Why Episode 425 Black Impact! The Moment the Black Organization Reaches Out is an important Detective Conan Episode.

Major Spoiler Warning.  

I'm about to talk about this episode in the Context of my relationship with it as someone who didn't watch all the DC episodes I've seen in order, so I'll be spoiling not just the episode at hand but episodes as recent as 2023.

Spoiler Alert!!

I had been watching through all the Black Organization relevant episodes is roughly chronological order up to the end of the Vermouth arc, but then really started jumping around more randomly. So for example I'd seen all of The Clash of Red and Black before watching this episode that started the Kir saga.  

So I found it interesting how Conan is kind of technically committing Treason in how he's working with these FBI agents operating in Japan without permission, removing evidence from Crime scenes and lying to cover for them to the Japanese police officers he works with more regularly and knows more personally. I found it curious how the Japanese audience was so cool with all that. 

Then I finally watched this episode, a mistake Conan makes early in the episodes puts his Family in danger and at the end the FBI and Akai particularly essentially saves them by taking the Heat for Conan's tracking device. 

And so Conan in indebted to them, and that a very Japanese sense of Honor can explain his loyalty to them. 

So I am glad this Episode is Dubbed now, I just also wish more of the prior episodes with these FBI character were as well to set it up. But I did also recently argue against Continuity Lock Out. 

More Detective Conan episodes are on Netflix now.

The new Dub is still great, awesome cast and good scripting, and each episode is a good one including two of my favorite of the entire series. I do want everyone to keep watching them so they'll make more. 

However I can no longer stay silent about how frustrated I am with how this is being handled.

I would be less annoyed by how many important episodes are being skipped if these weren't the only ones we can legally watch even just Subbed between 123 and 754.  If TMS would just make all of it available Subbed somewhere then I could direct people to the context they're missing. 

I was fully prepared for the amount of content we'd get today to be no more then what we got in terms of runtime.  However when they said this would end the Black organization collection I assumed it was gonna end with episode 345 Head to Head Match with The Black Organization: A Duel Mystery on a Full Moon Night the finale of the Vermouth arc.  

Episode 425 Black Impact! The Moment the Black Organization Reaches Out is a very good and very important episode but one I was willing to wait for since it's the start of an era of the show not an ending.  

For today's drop I would gladly have traded it for Contact with The Black Organization 309-311 and Four Porsches 338-339.  And of the episodes between Mysterious Passenger and 345 I would also for a collection branded as being about Conan VS the Black Organization consider them more directly relevant then The New York Murder Case, that case's relevance to the BO storyline is largely in hindsight, Contact is the episode that really first starts revealing what the BO is actually doing. And Four Porsches is most of the set up that 345 pays off. 

And if we could have had more episodes I'd next have prioritized Hidden Bathroom Secret 340-341 and 343-344 The Connivence Story Trap.  

The New York Murder Case I would maybe have saved for a Collection focused on key episodes of the ShinRan Romance storyline in which I'd include every episode where Ran suspects the truth at least up to The Desperate Revival 188-193, maybe episode 10, Ski Lodge Murder Case 84-85,The Memories of First Love Murder Case 100-101, The Locked Room in the Sky: Shinichi's First Case 162 (which is a double length episode), The Secret Rushed Omission 271-271 and again 343-344.  

If that is the theme of the next collection we get which I think it should be, but again being given only 12-13 episodes, I would skip those already covered by the first 123 and focus on the episodes the West hasn't officially gotten yet. 

Another theme the next collection could have is an FBI characters focus, Cinema Saturdays is doing the two most FBI centric movies in a row, and it would fill in some gaps. It could start with The Battle Game Trap 226-227, then 277-278, 343-344 and Four Porsches could also fit here, The Man from Chicago 258-259.  And then Shadow of The Black Organization.  Those being the options for just the first Cour of such a collection, the second cour would have to be the full Clash of Red and Black, not a single episode skipped.

Update August 26th 2025: Contact With The Black Organization has moments that could justify making it part of either a ShinRan or FBI themed selection, it'd be hard to argue that's the main point of the episodes, but I also feel it's hard to argue the Black Organization is the main point of the New York Murder Case. 

I've also recalled that a few things my memory associated with Contact actually happened in the prior two parter 307-308 On The Trial of The Silent Witness.  But none of the most essential stuff. 

Genre tags are applied too loosely on websites like Crunchyroll.

I'm singling out CR here because HIDIVE's much smaller library makes how the critique could apply there less annoying. 

It's bad enough these Anime websites are mostly using normal Genre instead of distinctly Anime genres.

It's most egregious with Drama.  Drama is something that's arguably in everything, Drama as a Genre to me is really primally the absence of anything else, or at least the absence of Fantastical or Action/Adventure elements.  

