Undead Murder Farce

Episode 5

I hope everyone did their assigned reading. This week's test will cover the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Maurice Leblanc, Gaston Leroux, Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, and more. Your familiarity with their major works of 19th and 20th-century fiction will be of utmost importance in this class, and I expect nothing but the best from all of you. Alternatively, however, you could get caught up by skimming a few volumes of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

With a new farce comes a new locale, new characters, and new opportunities for Aya to crack jokes about being the brains behind the operation. As expected, this episode is mainly table setting for the case to come, and it takes its time pulling out the pieces and game board so the audience can get a good look at everything. Of note are the London setting and the cast stuffed with public domain favorites, making this concatenation of cameos feel like an Avengers moment for a Victorian-era street urchin. Moriarty has even assembled a literal team of such figures, who, while they have yet to be formally named, can be identified with a glance at the show's credits. It's goofy but earnestly so.

Although the crime has yet to occur, we know the time, place, and target thanks to the helpful habits of gentleman thief Arsène Lupin (the first, not the third). His personality is about what you'd expect—debonair, wry, and confident—and all of the pre-established characters hew closely to their prior depictions in film, literature, and the like. Their designs aren't too outside-the-box either. Holmes is tall and thin. Watson is shorter and rounder. Fogg and Passepartout look like a wealthy dude and his butler. Lupin is admittedly a lot more suave and shirtless than his famous anime counterpart. And Erik, the Phantom of the Opera, is hot and half-scarred, which is a far cry from his corpse-like deformities in Leroux's novel, but par for the course for modern interpretations. Apparently, they had more fun designing Moriarty's crew—we get a good look at their various silhouettes in the OP—but I'll wait for them to be properly introduced before commenting on them.

That said, by adhering so close to our expectations, Undead Murder Farce could aim to subvert them once the mystery gets into full swing. My major theory at the moment has to do with the diamond's werewolf-saturated origin story. At first, it seems like a natural counterpart to the vampires in their first case, and both creatures' aversion to silver is a constant. However, I will go out on a limb and speculate that Lupin's interest in this particular diamond stems from him being a werewolf. His name is derived from “lupus,” the Latin word for “wolf,” and his lycanthropy would explain why he recruits Erik to assist. Aside from literally putting the Phantom in the phrase “phantom thief,” Lupin wouldn't be able to touch the silver puzzle box holding the treasure if he were indeed a werewolf. This is just my hunch, but because it's rooted in a groan-inducing pun, I'm reasonably confident it's up this author's alley.

The episode's highlight is the deduction-measuring contest Aya and Holmes hold in the back of a police carriage. I expected these two headstrong detectives' egos to clash as soon as they were within spitting distance, and I was not disappointed. Shinichirō Miki plays a particularly great Sherlock too. His voice is sharp, yet it always hints of profound exhaustion. Between his appearance and timbre, I also can't help but be reminded of Kaiki Deshu's investigative capers throughout Monogatari's Hitagi End arc, probably the main reason I enjoy his performance here so much.

The big unknowns, with no literary precedent to guide us, are the representatives from Royce, a private security company with an apparent axe to grind against the supernatural. I'm picturing the Pinkertons if they specialized in staking vampires and giving their agents absurd names (“Fatima Doubledarts” will be tough to top). This again reinforces the series' theme of modernity at war with the literal ghosts of the past, although, as the tale about the werewolves and the dwarves reminds us, the past was plenty violent as well. These modern power struggles are also more complex than monsters vs. humans; Aya and Tsugaru's loyalties are different from Moriarty's crew's loyalties, and humans' tendency to form opposing factions is self-evident.

Aya formulates a plan and kindly leaves us with one parting clue: Ishikawa Goemon. This is, first and foremost, a metatextual joke from Yugo Aosaki; even the most lightly seasoned anime fan will connect Lupin and Goemon by way of Monkey Punch's Lupin the Third. In-universe, their connection is less obvious, although Goemon's reputation as a ninja certainly intersects with Lupin's phantom thief gimmick, and ninja-like stealth and agility would presumably be needed to get in and out of the locked room encasing the diamond. Goemon's other claim to fame is being boiled alive, with legend purporting that he saved his son's life by holding him above his head out of the water. I don't know how this would tie into catching a thief in the act, but I'm eager to find out! Per usual, the breezy pacing made this week's setup fly by, and with so many cards on the table, Undead Murder Farce has plenty of hands to play.

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Undead Murder Farce is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Steve is on Twitter while it lasts. He's just trying to get ahead in life. You can also catch him chatting about trash and treasure alike on This Week in Anime.