I don’t think I’m telling tales out of school when I say that Karakuri Circus is a bit of a hot mess.  There’s a kind of glorious anarchy to it, yes, but everything about this show is all over the map – the pacing, the tone, and (perhaps most significantly) the plot itself.  I’ve given up as far as the suspension of disbelief part – the airplane crashing into exactly the right tiny circus was the final nail for that one.  But it’s testing the limits of how much disbelief you can have towards events on-screen and still care enough to keep following them.

More than anything what I want from Karakuri is for it to slow down, take a breath – but given the insane pacing required to fit this material into 36 episodes, I know that’s not going to happen very often.  Episodes like this one are more likely to be the norm, and while they’re entertaining in their way, they’re hard to take seriously even by this series’ standards.  And given that the budget here is probably commensurate with an adaptation of a manga than finished years ago, the amount of action is going to necessitate an awful lot of CGI.

That’s what this episode was, pretty much – wall to wall action.  Shirogane vs. automata, as not only Narumi’s group but the anti-automata organization “Shirogane-O” follows the nose of that dog who was hanging around in China to the location of Midnight Circus.  The most interesting element of this is that Jin is the head of Shirogane-O – at least I’m assuming it’s Jin, as it’s certainly Furukawa Toshio’s voice.  I’m still trying to fit all this together in my head, but everything has happened so fast that things are kind of a blur.  That includes Mingxia, who’s being treated as if she’s an important character but honestly just sort of showed up so why do we care about her, exactly?

If you’re going to rely as heavily on action as this episode does, it had better be good – and this was pretty good, though hardly great.  The CGI isn’t top-notch but I’ve seen worse. and the one-off battles between the shirogane and automata are mostly grandiose posturing with a bit of oddly-placed gratuitous nudity.  Meanwhile of “our” Shirogane and Masaru there’s not a peep heard, and while that was mostly true during the last two episodes it wasn’t so much a problem because the flashback arc was more involving that this week’s events.

I hate to say it, but I’m kind of on the fence about covering Karakuri Circus after this season.  I don’t say that lightly because I’ve already dropped two “core” series from this year that didn’t have any margin for error quality-wise, and I would really hate to lose a third.  But three cours is a big commitment, so I’m wavering – if anything, right now I would say Karakuri has to raise its game a level or two in the next few eps for me to stay on-board.  I’ll treat the second cour like a new series, and give it a chance to convince me – but much more so than I’d hoped when I previewed this series, I definitely need to be convinced.