Apparently not earthquake, tsunami or even nuclear crisis can stop Victorique, so we get a fresh episode of Gosick to take our minds off our worry. A little late, perhaps, but welcome nonetheless.
Given that this arc – especially this episode – is primarily given over to developing Kujo and Grevil, there were bound to be some complaints from the fan base and like clockwork, they’ve been there. Victorique is the main draw of this show, no doubt, but I thought things held together pretty well in her (mostly) absence. We had a few holes in the mystery, of course, but those happen even when Victorique is involved.
My first question is this: just what are they implying about the young Russian girl Kujo rescued? Anastasia, from an elite Russian family, fled after the revolution with no family? Is she who I think she’s supposed to be? Whoever she is, she snags Kujo and he rides off with her in the carriage as we picked up right where we left off. For the first time forced to try and solve a mystery more or less on his own, he has a couple of decent ideas of the common-sense variety – send her to Grevil and mention his name, for starters. And it was a good idea to loop back to Gavroche Ruji, the urchin who appears to see everything that happens in front of the Jeantean. Turns out the boy has already gone to the cops and no one would believe him, but Anastasia’s presence and Kujo’s own testimony changes that. But on their way to the cops the two boys have an encounter with one Brian Roscoe, the flame-haired illusionist who opened up Horvitz to the outside world.
Among the revelations here is that – if I interpreted it correctly – Grevil wears that ridiculous hairstyle because Victorique demands it as a form of”payment” for her assistance. He tells Kujo that before he arrived on the scene, Victorique never gave her powers freely to anyone – which ironically makes Kujo almost as valuable to Grevil as she is. He forces the boy to call her for help, which he does, and she pretty much solves the case for them – which is kind of a shame, really, because I would have liked to have seen the two of them see it through to the end. But the result is fairly predictable – Jeantean is acting as a kind of black market Sotheby’s for stolen treasures and yes, the stolen children, all of which they auction off out of the secret room on the 5th floor. Right up until the moment the cops follow Kujo’s lead and bust up the racket. Unfortunately we never did find out why Kujo was invited right up to the secret room on his arrival. Nor do we find out why Ruji is the only European in the series who gets a Japanese name…
Going forward, looks like we get another Grevil-centric episode next week. It’s clear we haven’t come close to seeing all that remains hidden in his relationship with Victorique (as we’re continually reminded with scenes like the dream sequence in this episode) so hopefully that will fill in a few more gaps.
