In terms of just straight-up fun, Undead Girl Murder Farce is probably my top anime of the season.  It occupies a very narrow but successful band – highly-intelligent anime that are also extremely easy to enjoy.  The premise is quite straightforward, and it combines two elements as comfortable as an old sweater, Victorian fantasy and mystery.  The dialogue is razor-sharp and very funny, and the direction is strictly 1% level.  UGMF is all about taking the familiar and extracting the absolute most of it that’s possible to extract.

I would also note that Undead Girl Murder Farce is taking a pretty relaxed attitude towards pacing.  This initial mystery is going to take three (at minimum, but that seems likely to be the number) episodes to wrap up.  For a one-cour – even 13 eps – show, that’s surprising.  I’m kind of in the mode where I’m just enjoying spending time with these people, so I don’t really care about where we spend it, and I do find the Godard mystery to be engaging and interesting.  But the body of the story is clearly going to take place in London – Sherlock has already been name-dropped, and the man Aya and Tsugaru are chasing has an “M” on his cane.

The banter continues to be a strong suit, with both Tsugaru and Aya quite happy to wind each other up and be wound up.  Aya’s “as you can see I’ve gained a few pounds” was the line of the episode, but his whole riff on koi and blood being thicker than “saltwater fish” was hilarious too in an esoteric way.  I also love the little details of their vaudeville act, like the way he turns her cage to face whatever person she’s talking to (last week it was the fingers he held up).  This is all very familiar detective fiction material, but the absurdist element takes it to another level.

As to the case itself, we’re getting plenty of signals about who might be responsible for Hannah’s murder.  Eldest son Claude is openly hostile to the detective pair – some might argue too openly to be the real killer.  He goes so far as to grab Tsugaru by the neck and openly threaten him (the boy just has no idea), and imply that his father’s agreements don’t bind him.  Younger son Raoul pretty much acts suspicious all the time, though he does appear to have an alibi in having been with his father at the time of the murder.

Then we have the servants.  Alfred would appear to be the other main suspect, and the whole “twenty years” thing strongly implies some connection between Alfred and Lord Godard’s wife.  Again one might argue that he’s too obvious to be the real killer, but he had opportunity and if indeed he had motive too, that connects a lot of dots.  I’m kind of fixated on the maid, Giselle, though, who just seems too airheaded and incidental not to be a suspect.  She has an alibi but it’s contingent on the word of a child, and while there’s no obvious motive it doesn’t take a tremendous amount of stretching to imagine one.

That final sequence in the woods seemed to seal the deal for Aya.  The encounter with the hunter Josef was an interesting one, quite telling about the mindset of the “human ally” vampire.  It’s hard to deny that Godard has a right to feel the way he does – if he’s attacked, should he not respond?  Still, it shows us just a bit of the wild animal still inside the tamed vampire.  As for Josef’s testimony, it pretty much confirms that his friend Hugo was working with someone on the inside (be they human or vampire).  All will be revealed next week, I feel pretty certain.