So, I know that everyone is pissed that the detective side story seemed to amount to nothing but it’s actually a very clever and very realistic plot point. When you look at any country, to include Japan, the amount of corruption that has pervaded for decades and that is still being unearthed is breathtaking. There are constant investigations that start and that amount to nothing because politicians hold an absurd amount of wealth and power and can sweep investigations into themselves or those close to them under the rug.
The point of the detective side story was likely to show just how POWERFUL ADAM’s family and influence is in the country. Here’s a guy who was raised from birth to be the next politician in the Ainosuke family dynasty and he is so powerful that one measly detective can’t touch him if her bosses won’t back her up.
The biggest investigations have been those where the bosses did not cave under pressure. In the US, a great example is the Watergate scandal and the investigation into Spiro Agnew (the vice president at the time). Everyone should listen to Rachel Maddow’s podcast Bagman on this because it is FASCINATING. The only reason anything was uncovered and that we know anything about it is because the Attorney General at the time (who was a Republican and the same party as Nxon and Agnew and appointed by Nixon) resisted political and family pressure to drop the investigation and instead he shielded and protected his attorneys and the investigators from the politicians who were trying to discredit their investigations to get away with their crimes. That is something that is rare to find in any human being and takes immense conviction of character.
The point is that any investigation the detective lady would have conducted would have taken months and much longer than 12 episodes. She would have needed resources and for her bosses to be incorruptible in order to protect her investigation. There was never any way this was going to happen. The point of her was to show how powerful ADAM was, how untouchable he was, how dangerous he continued to be (so much so that he threw another politician under the bus in order to save his skin).
But even though the detective lady wasn’t able to do anything about him (and who knows, if there’s a season 2 maybe we’ll see more of her), Langa was able to do something about ADAM. Because Langa realized that ADAM lost his purpose for skating and no longer skated because it was fun. Instead, he skated because, like everything else in his life, it made him feel powerful and untouchable and unbeatable. When Langa got in the zone, he felt nothing, he heard nothing, he saw nothing. It was a place of grief and depression for him, where he’d gone before when he dad died and he tried to snowboard for the first time. But for ADAM, the zone represents the only place where hecould just BE without the pressures or the expectations of others. And he wanted to drag Langa there with him because he didn’t want to be alone there. Except that Langa don’t need that shit because he’s found his happiness with Reki. Whereas ADAM has no happiness. He only has power and it’s always lonely at the top.
We see the just a couple of scenes where ADAM may be on the precipe of a paradigm shift and that he may have realized that he lost sight of why he skated, but toward the end, he walks back from it. When he started shouting that it was “insignificant” and that fun had no useful function at all, that’s him walking back from the ledge of the paradigm shift that would have allowed him to become a different person. People don’t change once they’re adults, and the only times they do is when something so jarring happens that it forces them to confront and accept a paradigm shift in their reality.
ADAM has money and power and conviction that he is untouchable, and therefore he has no reason to jump that ledge and undergo a paradigm shift. The detective lady never had any chance at touching him and bringing him down, and her character arc supported the idea that ADAM would not change and cannot change.
