I can only sort of LOL at this episode. and Karakuri Circus in general. It’s mostly in a good way, but while I’m a lover of some good bombastic-ness as much as anybody, this show really takes the cake. It’s no exaggeration to say that it makes Ushio & Tora (and that show wasn’t exactly Upstairs Downstairs) look positively tame by comparison. Even in the context of shounen, and old school shounen, and Fujita Kazuhiro shounen, Karakuri is really out where the buses don’t run.
Is that a problem for me? Well, if I’m honest maybe a little bit of one. I’m already going through plot and suspension of disbelief fatigue and we’re only through 6 episodes out of a planned 36. As a non-manga reader I never thought the pacing was a problem with Ushio & Tora – in fact I rather liked how urgent and relevant the narrative was. But maybe (again, not having read the manga I can’t say for sure) Karakuri Circus is being impacted more negatively by the compression of all those volumes.
Speaking of suspension of disbelief – I grew up in Illinois, and believe me Illinois doesn’t look like that. Yeah, there are some hills in the far south of the state and around Galena on the Iowa border, but that looked more like Utah or something. Also, how the heck did Guy Christophe Rech (Sasaki Nozomu) manage to keep Narumi alive long enough to get him from Japan to Illinois? Well, whatever – that was all only a small part of a massive plot cyclone that reset the chessboard yet again, with a flotilla of new characters along for the ride.
So apparently, ZONAPHA Syndrome mostly impacts children, and what we’ve seen with Narumi is only the first stage (it gets much, much worse). Also the disease is being spread by members of the “Midnight Circus”, for reasons that are not yet clear – and it’s the role of puppeteers to fight them. These people are called Shiorgane – which I guess implies that Shirogane is not a simple proper name – and Narumi has been “scouted” to be one of them. Guy whisked him back to the ZONAPHA hospital where research on the disease is being done by Guy, a crone named Lucille Verneuil (Paku Romi) and a bunch of doctors and nurses who get high as kites on uppers in order to be able to cope with the misery of the kids and smile for them.
Oh, and alchemy.
Get all that? I don’t know exactly how all this ties in with Masaru’s family drama and the factions involved, but I do know that Narumi now has a prosthetic puppet arm and has lost most of his memories. Fortunately he’s the same guy apart from that – a hotheaded teddy bear who adores kids and would do anything for them. The second and final stages of ZONAPHA are pretty horrifying I have to say, and almost seem to justify the loopy behavior of Guy and Lucille. But even given that they protect the children and fight off an attack by a creepy ventriloquist from Midnight Circus, I still don’t totally trust those two.
Kurik
November 17, 2018 at 12:28 am“Karakuri is really out where the buses don’t run”…This. Also I would add “WTFridge is going on here?”…This show is so out there I don’t think any form of gravity is impacting on it. I too had the same thought about how he survived tokyo to the us but quickly said he was in some form of suspended cryo-chamber that stopped time and I actually convinced myself. Anything officially goes in this show which is not a good thing.
karma
November 17, 2018 at 12:48 amKaracuri Circus train has no brakes… And I love it. It only makes the story more unpredictable.
“Also, how the heck did Guy Christophe Rech (Sasaki Nozomu) manage to keep Narumi alive long enough to get him from Japan to Illinois?”
He used magic water for this (Aqua Vitae will probably become relevant later, because such solution would be too lazy otherwise). I wouldn’t be surprised if Guy actually waited for something bad happen to Narumi to cut his arm, and change him into this puppet – Kung Fu master hybrid (so everything went according to plan). Narumi being indebted to Shirogane faction is the icing on the cake.
It’s rather funny that shiroganes are basically witchers – a package complete with white hair and fighting monsters (but it’s possible that they have some kind of sinister agenda).
Yann
November 17, 2018 at 1:58 amYeah… I guess I’m done with this show. Super bummer for me since I loved Ushio and had high hopes. But this just doesn’t work for me. I’m getting the vibe that it might be due to the pacing and compression of the story for anime format, but I’m not sure… So many McGuffins only 6 eps in. My suspension of disbelief just isn’t as stretchy as yours I guess 😉 I think it might be the first time that there’s not a single show I really like in a season… :'(
Jindujun93
November 17, 2018 at 4:50 amUnfortunately I’m not feeling this one because even without a friend mentioning it to me, I can tell that they skipped quite a lot already and that it kind of hurts the adaption (according to him, they skipped 7 volumes between this episode and the last, and pretty much all of the Slice of Life content that would be good for a downtime has been cut out). With Ushio to Tora it never bothered me too badly despite having read the manga, because they only started the significant skips after the first cour, but here… I just feel like something’s missing, despite me really wanting to like it, considering that it has Fujita written all over it. Shame that the manga is only halfway translated, though, so even checking that one out isn’t that much of an option for me.
Guardian Enzo
November 17, 2018 at 9:07 amMaybe being the longer manga has really hurt this one, in terms of skipped material. Plus it’s 3 episodes shorter than UshiTora.