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.

Undead Murder Farce – 11 – In the Doghouse

Following another unsettling monochromatic flashback involving werewolves convict and execute a pregnant woman via Giant Jenga, back in the present the Royce agents report they were unable to track the golden werewolf. That said, the villagers now have their culprit in Alma, so the chief tells Aya how to find the Forest of Fangs. They’ll be accompanied by the agents.

Shizuku wakes up in bed with a naked woman and a red wolf. A third werewolf, Nora, introduces herself, and how she found Shizuku frozen from the falls, and had the other two (Kaya and Vera) warm her up. Nora doesn’t suspect her of being “the culprit” because her rifle isn’t a shotgun.

When Shizuku asks what culprit she’s referring to, she learns that the werewolf village has experienced the same number of mysterious murders of young women, each four months apart and killed in the same manner. Shizuku tells them about Aya, but Nora says she needs to leave the village immediately.

To prevent the male werewolves from finding Shizuku, Vera and Kaya try to sneak her out in a hay-filled cart, but one of the wheels breaks, and Shizuku has to improvise. Showing of her acrobatics and skill without a rifle, she manages to fight off a number of werewolves before she’s surrounded.

The same elder from the flashback, Granny Nagi, the village elder, places Shizuku on the same Jenga tower she did the pregnant woman and asks a series of questions. Every lie is a plank removed, but Nagi assumes Shizuku is lying about everything.

Then a single gunshot rings out, and they bring Shizuku with them as they investigate the source, only to find Nora, whom the elder seemed to be quite fond of and who was about to become a priestess, has been killed. Shizuku offers to help, and shows that she’s learned a thing or two about sleuthing from being around Aya.

She’s able to deduce that Nora wasn’t killed where her corpse lies (there’s no blood splatter), she was likely in the river (she’s wet) and put on her cloak (which is dry) before being killed, and there was also a second shot (but they only heard one). After that, Shizuku runs out of gas—she’s not really a detective, after all—and once more invokes the ire of her wolfy captors.

Aya and Tsuguru can’t get to her soon enough, but while on their way through the arduous Forest of Fangs, which consists of great fang-shaped mountains they must traverse, their journey is rudely interrupted by the arrival of Victor, Moriarty’s brute strength muscle. Perhaps while the Royce agents fight him Tsuguru can slink away with Aya? Shizuku isn’t going to remain un-executed forever!

Undead Murder Farce – 10 – Golden Girls

Aya’s interview with the village mayor continues, intersperced with effectively creepy flashbacks to when the three outsiders: Dr. Heinemann, Cnut, and Alma, were “tested” to ensure they weren’t werewolves. Those tests turned out not to be that torturous—making them smell a pungent flower and listening to clanking pots and pans—but convinced the mayor and the villagers that no one among them was responsible for the abductions.

Cnut, the village engineer and carpenter, is Aya’s next interviewee, as he knows more about Rosa and Jutte, the two who were chased to a tower and burned alive in last week’s episode. That happened eight years ago, after years of Rosa living peacefully with her daughter ever since she was found wounded, pregnant, and alone in the woods.

Louise, whom everyone agrees is the “guardian angel” of the village, exposed little Jutte and her mom Rosa as werewolves when Rosa mistook Louise for Jutte and told her not to reveal her ears when she smelled a strong-scented flower.

The final outsider to be interviewed is the most suspicious, at least on the surface. Alma is the newest member of the village, having moved on a whim after visiting to view and paint the nearby falls. She painted lovingly rendered portraits of the missing girls, and also draws a beautiful portrait of Aya while being interviewed.

Alma also reminices quite admiringly about spotting a “beautiful golden wolf”, something she can do since she’s on the village’s outskirts. She’s also caught in a white lie when Aya deduces that she isn’t from a family of artists nor did she receive formal art education, owing to the way she holds her charcoal.

The exchange of the week, and possibly the series thus far, is when Alma asks Aya how it feels to not be able to die, with Aya replying that it would honestly bore Alma to death.

