Haru: "ON" drama episode seven recap and screenshots

 Air Dates: July 12 to September 6, 2016 Tuesdays at 10:00 pm on Fuji-TV, rating: 7.98%

 This drama also goes by the name "On: Special Agent Hinako Todo"

Main Cast:

Haru as Hinako Todo, rookie detective

Yu Yokoyama as Yasuhisa Shoji, senior detective

Atsuro Watabe as Iwao Atsuta, department's supervisor

Jun Kaname as Keiichiro Kurashima, detective

Kento Hayashi as Tamotsu Nakajima, doctor

Mieko Harada as Taeko Ishigami, medical examiner

Tsutomu Takahashi as Keizo Kataoka, detective

Saku Momose as Ryoshin Shimizu, detective

Ryo Sato as Maki Tsukioka, traffic officer

Shiji Saito as Takeshi Miki, investigator

  Two more episodes to go but will wait until next week to view them as I may be boring some of you out there with these recaps as this is the fifth one in a week. No blabbering tonight as we'll get right to the action, there was no carryover from the previous episode.
 AID is a website that was created for people who seriously wanted to commit suicide. But when an individual first asks for help in doing that deed the leader of the site along with other members try to persuade that person from going through with the act, they truly do try to stop them. And those efforts to stop that troubled person from committing suicide will continue for a while if the poster keeps wishing to end their life.
 But if those efforts fail to help that person then the site will send them a package containing a drug that was popular twenty years ago for killing yourself, that drug is called Biolog. The person is told the drug will send them to a better place and relieve them of all of their miseries but the sender didn't tell them exactly what this miracle drug would do.

 Biolog is a drug which causes a very unpleasant death but at least it's a quick one but that feeling of heaven that was advertised is totally false. As you can see above there have been five of these deaths and Hinako's elite team of detectives has been assigned the case. The team didn't have much success in finding any clues but for once some lucky breaks came their way.
 Hinako often visits a 'Lolita' club for some reason to relax. There the owner says one of her employees is troubled and the owner, 'My Sweet Boss', feels that she may harm herself. That was the case as when Hinako and the boss visited the apartment of the employee Kiria she was on the AID site. This was the first time Hinako had heard of it and after calming Kiria down presented this evidence to the rest of the team.
 The forensic chief Miki decided to be a guinea pig and join the site claiming he was someone who wished to end their life. That didn't go so well as the other members were putting him down and the leader of the site never contacted him. He was eventually kidnapped and beaten but the team was able to discover his locations and was able to rescue him at the very end of the show. However for now the AID site was a dead end but another break befell Hinako.

 Last episode we met a veteran officer named Harashima who worked at a police box. Many years ago his young son was killed by a suicide jumper who had leapt from a building. His wife was completely distraught over the incident and a few years later she also killed herself. Because of those events Harashima is someone who frowns upon those who want to kill themselves, Hinako soon learns the truth about his past.
 Harashima had also made the mistake of telling her some of his thoughts regarding people who wanted to kill themselves, she kept it a secret but he was now the #1 suspect on her list. Hinako is right with her suspicions as Harashima is the owner and leader of the AID site, he does want to help those in need but if they're so determined to kill themselves then he's willing to help them.
 Back to Kiria who has now decided not to kill herself. For some reason Harashima wouldn't hear of it, he broke into her apartment and at gunpoint was trying to force her to drink the Biolog drug. Harashima seems a bit wacky at this point, Kiria is going to die either by his gun or the drug. Hinako had received info that seven people had been sent the drug, five had used it to kill themselves but Kiria was one who hadn't.

 Hinako burst into the apartment in the nick of time but as it turns out there wasn't much she could do to help. Her and Harashima had a long conversation where he confessed all his evil doings but she wouldn't be able to use the confession as now she was his target. Hinako always has carried a knife in her purse for situations like this one, however when she was about to pull it out the knife was gone!
 She seemingly had no chance now as Harashima quickly subdued her and was about to end her life either via his gun or the Biolog drug. Hinako only had a matter of seconds to live when once again she was saved in the nick of time by Shoji, lot of things about him which soon I'll get to. Shoji is quite a fighter and was able to arrest Harashima very quickly and it seems as though this is the end of the episode. it is except for the Shoji tidbits that did and will have a major affect on the last 2 shows.

