Undead Murder Farce – 4 [The Headliner Appears]

Welcome all, to another episode of Undead Murder Farce! This is a late one, apologies for that. I was attending Otakon this weekend and that took up a whole lot of my time. Was fun though, and I can’t wait to go back next year! Bought some nice merch. My weekend adventures aside, on with the episode!

First up lets talk about the production, because Undead Murder Farce kind of disappointed me this week. There’s the obvious, such as the really bad greenscreen effect that we’ve seen before. I still don’t understand why the show is doing this, it doesn’t look good, it doesn’t add to the aesthetic, it just looks like they were to lazy to do it right. There’s just nothing good about it. The less obvious issue though is Tsugaru’s fight. Now this isn’t meant to be some kind of big set piece, I get that. Undead Murder Farce isn’t that kind of show. But even with that in mind, the choreography and lighting of the whole thing just felt… bad. It wasn’t engaging in the slightest outside of Tsugaru’s dialogue, which isn’t how you want a fight to be. It feels like, visually, we’re just getting weaker and weaker as time goes on.

Getting into the episode proper, this week sees the end of the murder mystery and it was… fine? I’ve very torn on it honestly. While I wasn’t expecting the answer, Raoul as a suspect came a bit out of left field, it still made sense with Rindo’s explanation. Bits of it were a tad esoteric, such as creating an ice-spike out of holy water and then framing the whole thing with the silver spike. But others, such as cutting off your fingers to hide the burns because they will regrow faster then they would heal, were really clever and fit really well into this “Monster murder mystery” thing. Overall I would say it worked and that the good balanced out the bad, enough that I don’t feel cheated at least.

As for Raoul himself, as I said this was a bit unexpected, he didn’t really get a lot of screen time to make an impression on me. But I do quite like his angle of hating what his family has become. How he rebels against their human loving ways, how they have given up their places as “monsters”, how vampires are “solitary creatures” and all that jazz, viewing them as having become weak. It was a nice demonstration that, for all that they may try, monsters can probably never truly live among humans. It was a nice reminder of this different world our characters inhabit. I just wish we could have gotten a bit more from him to flesh him out before revealing he was the villain and dealing with him.

Speaking of the fight, Tsugaru kicked some ass here. This was a nice demonstration of power for him. I mentioned before that it didn’t look very good, and I stand by that. But narratively it works. We get to see just how threatening an Oni can be. I do think Undead Murder Farce had a bit of a missed opportunity here though regarding the supposed fragility of Oni. Raoul didn’t really land a hit on him at any point, making this a rather one-sided beat down. I’d have liked to see a bit more tactics to go along with Tsugaru’s raw power. Something a bit more in line with the more mental aspects of the show. Still, the bits and pieces of backstory we got from Tsugaru made the whole thing worth it, so that was nice.

Going back to the family for a bit, my last complaint is simply that they didn’t have much to do this episode. For all that they just learned their brother murdered their mother, and was planning more, their reactions were very… muted. They didn’t get angry at Raoul, nor try to defend him against Tsugaru refusing to believe it. They all just sort of stood there in shock. And after Raoul was dealt with and it was time to leave? They all become rather stone faced and placid, like they’ve already accepted the whole thing. It felt like Undead Murder Farce really missed the mark with the emotional side of this reveal, and that’s a shame. I’d have loved to see one of them dispute this while Rindo just picks their arguments apart, really show off how cold hearted she has the ability to be. A missed opportunity.

Finally we need to talk about Moriarty, or at least what I’m calling him until we get a name. This episode introduces, sort of, our big bad for the season, as well as his crew. He seems to be traveling with a pair of twins, Frankenstein, and what I suspect to be a Dr. Jeckle/Mr. Hyde sort of character? Like he’s building his own menagerie of helpers. I’m looking forward to meeting them. On top of that we also get snippets about an Arsène Lupin, the Phantom Thief, who also seems to be some kind of supernatural character. I suspect he’s who Tsugaru and Rindo will meet next on their quest to hunt down Moriarty. Why else would you drop his name? The question though is if he will end up as an ally or not by the time his arc is done.

So yeah, all in all this was kind of a disappointing episode as far as climaxes go. I can’t help but feel Undead Murder Farce was a bit to focused on showing off our leads rather then giving the family the emotional focus they deserved. This lead to our leads once again being fun and engaging, seriously their dialogue never fails, but the episode as a whole feeling like a failure. Hopefully as the story moves into more and more personal territory for our leads this will become less of an issue, as the emotional core will be centered on them rather then a side-character. But until that happens I can’t help but fear that Undead Murder Farce is trying to be a bit to clever and is ignoring what truly engages people.

P.S. I almost forgot, there was a small comment about Dracula having a much harder bite. Are we saying Tsugaru fought Dracula?! Is that the implication? I thought he had never been to Europe though? Or did Dracula come to Japan? I have no idea but I want to know more.