Aya, Tsugaru and Shizuku follow Alma’s advice and take a look at the falls, which are indeed beautiful, and below which is presumably the wolf village. They also inspect the ruins of the tower. While they don’t find anything of note, it’s a gorgeous spot with the setting sun, and Tsugaru catches the glare of Aleister’s spyglass—Banquet is near.

Interestingly, he doesn’t tell Aya or Shizuku about this, but that evening while at Dr. Heinemann’s they end up in a standoff with Agents 3 and 4 from Royce: the spitfire gunslinger Alice Rapidshot, and the calm, cool Kyle Chaintail. Aya proposes a truce until she solves the case of the missing girls, which she believes will take no more than two days.

Later that night we witness Aya and Tsugaru swapping spit for the first time since they first formed their contract, though it’s clearly a routine “medical procedure” that Shizuku doesn’t enjoy watching. The night is then interrupted by commotion from outside: the village has formed a mob with torches and weapons once more.

This time, there target is Alma, who pleads with them to leave her alone, but ultimately can’t control herself from admitting that yes, she is the one who abducted and ate the girls, including Louise. She then transforms into her golden werewolf form and dashes away into the night.

Tsugaru and Shizuku pursue her while carrying Aya in her cage, and Tsugaru, flush with his infusion of Aya saliva, turns out to be more or less a match for Alma in strength. However, Alma slips away from his hold thanks to a gunshot from Alice, evades Shizuku’s gunfire, then snatches Aya’s cage in her jaws, runs to the falls, and tosses the cage in.

Shizuku, barefoot and in her nightgown but still quick as a cat, is able to catch the ring of her master’s cage with her blade and sling her safely to Tsugaru on the bank. Unfortunately, this means Shizuku lands in the water and goes over the massive falls. Despite having never heard a kind word from her, Tsugaru seems genuinely distraught.

The natural next destination for Tsugaru and Aya is the werewolf village below, but they still have to deal with Alma the golden werewolf, not to mention those pesky Royce agents and Moriarty’s clique.

Undead Murder Farce – 09 – The Howling Village

In a flashback, a scared little girl is riding on the back of a werewolf fleeing an angry mob. The wolf and girl seek refuge in a watchtower but the mob burns it to the ground. Eight years later, Tsugaru, Aya, and Shizuku have arrived in Heulendorf, in the German Alps, seeking the Forest of Fangs.

They first encounter the village doctor, Heinemann. Apparently, even in this remote village he’s heard of the Cage User, and begs them to take on a troubling case of village girls being taken in the night and later found torn to bits. It’s been happening every four months.

The villagers are understandably uneasy, and Gustav, father of Louise, the latest girl to be taken, even shoves a shotgun in Aya’s face when he first sees her. Aya tells him she’ll leave if he wants, but she believes she can determine who is behind the abductions, and he lowers the gun.

Aya has a good look around the scene of the kidnapping, and determines that a werewolf entered down through the chimney in wolf form, turned into a werewolf and tossed the room to make it seem like it was insane, then wrapped Louise (who must use a wheelchair to get around) in a bag and escaped through the now-broken window.

Aya is able to also rule out a copycat, as the bite marks on items in the recent scene match those from other incidents. While Aya tells Gustav he’s unlikely to see Louise “alive” again, she is still going to do her utmost to discover her kidnapper.

Aya, Tsugaru, and Shizuku then pay a visit to the elderly, bedridden mayor, who fears the village is done for. When he learns that they’re looking for the Forest of Fangs, he says it’s a place “that doesn’t exist in this world”, but can only be accessed by finding the forbidden werewolf village.

The mayor is loath to tell Aya where the village is or how to use the diamond, but when she bets she’ll be able to name the culprit behind the kidnappings within two days, he agrees to tell her. No sooner is this deal struck than two new cowboy-themed Royce agents arrive on the train.

Like the first episodes of the other arcs, this is mostly about setting the stage and introducing the players. Since I’m not the best detective I don’t have any ideas about who the culprit, other than perhaps the girl in the flashback. If she survived the fire, she may now be taking her revenge on the village that killed her mother and family.

