Two steps away from where Hortez was standing, Frodo ends up inadvertently spying on a conversation between a young, serious-looking girl and a bewildered-looking duck. (Note: that is pretty much the only kind of duck.) The girl is named Sanae, and besides her permanent angry frown emoji of a face, she can best be described as a perfect cross of Waylon and Yoshino, and that’s possibly because she is their daughter. I know, I know, that means Waylon managed to consummate his marriage at least once, something which requires the Golden Gate Bridge to suspend my disbelief. It’s possible this is a turkey baster situation, but I’d think if Yoshino had the entirety of HoYay Castle to choose from in that scenario, she would have gone with literally any man there before her husband.
Anyway, Sanae is pleading with the duck to accept something from her as thanks for some help he provided. The duck is refusing her, and seems to think it’s rude for her to even offer anything. Sanae protests, “My parents would be ashamed of me if I showed such bad manners.” Your dad peed himself in front of a president! He has no right to judge. Frodo chooses this moment to butt in, and the duck and the girl start yammering simultaneously. It turns out Sanae dropped her giant glasses into the pond and the duck retrieved them for her, but he doesn’t think that’s a big enough deal to warrant some kind of extravagant mafia thank-you gift. Yeah, girl, ducks like diving into ponds. It’s fine. Frodo, given the stricken look on Sanae’s face, tries to convince the duck to just take her goddamn Edible Arrangement. He still doesn’t want it, but Sanae is shoving those chocolate-covered pineapple wedges in his face like she’ll literally die if he says no one more time, so he accepts. She thanks him with a deep bow and he waddles off to pick out all the strawberries and throw the rest of it in a ditch. As he’s walking away, Sanae bows a-fucking-gain to his back. SHE’S JAPANESE, DO YOU GET IT NOW?! Then she turns to Frodo and bows to him too. Christ.
Sanae refers to that polite-off she and the duck were having as a “spat” and thanks him for resolving it. “My things are back at the inn,” she goes on to this dude who shouldn’t care. “I should get going.” For no reason whatsoever, since this girl’s only skill seems to be bowing a lot, Frodo asks, “Will you join my group?” This creeps me out, but maybe only because I’ve been a little too into Broadchurch, the town where everyone’s a pedophile! Sanae, though, is acquainted with the recruitment process, thanks to her parents. “Kindness often comes back to you,” she tells Frodo. “Even my parents said that he was blessed with good friends in the past.” I’m sure Barry would be delighted to know that, 15 years after his adventures end, one of his least favorite gay men told his immaculately conceived daughter how blessed and lucky he was in life. That totally would not make him flip over a table.
Once Sanae has continued the family tradition of running off with total strangers, Frodo heads to the furthest building. Inside, he finds a bizarre scene: a duck and a boy in a very lame outfit are standing over what appears to be the contorted corpse of a second duck. The child, appropriately named Kidd, tells Frodo that he is looking at a murder scene. “Officially, it will be known as the Duck Murder Case,” he adds. “You have a talent for thinking of creative names,” Frodo doesn’t reply. Anyway, Kidd. He’s basically dressed like the fussy fourth grade edition of Miles Edgeworth, only he physically resembles Phoenix and his suit jacket and knee socks are blue. He is also obsessed with finding evidence, exacting justice, and being a drama queen. So I will take back what I said about intrepid reporter Perrault, because Kidd is obviously Phoenix and Edgeworth’s one true mpreg love child.
Larry Butz just broke out in a cold sweat.
Kidd leans over the duck carcass and gives his impressions aloud: “According to the inn’s guest list, the victim’s name is Jonathan. Every bone in his body is broken. No personal items appear to be missing, so it may have been a personal vendetta.” Where would a duck even keep his wallet? They don’t wear pants! But I will trust that Kidd has a complete record somewhere up his asshole of all the personal items Jonathan here may have had on him. “It won’t be an easy case to solve,” Kidd says, though no one has asked him to solve it. To Frodo, he goes on, “Would you like to assist me?” Then again, it’s not like the fucking duck police department is going to figure this out, since their one competent officer is gallivanting around the countryside with Hugo. So Frodo agrees to help.
