An apt selection for the start of finale season, no doubt.  But for Baccano!, this episode was an ending that wasn’t.  The series of course continued for another 3 eps direct-to-DVD (no Blu-ray till 2011).  But as this was the TV finale Brain’s Base wanted to give the series a sense of closure, no doubt – so that if you never saw the following three episodes.  And on the whole I’d say they accomplished that pretty well.  This episode was all over the map but then, Baccano was pretty much all over the map all the time.

To a certain extent, despite all the craziness it did became possible to sort the cast into good guys and bad guys, at least roughly.  Jacuzzi and the Delinquents have killed a lot of people, but mostly offscreen – so I guess they count as good guys.  Czes too, who’s firmly revealed to still be a child emotionally despite his chronological age.  Issac and Miria obviously – the true heart of Baccano, ever-unchanging (in more ways than one), Ennis, Chane.  Szilard gets his comeuppance (long before the events on the Flying Pussyfoot), as does Goose Perkins.  Somewhere in the murky middle are Ladd and Claire Stanfield (though if you ask me, they’re pretty unequivocally bad guys).

Certainly, Firo being the one to devour Szilard is a pivotal moment in the whole Baccano timeline.  That knowledge in someone else’s hands would have been a real problem, but Firo is a good guy in this mythology – which in itself says something about it, because he’s a mafia capo himself.  That knowledge is what allows him to save Ennis, who’s about to expire after Quates’ demise (directly due to Ennis betraying him, as all his homunculi eventually do).

As for Dallas, well – he’s unquestionably a bad guy too, in a low-rent scumbag sort of way.  His fate is certainly an ugly one – encased in concrete in classic mafia fashion and sunk to the bottom of the Hudson, in his case to perpetually drown.  But his relationship with Eve complicates matters, and when the head of the Runoratas decides to scoop him up and perform experiments on him you’re not exactly sure if that’s a turn for the better or the worse.  But it does at least make Eve happy.

Rail Tracer and Chane being a romantic angle, well…  That’s one I think Narita swung and missed on, but whatever.  R.T. was never the strongest part of this arc to begin with for me – a really bizarre character even by Baccano standards, and I never got the sense that the series knew exactly what it wanted to do with him besides use him as a crutch when the plot called for it.  There’s a lot of unresolved stuff here generally, some of which is touched on in the next three episodes, but even more which would have come in the second season we’ve inexplicably never gotten.

If there’s a signature moment in this semi-finale for me, it comes when Isaac and Miria show up in 2001 – only to reveal that it’s taken them this long to realize that they aren’t getting any older.  That’s Baccano in a nutshell, really – no matter how grisly and violent it gets, it can charm you in a totally goofy and feckless manner at the drop of a hat.  I don’t know of another series that works this alchemy in quite the same way, and that’s what makes this one hold up so well.