Undead Murder Farce – 08 – Moonlit Banquet

I haven’t mentioned it yet, but in the parlence of our times, the music in Undead Murder Farce fuckin’ slaps. The music is by Yamaguchi Yuma, who has only done the music for a handful of anime, none of which I’ve seen other than this. But the mood for each of the many battles that takes place simultaneously this week is set perfectly by Yamaguchi’s punchy combination of orchestral, jazz, and electronic themes.

Lupin suggests a truce with Tsugaru so they can deal with the powerful Reynold, and end up dropping an organ on him. Fatima is wounded by Phantom, who has used his years underground to become the master of acoustics. Shizuku looks well matched against Carmilla, until she starts feeling the effects of the vampire’s aphrodisiac venom.

There’s a lot going on, and all of it is fun. Holmes and Watson’s fight with Aleister Crowley is interrupted by the arrival of Moriarty, whom Sherlock had presumed died eight years ago, and his attendant Victor. Even when Moriarty proceeds to provide an infodump of how he’s built a small army of monsters, it’s still kept visually interesting.

His crown jewel is Jack the Ripper, who like Tsugaru is an artificially created hybrid. Tsugaru is a human-oni hybrid, but Jack also has the offensive and defensive prowess of a vampire baked into his DNA. I’m not sure quite what you call what he does to poor doomed Fatima (scalloping? filleting?) but goddamn is it brutal.

Moriarty happens to be the person who stole Aya’s body, and he’s been using it for research; Jack also has a touch of her immortality baked in. He and his troupe of baddies, named Banquet, want Fogg’s diamond so they can locate the last missing piece for his chimeric masterpiece: werewolves. Needless to say, Moriarty is in no hurry to return Aya’s body to her. His research and the discoveries it will reveal have only just begun for him.

Tsugaru might be able to tell he’s got one tough opponent in Jack, who has a lot more going on in his bloodwork than just oni. Jack also recognizes him as the only test subject to escape Moriarty’s dungeon-lab. Tsugaru gives it the college try, but Jack bests him, then deems him unworthy of even being finished off. Jack then fires a flare to signal to the other Banquet members that the diamond has been secured.

He doesn’t know it, but in doing so, he saved Shizuku’s life. Under the woozy sexy spell of Carmilla’s venom, Carmilla is about to slowly have her way with her when Carmilla finds Lestrade’s silver cross and stabs the vampire in the hip. Carm is about to go medieval on Shizuku, but the flare stops her, and she withdraws along with Moriarty and the others.

Aya, Sherlock, Holmes, Fogg, and the other detectives gather back in Fogg’s study to commiserate being well and truly beaten this night, and are joined by a still…amorous Shizuku. While Tsugaru fought Jack, Lupin fled with Phantom, and they presume they took the silver safe with them, as with everything going on Aya completely forgot about it.

As for the Penultimate Night…well, Jack is about to show it to Moriarty and the others when he realizes the pocket he put it in has a hole in it—a hole made by the sticky-fingered Tsugaru while they were tussling. I got a big dopamine kick when Tsugaru cheekily produces the diamond, which he ultimately kept out of both Lupin and Banquet’s hands.

Aya has already translated the writing carved within the diamond, and suggests they hold it up to an arc streetlamp. The UV light emanating from the lamp turns the Europium within the diamond a glowing red, creating a theretofore hidden word: Fangzahnewald, or Forest of Fangs, the location of the werewolves everyone seems to be searching for.

Needless to say, and to quote Sherlock, the game is afoot. Aya isn’t just going to let Moriarty keep her body. She wants it back! Nor does she want him to gain the power to dominate the world. If he did that, she wouldn’t be able to solve fun mysteries with Tsugaru and Shizuku by her side! So Moriarty and his merry band of weirdoes are the logical next target. Until then, this was a superbly fun supernatural crowd-pleaser.

Undead Murder Farce – 07 – Trojan Head

When the vault begins to flood, Holmes realizes he did exactly what Lupin hoped by telling him he could pick any lock. By shooting the vaults locks, Holmes ensured no one could leave, while Lupin ensured the water from the moat wouldn’t be enough to completely flood the vault, only to separate everyone from the heavy silver safe.

