No question about it, Karakuri Circus is an odd series.  Even its relatively conventional episodes aren’t very conventional, and the pacing is all over the map.  Yet it remains involving, largely because Fujita-sensei has the germ of an interesting story at the show’s heart and the cast is uniformly excellent.  But it’s becoming increasingly clear to me (and who knows, maybe everyone) that trying to tell that story in 36 episodes is taking a toll on the effectiveness of the telling.

This episode picks up right where 09 left off, in the midst of Narumi’s flashback to Yin’s ZONAPHA syndrome origin story, and remains there for most of its length.  Things went in a direction I wasn’t necessarily expecting, as Jin – rather than engage in some hideous act in the heat of the moment, kidnapped Francine and fled Prague.  It takes Yin 9 years to find him, which he does in Quiberon, France.  Now, why Francine chooses to (apparently) stay with Jin for that entire time (as he increasingly goes off the deep end) rather than try and escape I’m not sure.  But there are a number of things in the episode that I’m still a little fuzzy about.

During this time Francine has become ill – apparently with ZONAPHA, though we never do find out where the disease originated from – and has been quarantined and imprisoned by the villagers.  After a fierce verbal confrontation Yin and Jin for some reason end up working out of the same lab, trying to find a cure (which will of course end up being Aqua Vitae).  I guess they both find it independently of each other, but by that time it’s too late – the villagers have set fire to the hut where Francine is imprisoned, putting an end to her once and for all after a tearful goodbye with Yin (where she admits she’s “been” with Jin over these nine years, again leading me to ask why she never fled).

It’s at this point that things, in true Karakuri fashion, go batshit nuts.  23 years later Jin (Yin left after Francine died, and never saw his brother again) makes an automaton Francine, complete with the lock of her hair that Yin gave him.  He uses the hair to infect the villagers with ZONAPHA, then uses the puppets he’s created to try and make mecha-Francine laugh to lay waste to the village.  But according to Lucille – who was there – the real horror of ZONAPHA is you can’t die no matter how bad the disease gets.  Jin takes out his rage on the Francine doll which refuses to laugh and leaves, and eventually Yin shows back up and meets Lucille, who he basically puts in charge of his revenge program before he jumps into the well he’s seeded with Aqua Vitae and dissolves so as to control the villagers who drink it.  Get all that?

Truthfully, this is all pretty messy in the telling – more so than the first part last week.  In the end we’re left with mecha-Francine surviving to the present day and creating the Midnight Circus in order to find someone to make her laugh, and presumably Jin is alive and crazy out there somewhere.  And what’s with the dog who was with Narumi’s old sensei, who ends up blowing himself up and destroying the Aqua Vitae spring that Jin left behind?  Luckily I’m still invested in the central characters, and this whole flashback sequence (whether it’s literal reincarnation or not) does add something to their story.  But the breakneck pacing in Karakuri Circus is causing some sloppy storytelling, which unfortunately seems likely to plague it to some or other degree for the rest of its run.