Welcome all, to a rather late episode of Undead Murder Farce! Sorry for that, I’ve been writing some reports and getting back into Path of Exile. Not the best excuse, but hey it’s fun. Enough about me though, lets talk about our current seasonal murder mystery!
Starting off, Undead Murder Farce continues with it’s questionable production this week. I know I harp on it every time, but I’m going to continue to do so until it stops being a problem. It’s just to dark, to hard to see anything, and they still haven’t figured it out. On top of that, what decent animation we did get in the fights was still kind of rough. The way Tsuguru used his environment was nice, but I can’t say it looked good. And that’s not even mentioning the power-point levels of editing that were the last few moments of the episode. Seriously, what was that zoom and pan shit? Is this a professional project or is it babies first production? It’s damn shame. Undead Murder Farce never looked great, but it’s fallen even from those mild heights recently.
Getting to the actual mystery, this at least took a rather interesting turn. I said last week that I was sure Alma was causing it all, killing both sides to drive a conflict, and that she was just Jutte under a different name. However this week shows that isn’t the case, as not only is she found dead in an underground tunnel, there’s evidence someone else was living there as well. I’m still half-right, someone was seeking to cause conflict on both sides, they did steal Gustav’s gun to implicate the villagers and kill wolves. But if it isn’t Alma, nor anyone else from there werewolf village, than who could it be? The only idea I have left is that both Rosa and Jutte survived, living underground this whole time, and that they were the ones doing all of this for revenge. The thing left unexplained would be their skeletons.
Whatever the case, whoever is doing it’s plan is working. The towns folk have arrived as a mob, Moriarty’s crew is taking them down as well. All of the werewolves are basically dying. To be honest, it’s kind of crazy how one-sided this is and just how badly it paints humanity. Like… There is no world where the werewolves come out of this OK. Their entire village is getting slaughtered, best case scenario a few of them live and run to create a home somewhere else. It’s kind of cool that Undead Murder Farce is willing to go that far, and I really hope it touches on just how despicable this is in the finale. But it’s also a tad disappointing with just how irrelevant and weak these werewolves ended up being, despite being described/built up as these big dangerous monsters. Can’t have both I suppose.
As for how Aya and Tsuguru fit into all of this, they were solid this episode. Watching them figure stuff out, deducing where the entrance to the cave was, what happened to Louise and how she was treated like shit, just their general chemistry. All of that was good. I especially enjoyed Aya’s lines at the end, both her delivery as well as giving Shizuku an excuse to go and check on the werewolves who helped her. It’s a good balance between this cold-hearted logical façade and the actually caring individual underneath. The only thing that confused me about them was how Tsuguru can apparently have some trouble against Alma but then proceed to take on 3 warrior werewolves at once, as well as why he’s so willing to kill them despite supposedly being helped by their other villagers. It just feels like Undead Murder Farce doesn’t quite have that figured out.
Speaking of conflict, this brings me to what we can expect from the next episode. It’s pretty obvious that Undead Murder Farce is setting itself up for some kind of big finale. Wolves vs Banquest vs Insurance vs Team Aya. Some of these are nice, I’m kind of looking forward to the Shizuku and Carmilla rematch. But overall I think shoving all of this into one episode, as well as involving the insurance squad, is a mistake. I just don’t see how the show is going to be able to give all of them the time they deserve with only a single episode. Lucky for me then that I don’t actually care all that much about these fights in the first place! I’d like them to not suck, sure. But so long as the murder mystery wraps up cleanly I’ll be content. Not necessarily happy, but content.
So yeah, if you couldn’t tell by how long this took to write I wasn’t terribly enthused with most of the episode. The core of Aya and Tsuguru, as well as the mystery, is good. I think this is the strongest mystery the show has had since it started. But much like the previous arc, the show starts to flag anytime it moves away from our leading pair. The rest of the cast just don’t have the chutzpa to really carry the show. And it doesn’t help matters that the Banquet, our primary antagonistic force, don’t really have a lot going for them beyond “Historical bad guys”. When Frankenstein’s Monster is your most compelling/charismatic villain, you’ve done something wrong! Hopefully this last episode can at least wrap up the mystery in a satisfying way, because if it can’t I dunno how positive I can be in the final review.