After that the same almost applies just as much to Romance or Slice of Life, I'm more open to Fantastical shows being counted as Slice of Life but it has to be something like Slime 300 as opposed to Reincarnated as a Slime. 

I guess the problem is on CR as well as Database Websites these Tags serve two different purposes.

There is when you are on the Page for the Show or Movie itself where I guess maybe some people do want to know if this Isekai has more Drama compared to other Isekai.

But I mainly use these Tags to search for shows.  And so I want clicking on Drama to be something that narrows things down, I'm looking for shows like Rumboing Hearts or Toradora or School Days, not DanDaDan or half of CR's Isekai.

Pokémon and Nintendo Fandom

One thing I feel is missing from how many people reminisce about the early days of the Pokémon fandom is how the Pokémon Fandom and the wider Nintendo fandom related. 

Pokémon is the only franchise represented in the original Super Smash Bros. that wasn't old enough to even have an SNES game, a few others had no NES games but only Pokémon had no SNES games.

The way Pokémon so quickly jumped to being arguably the most mainstream popular of all of them and certainly bigger than every franchise but Mario and Zelda did garner some degree of subtle resentment from the more long-time Nintendo fans.  Not me though, I was a Nintendo loyalist for years already before I heard of Pokémon but once I discovered Pokémon I quickly thought of it as part of the family.  But I noticed that for example early Sprite Comics predicated on being epic Nintendo crossover fics never included Pokémon.  And when there were Pokémon references it sometimes felt kinda mocking.

Today Pokémon isn’t different from other Nintendo first party franchises because it’s seen as too new, Pokémon is older now then Mario and Donkey Kong were when the first Smash came out (in fact so is Smash itself) and some even younger franchises are firmly part of the Nintendo pantheon now.  But Pokémon does feel a little different still in some hard to explain way.

Nintendo loves dropping Easter Eggs to their other first party franchises in various games, but Pokémon does feel a bit left out of that tradition, both in terms of being referenced and making references. Smash seems to be the only place Pokémon coexists with the other Nintendo franchises and it’s not first party only anymore. 

It might be because Pokémon is by many thought of as a Multimedia franchise rather than a Video Game franchise first.  The whole Pokémon saying only their own names trope is an Anime invention that proper Pokémon games rarely incorporate and when they do only really for Pikachu. Except Smash of all places where Jiggleypuff also still does this (I do appreciate how Rachel Lillis name is immortalized as part of the Smash Ultimate credits).

In which case it does go both ways.  Comic Party is an Anime from OLM the same studio as the Pokémon Anime that I refer to as the Lucky Star of the early 00s, more specifically it is for OLM what Lucky Star is for KytoAnimation on a meta level. And yet Pokémon is the one OLM Anime left out of all that referencing even though it was by far their biggest franchise.  Perhaps because Nintendo didn’t want their new Crown Jewel being so directly linked to Otaku Culture. 

Pokémon is by money earned the largest IP franchise of all time, beating out even Star Wars and Batman.  So it’s perhaps the one franchise Nintendo feels they don't need to cross promote. 

On a Fandom level Pokémon’s long term ubiquity has made it now the opposite of what I observed in the early days.  Pokémon references inevitably show up in fan content related to other Nintendo and other Anime franchises.  But a Pokémon specific YouTube channel is not likely to bring up Metroid.

It’s a shame because I think there is a lot of fun you could have with fan theories based on connecting Pokémon to the rest of the Nintendo multiverse, like the parallelism I see between the Lake Guardians and the Golden Goddesses. Or how Kirby could be a Pokémon anatomically related to Clefairy and Jiggleypuff.  Heck one could go beyond just Nintendo and speculate on a relationship between Deoxys and Jenova.

And if Link isn’t out of place in Mario Kart then Pikachu certainly wouldn’t be.  If a Side Stepper can somehow drive a Go Kart so can a Krabby.

Keep watching Detective Conan

 Countdown to Heaven will still be on YouTube till Tomorrow Evening.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IL039jPVS2k

I recommend doing a binge of the episodes on Netflix where you watch this movie between the Reunion three prater and Mysterious Passenger since that's when it originally came out. 

After that The Raven Chaser will be up for a week.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LtigIQlsqM

Then the other movies we'll get during August are announced to be  Sunflowers of Inferno, Dimensional Sniper (the only one where I'm unsure if it'll eb Dubbed or not) and The Scarlet Bullet.

And rewatch the new Dub on Netflix and/or Crunchyroll as often as you can.

Update August 8th: And we have an announcement now that more are coming to Netflix on August 21st.

https://tmsanime.com/news/more-detective-conan-coming-to-crunchyroll-netflix