By the time Fatima blasts through the vault doors to free everyone and the water level falls, the safe is gone. As everyone warms up and dries off in Fogg’s study, Sherlock asks Ganimard for his handcuffs, then cuffs him with them, accusing him of being Lupin, only in a better disguise than the one he showed them before.

It is indeed Lupin, but while they have him, they don’t have the diamond. That’s where he’s wrong: the safe that the Phantom pulled out of the vault through the air vent with a rope lowered in by the pressure of the moat water doesn’t contain the diamond. Instead, it’s in Watson’s coat pocket…or it was, until Lupin realized it was there, snatched it, threw a smoke bomb, and fled.

In Fogg’s arboretum Lupin meets up with Phantom, who has the safe. But to both their shocks, the safe contains none other than Rindou Aya. Once the safe door opens, she calls for Tsaguru, who arrives bang on time while reciting the rakugo story “The Pot Thief”, along with Shizuku.

Reynold has seen enough, and decides that he’ll execute Lupin, Phantom, Tsugaru, and Aya one by one and recover the diamond. But he is interrupted by another blast that Lupin swears wasn’t him. It isn’t him. It’s Moriarty and his merry band of famous supernatural and occult figures.

Along with Moriarty himself there’s a hulking Victor (Frankenstein), the sultry vampiress Carmilla, Jack the Ripper, and Aleister Crowley. After effortlessly slaughtering all of the guards and cops in the main hall, the group splits up to find the diamond, while Aleister and Carmilla create a diversion.

While there’s a mention of over twenty deaths, the quick and dirty execution and the fact most of the victims are identical faceless guards dulls the gravity of the bloodshed.

Exceptions to this are the one guard who got concasse’d at the bridge, and the poor huddled maid who gets drained by Carmella.

When Reynold charges Lupin, he slips out of the way, and Tsugaru also dodges at the last second, so Reynold’s strike cleanly halves a nearby statue.

Meanwhile, Fatima has Phantom cornered, ditches her cloak, and shows off her prowess with double crossbows (i.e. Doubledarts), shooting one into his shoulder (and it looks like she has two more mounted on her hips). Phantom continues to not make much an impression here.

With Tsugaru and Reynold having run outside to chase Lupin (who still has the diamond), Aya asks Sherlock and Watson to take her with them as they investigate the supernatural intruders. They encounter Crowley first, and while he seems able to wield magic, he’s actually merely a talented illusionist.

Lestrade looks like he’s doomed to be Carmilla’s next meal, but Shizuku kicks her across the room and prepares to depart. Carmilla is insulted, and demands satisfaction, so Shizuku tells Lestrade to beat it and whips out her silver gunblade.

Outside, the three men chasing each other and fighting for possession of the diamond are briefly silhouetted by the full moon, their cartoonish cats-and-mouse game lending more credence by the minute to Aya’s assessment of this as one big farce.

Tsugaru is the last to have the diamond, and he prepares to swallow it for safekeeping, but Reynold kicks him and he spits it out, and it rolls to the altar of a chapel. This episode lives up to its title, “Free for All”, as after Lupin is unmasked all hell breaks loose, with Moriarty and his crew only adding more chaos and bloodshed to the proceedings.

While it’s packed with colorful characters, smart detective work, and inventive action, and Aya and Tsugaru are a delight as always, I can’t score this any higher than I did simply because the production values too often groan under the weight of the show’s ambitions. Also, at some point all the mustachioed characters kinda blended together. That said, I’m still looking forward to how this resolves.

Undead Murder Farce – 06 – The Gentleman’s Curse

All that setup was worth it, as after winding the key, all Undead Murder Farce has to do is let go and watch the elaborate mechanism it introduced do its thing. My most recent Holmes and Lupin portrayals being of Ben Cumberbatch and Omar Sy, respectively, I’m still not 100% sold on this show’s versions of them.

