Bungo Stray Dogs Season 4

Episodes 38-40

However you may feel about each season of Bungo Stray Dogs opening with a flashback storyline, it is hard to deny that the choice to open season four with an adaptation of the third light novel, The Unknown Origins of the Detective Agency, is a sound decision. That's not because it is desperately important that we understand how Fukuzawa and Ranpo came to be the founding members of it, but more because it sets up both the dynamic that was revealed during the previous season and details the agency's first encounter with Dostoyevsky. While other pieces of the overall story have indicated that he's been kicking around causing trouble for far longer than anybody truly realized, knowing that he's behind the case that first brought the agency together is significant. And after episode forty, we can argue that without Dostoyevsky, the agency would never have been founded in the first place.

That's because before he was involved in The Rats of the House of the Dead or any other organization, Dostoyevsky appears to have been heading up a group misconstrued by most people as “V.” What he wanted out of the group is unclear. After all, its stated purpose appears to have been to eliminate all Gifted people who stood in their way of a specific vision of the world. Since the group describes itself as Gifted killing other Gifted, the easiest way to understand it would be that they feel they are the only ones allowed to have power. It is tied into the revelation of the previous season, namely that Natsume Soseki helped found the Port Mafia and the Armed Detective Agency to maintain a balance of power in Yokohama. Ranpo seems to be halfway to thinking that Soseki essentially set up the situation that brought him and Fukazawa together; it's inarguably in his own best interest not to say anything on this front.

Essentially this is because teenage Edogawa Ranpo has finally gotten what he was lacking in his life: a sense of purpose and an adult who cares about him. The first two-and-a-half episodes of this three-episode cycle are animated in primarily black and white, with the odd flash of bright color. When Fukuzawa gives Ranpo his glasses, the world is suddenly bathed in bright colors again, indicating that by acknowledging Ranpo's genius and giving him a reason to have it and to use it, Fukuzawa has given him a new lease on life. The grayscale world wasn't so much an indication that things were taking place in the past or that there was something wrong with Ranpo's eyesight as it was a visual indication to us of his depression. While Fukuzawa almost immediately regrets having told the boy that he is Gifted when no such thing is true (he's just really, really smart), what he's done has given the boy reason to keep existing. At the end of the third episode, when he gets angry at Ranpo for endangering himself, he's giving him a much larger gift than he did previously: the knowledge that someone cares.

And he does care. We see that not only in his treatment of Ranpo but also in his interaction with a very young Oda Sakunosuke. Although baby Odasaku is already an assassin, there's a world-weariness to him that indicates that this is something he does because he has no other choice. When he asks for better food rather than an exit from his prison cell, the implication is that staying in the cell is a rare moment of having shelter in his life. As I said in the preview guide, I am Pavlov's dog at this point, and whenever Odasaku shows up, I get weepy, but I can't be the only person wishing he had also been taken under Fukuzawa's wing at this juncture.

These three episodes' purpose is to set the stage for what is to come. A better understanding of both Fukuzawa and Ranpo, who are both often sidelined in the main action of the story, is a vital underpinning that gives the whole story its shape and the confirmation of just how long Dostoyevsky has been meddling in the affairs of the Gifted in Yokohama is something we need to remember. We return to the present in episode forty-one when Odasaku is gone, and Atsushi takes over the role of the eager young protagonist. But without the actions of Fukuzawa, Soseki, and Ranpo, the story could never have reached this point in the first place.

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Bungo Stray Dogs Season 4 is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.