The concept of fighting crime has always been simple, even as technology has advanced from the days of Jack the Ripper. Establish a crime scene, find the clues, get a motive, and find the killer…not exactly in that order but within the realm of it at least. If we could actually dive into a killer’s ID—or Id Well as the show calls it—then we could possibly see crimes before they happen and/or track a killer’s movement. The first step, though—find a means of actually diving into a person’s mind—we can’t do as far as we know…yet.

Sakaido—Akihito Narihsago—goes into Id Wells often in ID:INVADED and dies often within these worlds. However, as the show establishes, those deaths aren’t that impactful if they don’t continuously happen to stress the diver out.

Having the ability to dive into a criminal’s mind would make crime solving a lot safer for detectives and investigators. Instead of possibly running into a trap, the investigators could see the killer’s location and calculate a plan of action to arrest them, safely. Maybe diving into Id Wells is a bit tiring on the psyche but if it prevents a funeral it might be worth while.

We’ve examined why it would benefit crime solving teams to remove the danger of real world problems to examine a “mental landscape” but here’s the million dollar question; Would technology like this be even possible? let alone feasible? There are ways to dig into a person’s mind via hypnotism and such but, beyond what is considered “gimmicky”, we haven’t developed any form of real-world tech that can allow a person to see inside the mind of another. Maybe far into the future, we could pull off what ID:INVADED does but, for now, crime-solving is going to be on foot and with real-world hands-on methods.

The requirement to become a “brilliant detective” in the world of ID:INVADED is to be considered a latent serial killer. If this was real life, do you really believe a serial killer would help the police identify other serial killers? Maybe we could give them incentive to do so—reduced sentencing or controlled living space like Akihito has—but the public would no doubt hate the police force for using such a system. Bottom line folks, this is the one element we can’t see happening IRL.