Trick 1

This is an interesting series with Nakama Yukie (Gokusen) playing a woman who is a down-on-her-luck magician. Her father was a very famous magician and debunker of spiritualists, but seems to have been killed by one. Her mother also seems to have considerable powers of her own.

Professor Ueda is a famous physicist who also does not believe in spirituality, but Yamada (Nakama Yukie) is able to trick him using magician tricks. She ends up accompanying him on a variety of missions to solve crimes or just to help people out.

The series is divided into various themes with several episodes per theme. The first theme concerns a religious cult that is headed by a woman who seems able to defy gravity. There is a young girl that Ueda and Yamada need to free from the cult, but things won't be as easy as they hoped.

The second theme concerns a person who claims he can make things disappear, and it seems he makes a bridge and an entire village of people disappear. The village hides its own dark secret, though.

The third series concerns a girl who tells the police she will kill three men with her spiritualist powers and it seems that she does that, but again Ueda and Yamada work to figure out what kinds of tricks she is using and to expose her as a fraud.

The fourth series is about a fake mind reader/magician who draws sketches of Ueda's apartment and Yamada's apartment, both.

The series is extremely variable in quality. The themes themselves are interesting and could have maintained the series on their own. However, for some reason a couple of running gags were used, one relating to the size of Yamada's breasts (she has flat breasts, according to her), and the other to the size of Ueda's penis (which is supposedly huge.)

Now, if that had been used for laughs a couple of times then it would have been ok. Instead, the gags are repeated and referred to over and over and over. It's like the show is schizophrenic, trying to reach for laughs with the running gags and otherwise dealing with serious, at times extremely serious, drama the rest of the time. The two just don't work well together.

The repetition is annoying enough that a series I would otherwise have given a very good to excellent rating ends up getting only an average to at-times very good rating.

Episode 1

Episode 2

Episode 3

Episode 4

Episode 5

Episode 6

Episode 7

Episode 8

Episode 9

Episode 10


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