As if this could get any more absurd, Kidd places a red mask over his eyes, which is apparently the cue for his goofy detective theme to play him into the case. Someone picked up a taste for cheesy action flair from his Aunt Maya. Frodo responds in the only appropriate manner, “………”
Now that he’s secured an assistant, Kidd begins his investigation by expositing about how he personally came to be a witness at the crime scene. Wow, he really is Phoenix’s son. “It happened right when I checked into this inn,” he says, fingering his chin just like daddy. In a sepia-toned flashback, Kidd and the innkeeper–the other duck in the room–are chitchatting at the front desk when the foley artist starts up a popcorn machine. Per Kidd, “All of a sudden, we heard horrible crunches and splintering noises from Mr. Jonathan’s room. It was too creepy sounding to be wood breaking.” He knows all about creaking wood, since he can hear his dads’ bed frame every night. In the flashback, Kidd and the innkeeper rush outside to Jonathan’s room, only to find him in his current state. Kidd immediately tells the aghast innkeeper, “Quiet down! Don’t touch anything. It’s all evidence. This is officially a murder case.” The innkeeper clearly had not thought of this, and Kidd tells him with a world-weary grimace, “Wherever I go, I run into cases like this. I suppose that’s what comes with being a famous detective.” This is so incredibly, delightfully dumb.
Out of the flashback, Frodo confirms that no one else was in the room with Jonathan. A perfect locked room mystery, except the room wasn’t locked and the solution will be really stupid. The innkeeper casually adds that Howard, a janitor working for the inn, was also nearby. Howard the Duck! Oh, you wacky writers. Though his name may as well be Red Herring. Kidd insists that they first search the room for clues, meaning Frodo searches the room while Kidd stands there in his dad-approved thoughtful pose. Among the tidbits Frodo stows in the court record: Jonathan’s feathers are too smooth and his expression too peaceful to indicate a struggle, some herbs were burnt in a vase on the shelf, a window big enough for a child to wriggle through is open, and last but not least, “Ladders aren’t my strong point.”
Who is he talking to?
Kidd decides this is enough evidence to be getting on with, such as it is, and next demands that Frodo “make some inquiries.” Again, Kidd will be hard at work, in this room, jamming his thumb up his ass. Outside, Frodo comes across Howard, who says he heard “the sounds of bones breaking” and saw his boss and Kidd run into the room afterward. “From the time I heard the noise until my master went into the room, no one came in or out,” he adds to an incredulous Frodo, who scoffs that Howard is suggesting the murderer “vanished into thin air.” Maybe the killer is one of the Mask’s Gang of Four and they teleported out! That would be at once more plausible and more relevant to the plot than the truth.
Frodo runs around Duck Village like a bumbling oaf for a while until I remember where the next “witness” is. He finds a duck browsing the wares at the trading post who knows about the “murder case.” This happened five minutes ago and nobody else has been to the inn in that time, so I don’t even know how this rumor has spread around. Anyway, the duck says, “Well, you know, the day before the murder, I saw an unfamiliar duck acting suspicious here. He was looking at the trade goods and taking notes about them.” So, exactly what this witness is himself doing. The “suspicious” duck apparently dropped a letter, which this nosy jerk picked up and now gives to Frodo.
Finally, Frodo finds another duck–this is awesome to describe!–hanging out by one of the town’s many water wheels. “You know,” says the duck conspiratorially, “I met the guy the night before he died.” Frodo’s all, “Dish!” like he has never heard anything so interesting. “We didn’t talk much,” the duck goes on. “He just wanted to sell me a strange herb. He said something about the herb being used for a very important ritual in a far away land. It gave me the creeps, so I didn’t buy any.” Come on, guy, no one is buying that. Clearly this dude and Jonathan got high and duck-humped all night on a big pile of hashish, and then his trip went bad and he strangled his lover to death. Open and shut.
‘I think I’ll move to Baltimore.’