 For the first six episodes Shoji had an informant named Fujikawa. At the end of the last episode he told Shoji he wouldn't work with him any more unless he got some secret info from the station, also he wanted Hinako's personal file. Shoji was able to do that but soon after Fujikawa was killed by Harashima, you honestly need a scorecard to keep track of all of the killings.
 When Shoji started out at the force Harashima was his mentor and the plans were one day he would take over what Harashima was doing though Shoji wanted no part of any suicide site. Before this final scene Harashima had told Shoji some of Hinako's secrets though we don't know what they were. They had to be serious as the reason Hinako's knife was no longer in her purse was because Shoji had removed it.
 He replaced it with a tape recorder, now after beating Harashima he took the recorder out of Hinako's bag, Harashima's confession was on the tape but also everything Hiano had said during their conversation, she said quite a few things about herself which shouldn't have been revealed and those things could mean an end to her career being a detective.

 In the final seconds as the credits were rolling Shoji showed Hinako the tape and said he had all he needed to end her career as Hinako just stood there gaping. Still can't understand why Shoji hates her that much, for a while they had started to get along but that may have been a ruse by Shoji. With just two episodes left sure they'll be devoted to Shoji trying to get her kicked off the force plus would imagine there's going to be a few more strange murders for the elite team to solve. Didn't mention Nakajima in this recap, he did help a bit with solving the case but he wasn't as much of a factor as in previous cases.
 This was the best episode since the fourth one as the drama got back to it's intensity and suspense. Nice cliffhanger too with Shoji holding the life of Hinako's in his hand, quite a bit will be happening in the last two shows. As mentioned above will be back next week with the those recaps and will do them back to back as it's probably going to be a two-parter. Sure they'll both be superb watches so will say now that this series is highly recommended, not on my top ten all time list but easily the best J-drama I've seen in about two years.

Haru: "ON" drama episode six recap and screenshots

 Air Dates: July 12 to September 6, 2016 Tuesdays at 10:00 pm on Fuji-TV, rating: 7.98%

 This drama also goes by the name "On: Special Agent Hinako Todo"

Main Cast:

Haru as Hinako Todo, rookie detective

Yu Yokoyama as Yasuhisa Shoji, senior detective

Atsuro Watabe as Iwao Atsuta, department's supervisor

Jun Kaname as Keiichiro Kurashima, detective

Kento Hayashi as Tamotsu Nakajima, doctor

Mieko Harada as Taeko Ishigami, medical examiner

Tsutomu Takahashi as Keizo Kataoka, detective

Saku Momose as Ryoshin Shimizu, detective

Ryo Sato as Maki Tsukioka, traffic officer

Shiji Saito as Takeshi Miki, investigator

  Did say yesterday that for the last four episodes would be doing two recaps in a row. Decided against that just in case I don't watch the seventh episode tomorrow plus it takes a long time writing up two full length recaps at once. Do have one fan out there who is also watching this series at the moment but for the most part seems most viewers aren't interested in this drama, perhaps due the lack of really popular stars?
 Had read this series gets much darker in the last 4-5 episodes, so far that hasn't been the case. At the end of the fifth show Nakajima had been arrested for murder, he didn't actually do the action but had a killer under his spell who committed suicide. That was the killer of Nakajima's boss at the clinic Hayasaka, the two of them had secretly been developing plans to cure the evil minds of criminals.
 So far the plan had worked to some extent but the ending results were disastrous as five of their subjects had gotten a brain tumor and had committed suicide. At his trial Nakajima wasn't prosecuted as his plans were a bit far fetched and no one could actually believe you could plant a brain tumor into someone. Nakajima wasn't entirely innocent though as instead of jail he's been sent to a facility named SNRC where suspects who the system doesn't know what to do with are sent.

