To Baker Street We Go.note
"Goodbye…Shin’ichi Kudō."
— Hiroki Sawada
Detective Conan: The Phantom of Baker Street is the 6th Detective Conan Theatrical Film in the franchise. It was directed by Kenji Kodama, written by novelist Hisashi Nozawa, produced by Michihiko Suwa and scored by Katsuo Ono. It was released on April 21, 2002.
Conan was invited to a party with many other guests. They were there to test a new virtual game system, when a murder mystery occured. However, the AI goes rogue and takes the children hostage. Now Conan must go into the game system to figure out who the murderer is with the help of the famous book character Sherlock Holmes. The lives of 49 kids testing the game are in his hands.
Trailer
The Phantom of Baker Street provides examples of:
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Noah’s Ark goes rogue and holds 49 children hostage inside their Cocoons.
- Bar Brawl: Spoiled Brat Hideki Moroboshi ends up putting the gang in one after stealing a gun and firing it. Excluding Haibara, everyone participates but Ran does the most damage.
- Big Bad Ensemble:
- Within the plot regarding the Cocoons, Noah’s Ark hijacks the game and traps everyone in it under the pretense of a 'resetting Japan' plot (as almost all the children barring the Detective Boys are the children of influential Japanese people). Noah's Ark - or rather Hiroki - does replace one of the participating kids, and admits at the end when Conan wins the game that he really just wanted to play with some friends.
- In the real world, IT magnate Thomas Schindler is the culprit behind the murder of Tadaaki Kashimura, with his motive for doing so being to dispose of Hiroki's DNA tracking software that has evidence proving he's of the lineage of Jack the Ripper.
- Censored Child Death: The closest the entire Conan franchise has come to killing a child on-screen was the start of this movie, which starts with ten-year old Hiroki Sawada jumping off a skyscraper. He removed his shoes and stood at the ledge of the balcony before cutting away to a scene minutes later when his superiors, who have been trying to get into his room, find his shoes...
- Character Filibuster: Ai and Hiroki were used for such purposes here. It's kind of jarring to see the latter switching between a
woobie in the two ends of the movie and this in the middle. - Coming of Age Story: The numerous rich kids who accompany, especially their leader Moroboshi are forced to mature and become humble throughout the course of the film. Subverted in Moroboshi's case, as he's replaced by Hiroki as soon as the game begins; when the kids are freed, he's the only one left completely clueless as to what had transpired.
- Creator Cameo: In-Universe. Dr. Agasa, who helped program the game the kids are trapped in, and Shinichi's father, who wrote the scenario for it, appear in a photo as Watson and Holmes, respectively. In addition, Irene Adler's appearance and personality were based on Shinichi's mother.
- Darker and Edgier: There was a different screenwriter for this film and it showed. A child commits suicide on-screen and is not revived or revealed to have survived another child shoots a loaded gun at a person (he misses) and numerous other moments.
- Gratuitous English: One clue that doesn't translate very well in English. Kashimura's dying message of "JTR" does not mean Jack the Ripper, but Schneider—through its Japanese approximation Jintora.
- Heroic BSoD: Conan has a brief one when Ran sacrifices herself to stop Jack.
- Holodeck Malfunction: The plot is basically this; specifically, Noah's Ark hacked into a VR gaming system and took the 50 players as hostage: Win to Exit, or their brains will be literally fried!
- Inside a Computer System: The main premise involves the virtual reality gaming console "cocoon" that puts players into the gaming world by neural stimulation. Of course, being a movie, we have the obligatory Holodeck Malfunction...
- O.O.C. Is Serious Business: How Conan suspected Hideki has been replaced. Specifically, he was unfazed by an early soccer ball, despite having been established as something of a soccer fanatic.
- Reverse Whodunnit: An interesting case. The audience is shown Schindler's murder plot against Kashimura in full detail once the main plot starts going (outside of whiting out the murder weapon as that spoils the trick as to how he got the weapon in the first place), and the victim leaves the dying message of marking the keys 'JTR' on his keyboard with blood. Conan and Yusaku independently figure out that the victim refers to 'Jack the Ripper', and Conan joins the game (which, as Agasa has confided in him, has a portion that's based on the Whitechapel serial murders) in order to track down what the message means, while Yusaku remains in the real world to investigate Kashimura's murder.
- Runaway Train: Towards the end, Conan ends up fighting Jack the Ripper in a Traintop Battle on one of these.
- Snap Back: The "death" of Noah's Ark can be said as one, to prevent the risk of adding in another Canon Immigrant as people who knew Conan's secret are, otherwise, important characters.
- Starts with a Suicide: Phantom of Baker Street started with the suicide of Hiroki Sawada, moments after he was introduced to the audience.
- Token Adult: Ran is always this when she hangs out with the Detective Boys, but it stands out more when she is with 48 children under 13. (Though Conan and Haibara are her age, only the audience is aware of that).
- Trapped in Another World: A good bulk of the movie is spent inside the artificial world Noah’s Ark created.
- Villainous Lineage: The Non-Serial Movie The Phantom of Baker Street started out with sensible social commentary on Japan's hereditary culture but hits this trope around the revelation that the bad guy is a descendant of Jack the Ripper and thus couldn't stop the murderous nature in his gene— or, at least, killed people because he was found he was the descendent thereof.
- Of course it's not so much this as the bad reputation such a revelation would cause if it went public that scared him, because the hereditary culture would turn him into that character in the eyes of the people. And then at some point his panic caused his common sense to run a few red lights and then hit a lamppost, a little understandably. Basically, it could be about how concentrating on erasing the mistakes of one's ancestors can make you repeat them.