But it’s hard to get hung up on that because this episode was so much fun, beginning with Lupin fooling Watson with an extremely accurate Sherlock disguise. Sherlock’s older brother Mycroft can tell it’s not him by the fingernails. Meanwhile, Tsugaru and Shizuku manage to grab the wrong birdcage in the park!

It’s the kind of crisis that only arises if your protagonist has no body and is hidden under a lace hood. After showing Sherlock that at his core, he’s a gentleman, Lupin leaps backwards out the window and straight into a moving car driven by the Phantom, showing his tremendous flair for drama. Shizuku doesn’t budge an inch when that car is headed right for her, so distraught she is.

Because Lupin is a gentleman, he offers her a ride so she can search for her birdcage more efficiently. As for Aya, she must bear the indignity of being ejected from her cage and her head cleaved in two by a car driven by the redheaded twins from last week. It’s metal as fuck, especially when the two halves simply reconnect.

When Shizuku spots Aya’s head in the twins’ car, the chase is on, with Tsugaru on foot and Annie Kerber commandeering a bike so she can get a good story out of this. Let us hand-wave her presence in London as the product of her having a press expense account…or ample savings!

Once Tsugaru has caught up to the Twins’ car, it’s game over for them, as he snatches Aya, puts her back in her birdcage, and leaps off, causing the Twins to crash. Annie is incredibly relieved Miss Rindo is okay, even though she knows she’s immortal. I felt the same way—Aya being separated from her entourage of two just didn’t feel right.

Now that the Cage User Crew is reunited, Lupin realizes who he just helped. Cordial introductions ensue, but the cordiality ends when Tsugaru defines Oni Slayer as stronger than Lupin.

The two have a dynamic little fight, with Lupin using what seem to be magical marbles to best a Tsugaru who is probably not going all out lest he kill the thief. Aya hardly cares about the loss…as the next great farce is about to begin.

The final investigator arrives at Fogg’s mansion: Inspector Ganimard of the Paris Police. Sherlock immediately checks to ensure it’s really him and not Lupin in disguise, and Ganimard doesn’t hold it against him. He joins Holmes, Watson, Fogg, and Lestrade in the vault where the silver safe is held.

Aya, Tsugaru and Shizuku head up to the tower to “stay out of the way” and observe everything happening below. The two Royce agents also stay above ground. Mycroft warned Holmes earlier that the shady insurance agents may actually let Lupin steal the diamond so they can steal it and use it to find werewolves.

Without warning anyone, Holmes fires bullets into all of the keyholes in the vault door. While he and the others are trapped inside, it also means Lupin will unable to get in. But Holmes didn’t consider the fact that Lupin would blast a damn hole in the castle, causing water from the moat to spill into the vault from the vent in the ceiling.

That vent may not be big enough for Lupin to slip through, but it’s certainly big enough to allow the box, if it floats, to rise right up to where he can nab it once the vault is flooded. As for how “gentlemanly” it is to drown one’s adversaries in the process of a heist, I suppose he’ll have a means of preventing that.

I imagine Tsugaru let Lupin win so that he didn’t show him any more of his skillset than he needed to, so that when the time came, Lupin would be less likely to have countermeasures. With Sherlock and the detectives seemingly off the board, it’s up to Aya and Tsugaru and Shizuku to keep the diamond out of Lupin’s—or the Royce’s—clutches.

Undead Murder Farce – 05 – Penultimate Night

Borrowing famous names from literary history can be fun, but it’s also risky. Those names and the characters they’re attached to have a lot of baggage; baggage that can easily crush an unassured anime series that’s only five weeks old.

Undead Murder Farce breaks out a large number of those names while teasing several others in its new setting of London. We’re introduced to the Gentleman Thief Arsene Lupin, the Phantom of the Opera, Sherlock Holmes and Watson in the first five minutes.

Aya and Tsugaru have been summoned to London by one of its wealthiest residents, Phileas Fogg (of 80 Days fame). The pair and Shizuku meet Sherlock and Watson in the same paddy wagon, but when the bobbies realize who they arrested, they head to Fogg’s sprawling fortress-like mansion without delay.

