Undead Murder Farce – 13 (Fin) – Crime Dog

For its finale, UMF eschews both OP and ED, instead beginning with a bunch of kinetic battles in the werewolf village. Kyle is defeated when Tsugaru uses his own chain against him (and Victor, in another temporary alliance with Tsugaru, uses his own severed arm as a projectile).

Alice is a crack shot as expected, but ends up falling for Aleister’s magic tricks, shooting his double and getting nicked in the back with some kind of fatal poison. Shizuku clashes with Carmilla once again, and not only accidentally flashes her with what I’ll call Chekhov’s Going Commando, but ends up surrounded by naked werewolf women when Carmilla flees.

With those battles ended, Shizuku lifts Aya high over her head so she can address the remnants of the two battling villages, so she can finally reveal the true culprit of all the murders: It’s Louise, AKA Nora…AKA Jutte. She’s the golden wolf.

Aya’s deductions surrounding Jutte’s multi-layered plot are extremely complex and detailed, and at least to my non-detective mind, moreso than previous cases. I suppose that makes sense, as this is the last case of the season.

Brass tacks: Jutte survived the tower fire that claimed her mother Rosa (and a random fox whose skeleton people mistook for Jutte’s). She then began living a double life as both Nora and Louise, having kidnapped the real Louise and hidden her in the cave for eighteen months (hence the tally marks).

Through it all, Jutte mentions how she and Louise had “a strange relationship”; Louise having been almost abandoned by her parents, and knowing what the villagers did to Rosa, made her believe Jutte was justified, even allowing Jutte to murder her so she could use her corpse not once but twice as both Louise and Nora to keep the wolves and humans guessing.

But with all the body-swapping, corpse tampering, and scent manipulation, in the end the one thing Jutte didn’t count on was a genius immortal detective like Rindo Aya to come to the villages. That said, once Aya reveals Jutte’s plot, nothing stops Jutte from simply transforming into a golden wolf and skedaddling…

…Except that she heads straight to the underground cave, where Aya has Tsugaru there waiting for capture her (with the chain he took from Kyle). Tsugaru thinks Jutte could stand to look a little more joyful in her villainy, but Jutte would prefer if he just let her go.

He doesn’t, as he has a job to do given to him by Aya. Jutte’s howl blows the candles out and she proceeds to start killing Tsugaru with a thousand little cuts and bites. He interrupts this process by bopping her on the nose, sending her splashing into the underground lake. In the moments she stops to shake off the water, she’s completely defenseless, like all dogs.

That’s when Tsugaru trusses her up like a turkey. However, when Shizuku arrives with Aya, Aya tells Tsugaru to let her go free. After all, Aya was wrong in a key part of her deductions: Jutte wasn’t doing this for revenge. She killed three human girls, but passed off their defaced corpses as the werewolf priestess girls.

In truth, she liberated them from a life of procreation, the boss wolf lady’s goal of creating the ultimate werewolf. In effect, Jutte/Nora and the three girls were being held in cages. Aya can relate, and because of that and the fact she was off in her deductions, Jutte is free to go and live her life how she sees fit.

With this final murder farce of the season thus solved, it stands to reason the focus of a (yet-to-be-announced) second season would be recovering Aya’s body. Tsugaru has it on Victor’s authority that the body is in one piece, stored by Moriarty in their hideout in London.

That said, if Master Detective Rindo Aya, her trusty Oni Slayer assistant, and her loyal and honorable maid have to solve a few more murder farces along the way, so be it! Until then, I’ll miss Kurosawa Tomoyo’s wonderfully aloof, sarcastic, sardonic vocal performance. If only she and Kitou Akari could face off as Aya and Kotoko in an Undead-In/Spectre crossover…