 That brings us up to date with Nakajima but there is one other thing which is Hinako's chief still wants him to work on their cases, he did help solve two of them as he is an expert profiler. On to the cases for this episode and should say murders as in every show that's what the cases are.
 At Nerima park there was a man murdered, his body was half buried in the ground. What made it gruesome was that he had been literally filled to the gills with 100 yen coins! There was no one thing which killed him, could have been his stomach or heart exploding along with choking on the coins or some other way ten thousand coins(!) in your body could kill you.
 What I've liked about this series is that there's been no magical way of solving the crimes. When the team had no clues about the murdered man the chief just told them do go and solve it the old fashioned way which is by foot. The team of detectives did as told but with no results but before too long the unthinkable had happened which was that there was a second murder by the same method and this time it was a woman.

 The woman wasn't killed at the same park but under a nearby bridge. The method was the same though as she had 100 yen coins stuffed into her mouth, the medical examiner estimated that there was a million yen in the two victim's bodies which would be ten thousand coins. There was one clue which was of no help, among the coins was one that had come from an arcade.
 What baffled the ream was where could someone get so many coins and how is it possible to put them into a body? Hinako deduces that it's a machine somewhat like they feed birds, chickens or other animals with, it ended up she was correct. Unknown to her or her boss Atsuta the pair had met the murderers though it was group of people one would never suspect of doing such a crime.
 Hinako had been a bit down and off kilter since the arrest of Nakajima so Atsuta had accompanied her on the investigation. On their rounds they helped an older man who had fallen down and sprained his ankle in front of an arcade as they brought him to his residence. It was an old building the five residents dubbed '18', something to do with them being in that carefree state 18 year olds are in.

 The five residents, two women and three men, had no families and were a bit low on finances so they are living as one 'communal family' which is how they referred to themselves. All of them are in their seventies but surprisingly in good health, possibly good enough to commit crimes.
 The coin murders haven't come to an end as one more happened, the victim this time was a somewhat well known Yakuza boss. He was killed shortly after visiting his daughter and granddaughter with the killing done the same way as he was stuffed head to toe with coins. There was a clue this time as the coins had fingerprints on them whereas the others hadn't.
 The clues to the killings were rapidly coming in as the park where the first victim was found used to be a laboratory owned by a man named Inatomi. That happens to be the name of the man Hinako and her boss had helped that day, seems impossible to think he could be guilty of any killings. More clues came out as the first two victims had ties to the five elders living together. There was so much evidence that Hinako took it upon herself to go to their place and perhaps arrest them.

 Didn't take any convincing from Hinako to make them talk as they were prepared for the police to come as they had set up the clues and for their trail to be discovered. They had wanted to be arrested to stop them from doing more killings, the question was why had they committed the murders.
 They all had ties to the first two victims who had been able to swindle their houses from them. Those two were associated with Urasawa who was the Yakuza boss and the third victim. He also had other dealings with the group of five elderly people, the three victims had led them to a life of poverty. The group worked together on the murders and was beginning to enjoy them too much, hence their request to be arrested.
 Which is what happened as they put up no struggle and seemed to be happy as they were led away to prison. To me it would have worked out better if the group of killers had been different people, no action or suspense in the ending with them wanting to be arrested. Nakajima did help out slightly with the case though not too much as the detectives would have found them eventually as they wanted to be caught. In the final moments Hinako visits Nakajima at the SNRC facility, it's the first time she's seen him since his confinement. Hinako confides in him that she's worried about her mind 'switching' as she realizes anyone can be a murderer, will she soon become one?

 All in all another fine episode though think the first four were much more intense than the last two though the fifth episode did have quite a suspenseful ending. Three more episodes to go, hasn't been a must watch but it's the best Japanese drama I've seen in at least a year or at least a regular prime time series. Said it in the last recap which is that it's hard to go wrong with police dramas and don't recall ever seeing one that I couldn't finish.
 Finishing is something I haven't been able to do with the three prior J-dramas from this year, can't believe how boring they've become. There are two starting up this month which seem promising and have a feeling those will be able to finished. Hopefully will be back tomorrow to recap episode seven and here's plenty more screenshots from this show.