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…

Undead Murder Farce – 12 – Man’s Best Frenemy

An apparent ambush by Victor turns out to be…something else, as he merely acted to separate Aya and Tsugaru from the Royce Agents, their mutual foe. He lets them go off on their way in exchange for the direction of the Werewolf Village and the diamond as collateral in case they’re lying.

Vera is waiting for Aya and Tsugaru when they arrive, and she and Kaya reunite them with Shizuku, who actually praises Tsugaru for “being useful for once.” But since the male wolves are on high alert, they have to free Shizuku another time. Tsaguru returns her recovered clothes…save her underwear.

Rather, Tsugaru and Aya slip out of the jail and continue the investigation. With Tsugaru’s diligent aid as her arms and legs, Aya inspects the spot where Nora’s body was found and discovers the entry to a secret underground passage just before the bro-wolves show up.

There, they not only find the site where Nora and other girls were murdered by the culprit, but also Alma’s human corpse in human form, along with a campsite featuring a wall with 550 tally marks carved into it. Despite these seeming complexities, Aya insists that the solution to the case is fairly cut and dried, but for another clue or two.

The tunnels eventually lead to the ruins of the tower, meaning the werewolves who were trapped there by the villagers all those years ago might not have died after all. When they come upon the doctor, who is acting kind of shady just beforehand, they learn that Louise’s corpse has been found.

Not only that, but Aya manages to get Louise’s parents to confess that before she turned four they tried to abandon her in the forest due to her inability to walk. It was Jutte who found her, only for Louise to finger Jutte as a werewolf. Aya believes Louise did this so she could survive, as Jutte was the only one other than her who knew what her parents did.

Aya and Tsugaru return to the Werewolf Village, but on the way, they notice that Alma and the camp bed are gone; someone had been through there after them and done some cleaning. Vera frees Shizuku and gives her her rifle, while Tsugaru prepares to face off against the bro-wolves.

Carmilla is the first member of the three-person crew from Banquet to enter the village, and she helps herself to the women, including Kaya. Tsugaru shows why he’s the Oni Hunter by dispatching three elite werewolves with relative ease (and with plenty of style points, I might add).

Alice and Kyle arrive in the Werewolf Village having apparently brainwashed/hypnotized the human villagers into serving as their burning, pillaging army. After all, Royce is there to wipe out the supernaturals. After grudingly leaving Aya in Vera’s care, Shizuku rushes off to try to find Kaya, and finds her, but also finds her old friend Carmilla as well.

While Shizuku deals with Carmilla, Kyle takes on Victor, and Aleister Crowley challenges Alice,  Aya has Vera take her to a graveyard where she believes she’s found the final clue to solving this case and bringing another murder farce to a rousing conclusion.

Spy x Family – 20 – TYDTWD

Anya’s next school assignment will be to go to a parent’s workplace to learn about their job and why they chose it. She asks Yor first, who imagines Anya shadowing her while she’s doing her real job assassinatin’, which is great both for some laughs and another excuse to watch Yor do her thing. Thankfully the blood in her imagining is pink, but both she and Anya deem it best for her to go to Loid’s workplace.

When I was sick but too young to stay home alone, my folks would alternate who took me to work. In both cases, their co-workers were delighted for a cute little kid to be there (their words not mine), and that’s no different for Anya at the hospital. The issue is that she takes careful notes of everything Loid is thinking rather than saying, and also learns about a secret passage she can’t resist exploring.

We finally meet the lady with the short white hair in the OP and ED; we don’t yet get her name but she’s a Westalis agent like Twilight. Anya ends up getting stuck in the ductwork directly over a meeting where doctors are talking about ghosts—and she makes a lot of ghost like sounds freeing herself. Finally, her hasty dumping of all the figures into the “sandbox”  reveals the limitations of the psychiatric tool, as Loid assumes she’s deeply troubled child.

The remaining quarter of the episode consists of Anya taking the idea of coded messages from her spy TV show and running with it. Since her own chicken scratch is illegible to everyone but her (her report—including many of Loid’s thoughts—was quite thorough!) she has Yor write them up, and she then distributes them to Becky, Second Son, everyone.

Even Frankie gets one, and wrongly assumes it’s a love letter handed to Anya by a beauty. When he cracks the code and waits on the bridge at the allotted time in his Sunday best with several dozen roses, Anya’s alarm goes off, but Bond shuts it off, letting Anya sleep right through the meeting time. That’s probably for the best, considering only Frankie showed up and had the wrong idea.