That said, the wagon ride still enables Aya and Sherlock to feel each other out as they both demonstrate their deductive prowess. The five are joined at the mansion by two members of the Royce Insurance Company’s “Advisory Security Department”: Reynold Stingheart and Fatima Doubledarts, which are some Harry Potter-ass names!

Once his crack team of investigators is assembled (save for Inspector Ganimard from France), Fogg takes everyone deep below his mansion to what could well be an underground Masonic temple. There’s a massive vault requiring three men to uunlock and four to open, and an elaborate silver puzzle box of mysterious provenance containing the black diamond Lupin intends to steal: the Penultimate Night.

Fogg isn’t as fazed by Aya’s bodiless nature because both the safe and the diamond are of Dwarven origin. The Dwarves of this version of the world were wiped out by werewolves, and the diamond and its silver safe are a form of posthumous revenge.

Like the first Lord Godard episode, this is largely setup, introducing us to the new setting and characters. Unfortunately, despite all those big names, the ones who made the greatest impression (other than the established Tsugaru and Aya) were the two Royce agents, each eccentric in their own way. Sherlock and the Phantom in particular are pretty damned dull!

That said, we also have a Penguin-from-Batman-lookin’ Professor Moriarty, who hangs out with, among other yet-to-be introduced colorful characters, a Frankenstein’s Monster-lookin’ giant named Victor. As Tsugaru dryly remarked to Aya, this is starting to feel like a veritable circus of trouble.

Undead Murder Farce – 04 – Staking One’s Reputation

It’s time for everyone’s favorite severed head-tective to reveal the identity of Hannah Godard’s murderer. Everyone is assembled in the study as Rindou Aya begins by reiterating her seven starting seven problems, five of which rule out an outsider doing the deed. As innocent as everyone looks, the killer is in this very room.

The sixth of the seven problems has to do with the sound of the murder. Hammering a silver stake would have made a sound. But whether someone heard that sound depends on the time. The seventh problem solves the problem of the sound: the silver stake was merely planted in the storage with the madame’s blood to look like it was the murder weapon.

In truth, the weapon no longer exists. It was a stake made from frozen holy water, which melted upon being thrust into the madame’s chest. An empty bottle was left at the scene, but it had dust on the inside, meaning there was never water in it. She even determines that the killer arranged the scene to trick Lord Godard into thinking the murder took place while he was hunting, when it really happened before then.

Put it all together, and the only person who had the strength to stake Hannah without a hammer and break the storage room lock to plant the stake…is Godard’s younger son, Raoul. His last line of defense is that his hand doesn’t bear the burn marks from handling the silver stake, but Aya chalks that up to him cutting his burnt fingers off with a sword. Because he’s a vampire, his fingers would regenerate without the burns.

When he has no other avenue of escape from Aya’s accusations, Raoul rushes to attack her, but is stopped dead in his tracks with Tsugaru’s free hand. He hands Aya, who is disappointed Raoul outed himself before she finished her conclusions, to Shizuku, then kicks Raoul out the window.

As for the motive, both of Godard’s sons didn’t share their parents’ desire to ally themselves with humans. Raoul was the more disillusioned of the two, such that he acted to make it seem as though a human hunter had killed his mother so Godard would end his pro-human practices.

But now that he’s been caught, there’s no escape for Raoul. He may be a vampire, but he’s no match for the Tsugaru, who toys with his prey with a florish of step-right-up showmanship, applying precise yet devastating blows with all the ease of cracking his knuckles. Before killing Raoul, Tsugaru tells the tale of a band of “ruffians” hired by the Meiji to purge all supernaturals, called the Oni Killers…and Tsugaru’s one of them.

For her part, Aya is apologetic that things might not have worked out so well for Lord Godard, but at least the wool was pulled from his eyes. Vampires living in harmony with humans is a nice ideal, but clearly much harder to pull off than he imagined. Before the sun comes up, Lord Godard sees Aya, Tsugaru, and Shizuku off, while Miss Annie from the press shows up for interviews.

