[Switchblade]

I definitely underestimated how much harder it would be to talk about this show without rewatching it. It is definitely harder to come up with a lot of insights when you're relying not on fresh observations but on "I watched this, like, three years ago from an increasingly bad faith perspective" memories.

So what I remember most about this arc was that I tended to consider this my least favorite tribute episode. Not for Kuroto; it's hard to hate on more Kuroto content. No, it was Eiji. This felt like the biggest departure for a returning character to date: laundry detective Takumi still felt like Takumi, but they changed so much about Eiji that it almost seemed like they'd just brought on Shu Watanabe to play a different character. Not sure how accurate that impression would still be on a rewatch, but it's what I walked away from these episode with back in the day and I wasn't a fan. I think this was around the point where I was starting to wonder if Decade's approach wasn't a better way of handling an anniversary show (it wasn't, for the record).

As for what I remember from the show's main cast, I'm not sure where I landed on Sougo at the time. Looking at some old posts it seems that I was getting frustrated with what felt like inconsistency on whether he was supposed to be learning anything from these experiences or if it was all bouncing off of his head like a Faiz Axel.