where many people dropped by to post how this number has appeared in their lives. Some were bombarded with the number in a short time span, others on how the number keeps reoccurring on a daily basis. The content of each entry is pretty random but collectively, it becomes a huge congregation of the number as a representation of "the unknown" trying to communicate with us. I'm guessing the writer deduced all this to the maths formula.

The other site made a biblical suggestion where it references the Bible Wheel, the Blessed Trinity, the alphanumeric structure of the Greek and Hebrew languages and links them all together. It's a bit technical to elaborate the details, but this would generally make up the religious part. So basically, I believe that this was how the choice of the number came about.

Now comes my second theory of why the aforementioned subjects came to a dead end. Well, I couldn't think of anything logical other than the writer not being able to relate anything content-worthy for this drama. With the number occurrences being too random or unsubstantiated, and the fear of probing into sensitive religious territory. Thus limiting the drama to mostly the third subject.

It came upon me that the result of what was disclosed at the end made the main case's missing four three girls and their culprit seem to almost not matter as much anymore. As what constituted to the ending was in a way dependent on what is made out to be the new bigger picture. In sum, it was nice seeing a drama take on a different direction, in both subject and writing style.