Currently watching: Marumaru Tsuma

Well, I’ve not been writing much recently but actually I’m feeling pretty optimistic about this season of J-dramas. Perhaps because I’ve not had much time to watch TV, and now it all seems fresh and original again. Anyway, there are four dramas that have caught my eye and I’ve even started visiting d-addicts multiple times in a day, hoping that the subs have been updated. It's been a long time since I did that. I’ll try and write about these four in the next few days.

The first I want to write about is Marumaru Tsuma. This series stars Shibasaki Kuo as the perfect wife to her husband, a TV news presenter. She's attentive, caring, patient. Everything you could wish for in a wife.

Except this perfection hides dark undercurrents. She’s too attentive, able to predict her husband’s needs with eerie precision. Also her desire to do what’s best for her man means she sometimes resorts to less than honest methods.

Who she is and what her true motives are is, I guess, the main story of this drama. The end of episode one threw in a few surprises to convince the viewers (who would have already suspected) that this woman can't be trusted and those dark undercurrents are about to come bubbling to the surface.

Episode one was all about setting up the situation and characters and, as such, nothing really dramatic happened until the last ten minutes. Then an awful lot happened at once. Perhaps almost too much, as various truths about the wife came tumbling out one after the other. A lot of the hidden menace will have gone with so much out in the open. But we’ll see. I could be wrong.

However, whatever her history is – yakuza, spy or even an assassin for Mossad – one thing is clear: leaving her husband when he has to look after his elderly mother (which was her idea) is not a nice thing to do.

Avoid: Ando Lloyd: AI Knows Love

It’s been ages since I named a blog post “avoid” but this drama leaves me very little choice. Despite a strong cast, good directing, nice photography and a lot of money being spent on it, this falls foul of those mistakes that should have been noticed during the writing sessions.

It’s written by the same writer who worked on Keizoku: SPEC, and if you take everything that was wrong with the finale of that drama and stretch it out across entire episodes, then you’ve got Ando Lloyd.

The trouble is, the writer keeps getting himself into situations that he can’t get out of. For example, the writer wants to show how damaged Ando Lloyd was after the battle in episode one, so he adds a line about it taking two weeks to recharge. Of course, that won’t be much use for the show, so he invents some lightning to get round it. But then something goes wrong! Actually, no it doesn’t.

The writer can simply rely on the super-intelligent robots to solve any problem or make mistakes as required. The writer certainly isn’t coming up with any clever solutions more complicated than “oops, he wasn’t dead after all.” Each time Ando Lloyd uses a new function we’ve never seen before, it does not suggest how powerful he really is, but rather how bad at planning the writer really is.

To be honest, the whole thing feels like a revenge fantasy written by someone who did badly at school and one day wrote this complicated story as if to reassure himself that he was clever and one day he’d be famous and then all those kids who kept laughing at him in class would be sorry.

Perhaps the worst thing about this drama is that it makes me wish they'd made a second series of Mr Brain. Kimura Takuya never does sequels, but maybe someone can force him to watch this drivel until he changes his mind.

Currently watching: Ando Lloyd

I was going to start off with a joke: Why are Kimura Takuya and this drama so perfect together? Because they’re both good looking but a bit stupid. Trouble is, I’ve no idea how stupid (or clever) Kimura Takuya actually is. I'm not entirely sure how stupid this drama is either, but more about that later.

It starts well. Almost brilliantly. Kimura Takuya plays Matsushima Reiji, an eccentric genius scientist, and his performance made the whole program feel like a sequel to Mr Brain. The story revolves around a “homicide calendar”: a list of people who will die on a particular date and time. We are now down to the last two: Matsushima and his fiance Ando Asahi, played by Shibasaki Kuo.

Unfortunately, Reiji doesn't make it much further than the half hour mark, and after that a mysterious android who looks identical to Reiji appears with orders to protect Ando Asahi from evil robots from the future. Meanwhile, there's a veteran detective who's on the trail of these murders and he suspects something very weird is going on.

On the plus side, it looks very nice and the acting is all pretty good. The trouble is that there's an awful lot of storyline packed into one episode, and it seems quite rushed. At the moment, none of the “rules” of time travel have been established. We don't know what these robots can or can't do, which means the story relies on “with one bound he was free” type devices to get our heroes out of any danger.

How this progresses remains to be seen. I suspect it will become a sort of Zettai Kareshi, and over time the android will slowly be taught human emotions. Except with more fight scenes. And fewer cakes.

Just watched: Galileo XX - Utsumi Kaoru Saigo no Jiken

This is an episode of Galileo in name only, since this story focuses exclusively on Utsumi Koaru, played by Shibasaki Kou. The eccentric scientist makes a cameo appearance in one scene and the final scene is on the same day as episode one of the  second series, but apart from that this drama has little to do with the rest of the Galileo canon.

Except, of course, the presence of Utsumi Kaoru solving a mysterious crime. A man is arrested in Tokyo, pushing a dead woman in a wheelchair. It’s discovered that he’s wanted in another prefecture, he confesses to a murder and he is transported to the other police department. However, by the time he gets there, his story has changed completely.

There’s no science behind the puzzle this time. Just a tangled tale of blackmail, false accusations. It’s a more old-fashioned murder mystery than Galileo’s demonstrations of physics and chemistry, but no less entertaining.

It was fun to watch, and nice to see Shibasaki Kou’s character get centre stage for once. It’s not a complete return to form for Galileo, nor is it as good as Suspect X, but it’s a decent addition to the series.