While Shizuku chases Tsugaru with their trunks, she gives Lord Godard some parting words of advice not to give up the good fight. Even if his son is outed as a murderer, there’s nothing stopping the lord, who is undying, from trying again to be a credible ally to humans.

She also confirms that the man who stole her body and half of Tsugaru’s—London-based, professor, cane with an “M” engraved on it—visited Godard before she did. This is clearly Professor James Moriarty, who has definitely messed with the wrong immortal detective woman.

I didn’t expect Raoul to be the culprit, but Aya did a thorough job laying out the facts of the case and burning away all of the irrelevancies until naught but the truth remained. It’s talky for sure, but like Kitou Akari’s Kotoko in In/Spectre, it helps that Kurosawa Tomoyo’s Aya is very fun to listen to, and her words are accompanied by visuals and fun camera angles to kept me engaged.

Undead Murder Farce – 03 – Trust the Process

Tsuguru and Aya join Lord Godard’s family for a meal. While Tsugaru, the human carriage driver, and the human butler Alfred have human food, Godard and his children drink animal blood in bowls like tomato soup.

His son Claude thinks the pair to be con artists, but Aya proceeds to explain in detail how she knew the driver’s wife had recently gotten him to stop drinking. She even gets him to feel bad and realize what a fortunate man he is! I also love how Aya and Tsuguru chuckle at each others’ jokes.

Since she’s unable to partake in the meal, Aya uses it to lay out the list of most logical subjects. Only two lack alibis: Alfred and Claude. This irks Claude in particular, and by extension his dad the Lord, but Aya assures them it’s unlikely an outsider did it.

Kurosawa Tomoyo is masterful at giving Aya a calm, collected, and direct manner that commands respect. Among everyone only she is the master detective, and those who doubt or question her process are quite frankly out of their element and resorting to emotionalism.

That said, we later learn that Aya doesn’t have a clue yet who killed Lady Hannah, and the dinner conversation was merely to buy her some time. When Claude confronts them in the hallway, he threatens to snap Tsuguru’s neck. In doing so, Aya confirms that his, and everyone else at the dinner table, had impeccably clean hands.

While Shizuku stays with Alfred and the young maid Giselle (and assures them she doesn’t work for Tsuguru and they can insult him all they like), Godard takes Tsuguru and Aya back out to the woods, where he once again insists that his household is innocent.

Godard then asks if they’ve heard of “Fushi”, or the immortal one. Tsuguru says he has. Aya adds that while they’re indeed immortal, even they can be defeated by an oni, only they were otherwise fairly weak and stupid, and driven to extinction in the Great Purge.

Godard then points out that Aya and Tsuguru might be talking about themselves: the immortal one and the oni. He then gets an arrow to the neck, and then rushes into the woods to capture the human vampire hunter who loosed it.

He’s about to kill him in “self-defense”, but Aya stays his boot. Instead, she questions the man, named Josef, and quickly learns that he was on a train near Berlin the night of Hannah’s murder. That said, he came to avenge his friend Hugo, another hunter who vowed to kill Godard.

Aya’s last question allows her to determine that even Josef wasn’t sure that Hugo’s stake was silver. As thanks for his being so forthright, she allows Josef to run off unharmed, irking Lord Godard. But he hired Aya, and so it falls on him to trust her and not his own instincts in this matter.

For her part, Aya believes she now has everything she needs to solve the mystery—or as she calls it, “this humorous and tragic farce of a murder case.” I’m looking forward to her conclusions.

Undead Murder Farce – 02 – Ahead of the Game

We travel from Japan to eastern France this week, as Lord Godard and his son are out hunting deer. We learn he’s a vampire who wishes to “meet humanity halfway”, accepting, for instance, the gift of a rifle even though he doesn’t really need one to hunt. Godard returns home to find his wife—also a vampire—has been murdered with a silver stake.

