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 – 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.