Armed with this crucial intel, Frodo returns to Kidd, who still has not moved one inch from his contemplative stance above Jonathan’s body. I see he has learned from his father’s mistakes and prefers to send other people backtracking through location after location. He asks to see the letter fragment Frodo found, and then reads it aloud: “‘to do ..ga tonight. No one is to interrupt me.'” Why would a fragment of a letter be missing one piece of one word in the middle of a sentence? “‘Ga’? What does it mean?” Kidd wonders. “Do you think Mr. Jonathan was planning to do something?” Well, yes, given that he says in the letter that he is literally doing something. A propos of nothing, Frodo says, “I heard from a townsperson that people burn herbs for foreign rituals.” He could not have phrased that in a worse and more irrelevant-sounding way, but Kidd picks up on his meaning and puts together that Jonathan was planning on smoking a bowl and watching Wheel of Fortune before his untimely demise at the hands of a person who could fit through a tiny window but is also strong enough to break every bone in a giant duck’s body. “This case appears to be sort of satanic in nature,” Kidd muses, “but I promise I’ll untangle the mystery!” I would complain about the use of “satanic” in a universe that doesn’t have Satan in it, but Sanae and her parents are fucking Japanese so I gave up on that level of consistency a long time ago.
Kidd spends a full 30 seconds walking back and forth around Jonathan’s body and fingering his chin before reaching any sort of goddamn point. He mutters to himself while Frodo blandly stares at him and probably wonders what Cogsworth is making for dinner. Finally, Kidd announces, “I’ve got it! I know who did it! I’ve unlocked the mystery. I’ll reveal it to you!” Whoa, hey, keep your pants on.
Of course, it is of vital importance to Kidd to gather all relevant parties in the room with the body, Sherlock Holmes-style, before showing off his grandiose fucking intellect. That means calling in the innkeeper and Howard the Duck–for some reason the duck Jonathan got high with and fucked is not invited. “Please be patient,” Kidd tells Howard. “A famous sleuth usually reveals the truth in front of all the suspects.” Seriously, that duck outside is like THE suspect, and Frodo also didn’t do anything. Speaking of Frodo, Kidd asks his “assistant” who he thinks did the thing, and Frodo can choose between himself, the innkeeper, Howard, or the possibility that Jonathan committed suicide. I go with that last option since it is the closest to the truth, though “I did it” is tempting and funny. Kidd ignores Frodo’s response entirely and proceeds to “reveal the real facts.” Oh, I know, Obama did it! Something something 9/11!
“We were hindered by making too many assumptions, and by being narrow-minded and subjective,” Kidd tells everyone. “This is a bad way to investigate.” If that sounds like code for “I fucked up but want to make everyone own my mistakes,” that’s because it is. Howard goes, “Don’t be so pretentious! Tell us now! Who is the murderer?” I’m glad someone said it. In response, Kidd kneels down before the “corpse” and says, “Hello! Good morning, Mr. Jonathan! Wake up!” Well, obviously.
Jonathan opens his eyes and stares creepily at the floor. Then, much worse, he slowly begins popping his joints back into place, accompanied by some truly horrifying work by the foley artist, who probably cracked his knuckles one by one into a microphone. Gross. Frodo, who somehow had not figured this out yet, goes, “Woooaaaahhhhh!!” He’s adorable.
Even I would not wish this on a duck.
Once everyone is done throwing up, Jonathan wonders why everyone is staring–and vomiting–and adds, “Oh! Are you interested in doing yoga with me? I’m just learning, but I love how limber it makes me.” No, wait, we are not done with the vomiting. The other ducks are like, “Fucking really? Yoga?” which Kidd takes to mean they don’t know what it is and makes sure to mansplain it as “a method of advanced exercise originating in a faraway land.” Ugh. Kidd says he was “almost fooled” into thinking Jonathan was dead, but, “Then I remembered about that particular herb being used in yoga.” Right. I’m sure Frodo’s detective work just jogged Kidd’s memory of peeping through a crack in the bedroom doorway when Edgeworth was in the Fuchsia Paper Crane position, naked.