The town and the press soon catch wind of the tragedy, suspecting a vampire hunter might be involved. Among the journalists is young Annie Kerber, who is excited to learn that Godard, whom she trusts as an ally to humans, has hired the “Cage User”  Shinuchi Tsugaru and Rindou Aya to investigate the murder.

While on a not very comfortable wagon ride (though I would have liked to see at least part of their boat ride from Japan) Tsugaru and Aya exchange some bons mots between themselves, Shizuku, and the driver. Upon arriving, we learn all the players in this whodunit: Lord Godard, his two sons Claude and Raoul, his daughter Charlotte, the butler Alfred, and the maid Giselle.

Since he is himself supernatural, Godard isn’t surprised upon meeting Aya’s head. On the contrary, he is happy to have a detective of note on this case. Aya immediately compiles a list of seven questions they must answer in order to discover the culprit, but only reveals five of them for now. Charlotte makes an appearance, but is freaked out by Tsugaru and the bodyless Aya.

This episode is primarily setup for the murder mystery to come, introducing the players, the setting, and creating the atmosphere. All we know for sure is that it’s unlikely for Godard or Raoul to be the killers, as they were out hunting. Based on nothing at all, my primary suspect is either an outside vampire hunter, or the maid. We’ll see how close I came as the case continues to unfold.

Undead Murder Farce – 01 (First Impressions) – Getting Ahead in Life

Right off the heels of Jigokuraku comes another stylish supernatural period piece, this time taking place during the Meiji era (1897 to be precise). Shinuchi Tsugaru (whose name means “headliner”) is a member of a supernatural troupe, where he fights monsters in cage matches under the name Oni Slayer. He’s feared in town as another one of the monsters, and by the same rabble who think a regular stray cat is an ayakashi.

One night, Shinichi is visited by a maid who happens to have a long rifle with a katana for a bayonet. The two dance under the moonless night in a very clever and kinetic little fight, until a voice that is not the maid’s is satisfied. The voice proceeds to demonstrate that she knows quite a bit about Shinichi: that he’s a half oni hybrid, but poorly made, such that one day his oni side will consume him.

The voice says she offers a way to extend his life, and all he has to do is kill her. The maid lifts the covered birdcage and the curtain around it opens to reveal the severed head of a beautiful young lady with piercing blue eyes. She introduces herself as Rindou Aya. She’s a 947-year old teenager who up until recently had a body, until a hybrid like Shinuchi absconded with her body and took it abroad.

Ever since his transformation, Shinuchi has treated life pretty much like a joke if not a complete inconvenience. He knows what’s coming, but he performs explicitly because he knows one day he’ll go berserk and take out as many lowlifes who patronize his line of work as possible.

But now that Rindou has offered to extend his life, he’s willing to change course to a less nihilistic end. But in exchange, he rejects Rindou’s desire to be killed. Instead, he offers to help her get her body back. She’ll be the brains, and he’ll be the brawn.

This isn’t just altruism, either: Shinuchi correctly surmises that the same foreign geezer in a top hat with a cane engraved with an “M” who took Rindou’s body is the one who took his humanity. He’ll be restoring Rindou’s body and getting some sweet revenge.

All in all, it sounds like a mutually beneficial deal. Rindou declares she’ll fulfill her end of the bargain and extend his life now to seal their deal. To do so, she’ll spare a bodily fluid, specifically her saliva, which she’ll transfer to him with a kiss. And boy howdy what a creepy, quirky, cool, and beautiful kiss it is!

Kurosawa Tomoyo’s Rindou blends Sakamoto Maaya’s ethereal Oshino Shinobu with Kitou Akari’s matter-of-fact Iwanaga Kotoko. Yashiro Taku does a fine variant of Tsuda Kenjirou’s apathetic velvety gravitas with Shunichi. There’s deft direction from Omata Shinichi (Kaguya-sama) and a compelling score from Yamaguchi Yama, and the OP and ED that totally whip ass.

Put it all together, and Undead Murder Farce fields a strong debut here. It’s a little talky, sure, but it also gives you plenty to look at and hear while the talking is happening, plus the information and characterization being conveyed is clear, concise, and intriguing. I’m definitely in!