Galileo
Posted on May 23rd, 2009
Galileo
[Rating: 6/10]
Genre: Mystery, Drama
Galileo centers around the strange cases encountered by police detective, Utsumi Kaori. When Kaori gets a tough case, she goes to seek the advice of Manabu Yukawa, a brilliant and handsome but self-obsessed scientist, who solves these mysteries using a combination of mathematical and science formulae for explanations.
This is like McGuyver and Poirot rolled into one, except it failed to succeed as brilliantly, in fact it didn’t come anyway near it. This show is more to showcase the looks and brains of the Yukawa except that I did not end up getting all fangirly over him. Here is why. Firstly he’s not a terribly likeable character, yeah he has the brains and brawns and seems to be able to do everything, and I mean everything, from cooking to rockclimbing to playing squash, and has women fawning over him, but his attitude is just unbearable. He is good and knows it, is narcissistic and really only helps out in the cases when he has interest for the case, otherwise he really can’t be bothered. Kaori herself is a rather cardboard cutout character, and is really there so that Yukawa can tease to his heart’s content and so the show will have some sort of obligatory romantic plot. They had barely any chemistry at all, and half the time she’s just looking dreamily at him, which kinda spoiled my initial impression of her. But since he’s meant to be Mr. Perfect obviously she has to fall under his spell as well. Probably the only interesting bits were the parts where he explains how he solved the cases, which were pretty incredible so kudos to the imagination of the scripwriter.
People who are new to watching Japanese dramas and the mystery genre will probably like it as it’s not particularly deep or hard to understand, and maybe so will those who have a scientific geeky side in them, but personally there are many other detective shows that are more worth the time.
Filed under: ** jdrama, mystery