Spoilers: The field sabotage, Inose’s injury and the final theft attempt are explained below.
Inose arranged the animal damage, then was injured by the boar he intended to release. The Dangerous Melon Field is international episode 1179 (Japanese episode 1121), an anime-original case. Solving that scheme does not finish the job: luminous tape and a black van point Conan toward a separate group of melon thieves.
The episode keeps changing the apparent problem. An assignment to identify a troublesome animal becomes a suspected assault, then returns to sabotage before ending with a human theft attempt. The evidence matters because those explanations are related to the same field without belonging to the same plan.
A detective is hired to investigate animal suspects
Melon farmer Kazuki Kumagai visits the Mouri Detective Agency to ask who is damaging his crop. The initial suspects are deer, wild boars and raccoons. Kogoro is reluctant until he tastes an excellent muskmelon and hears how much work goes into producing it.
The greenhouses contain fruit close to harvest, with individual premium melons worth tens of thousands of yen. Cameras, an electric fence and scarecrows have failed to stop the damage. That combination makes the losses more serious than an occasional animal wandering through a field.
Conan, Ran and Kogoro meet Kumagai’s farming acquaintances Shikado, Arai and Inose. Their names echo the animal suspects, extending the opening joke, but the rivalry over Kumagai’s superior melons introduces a human motive. Their concern about the damage is not automatically as friendly as it sounds.
The raccoon chase ends with a man on the ground
A cry of alarm draws everyone to a raccoon inside a greenhouse. They spend time driving it out, with Ran helping bring the chase under control. Just after that immediate threat is removed, Arai calls them to another greenhouse.
Inose is lying unconscious among pieces of a smashed melon. He is alive and is taken away for treatment, but the injury at the back of his head and damage to his trousers make the scene look like an attack. The investigation turns toward people who might resent him.
Personal grievances appear among the farmers: a romantic rivalry involving Shikado, Arai’s debt and friction with Kumagai all invite suspicion. None yet explains the physical sequence. The security footage supplies a stranger clue: no clear human intruder appears, but grass outside a greenhouse moves.
Inose’s diversion turns against him
Conan reexamines the cages and the surroundings, then explains the case through Sleeping Kogoro. Inose envied Kumagai’s melons while his own crop was doing poorly. With shipping close, damaging even one greenhouse could inflict a serious loss.
He brought a raccoon and a boar in a small truck parked inconspicuously nearby. He first released the raccoon from a camera blind spot and raised the alarm himself. While everyone dealt with it, he wheeled the boar’s cage toward a different greenhouse.
The boar had been left hungry so that it would ravage the melons. Instead, when released, it charged Inose and struck his shin. He fell backward, hit his head on a melon and lost consciousness. The animal then dug its way out at the edge of the greenhouse.
The apparent victim was therefore the architect of the sabotage. He had wanted the destruction to look like wildlife damage, but the animal did not follow his intended script. No second person needed to strike him in the greenhouse.
Why the moving grass and broken melon matter
The injury and scene fit a man being knocked over and striking the back of his head on the fruit. The moving grass, without a visible human figure, fits the boar’s escape route. The cage and the distraction explain how the animal reached the greenhouse in the first place.
Those details answer different parts of the puzzle: how the others were drawn away, what directly injured Inose and how the creature left. They are more useful than merely choosing the farmer with the strongest grievance.
Inose recovers with relatively minor injuries, and his plan is exposed. Kumagai and the others respond with an exasperated determination to straighten him out. Their familiarity softens the ending of the sabotage case, although it does not erase the deliberate attempt to ruin a neighbor’s crop.
The night markers reveal a second threat
Conan refuses to treat the explanation as the end of the assignment. A black van has been lingering nearby, and luminous tape has been placed around the greenhouses. Those markers are useful to people navigating the site after dark, not to hungry animals.
The clues point to a separate theft operation. A night stakeout catches a masked group arriving to steal the melons; they are surrounded and arrested. Inose’s attempt to destroy the crop and the thieves’ attempt to take it are distinct threats, so discovering one cannot safely explain away the other.
The finish gives the farmers a chance to protect the harvest together after the rivalry has divided them. A new request concerning stolen abalone then restores Kogoro’s food-driven enthusiasm. It is a fitting comic echo of the premium melon that persuaded him to take the first job.
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