The bar has been set pretty high, but last week was what I’d call Undead Girl Murder Farce’s first bobble.  Not a stumble by any means, just a little stub of the toe – an episode that didn’t flow as free and easy as the nine that preceded it.  Fortunately I think the series regained its balance, if perhaps not with one of its best episodes, certainly one that was rock solid.  And a lot of the seeds that have been planted over the course of this arc and series started to bear fruit.

The “Farce” part of the mix gets so dominant at times that one can almost forget this is a mystery series.  Until it goes and reminds us with an episode like this one, that is.  That mystery takes center stage, and so does Shizuku – the member of the main trio that’s received the least narrative red meat so far.  She’s had her moments to be sure, but mostly she’s been hovering in the background silently.  With her tumble at the end of last week’s episode she was sure to be a major player here, but she was the unchallenged protagonist of the episode for the first time.

Again, we start with a flashback, surely never a coincidence in this sort of series.  This time around it shows Rosa being interrogated in some sort of strange ritual, in what we can (correctly) assume was the werewolf village, Wolphinhel.  That makes her story pretty much what one might have guessed after last week – an outcast from Wolphinhel, then murdered in the human village.  We know from the old lady doing the interrogating (Sadaoka Sayuri) that Rosa is a priestess, and her leaving the village is supposedly threatening “the bloodline”.

Cut to the present, and Shizuku wakes up naked in the village, being cuddled by two naked lycanthropes (one in human form, one wolf).  This is for warmth, courtesy of Nora (Uchida Maaya), the one who found her freezing in the river, floating past the village.  It never seemed unlikely that the werewolves were going to be set up as the victims here – or at least no worse than the humans.  Aya and Tsugaru are inhuman themselves, after all.  The Wolphinhel we see here, with the werewomen seemingly filling a more spiritual role and the men serving as the muscle, does seem like a place that just wants to be left alone.  But I take nothing in this series at face value.

Nora tells Shizukiu that here too there’s been a killing spree – three girls killed on rainy nights, just like in the village at the top of the cliff.  The difference is that these girls were all shot in the face – which made Shizuku the prime suspect, except that she carried the wrong type of shotgun.  Seeing Shizuku trying to slip into the role of detective – one she’s clearly not a natural for – is fascinating.  She tries to sell Nora that her mistress could solve their mystery, but even Nora has limited tolerance for outsiders – never mind the men she’s hiding Shizuku from.

So just what the heck is going on here?  Somehow Jutte is tied into all this, surely – and she has motive for revenge against both her mother’s birth village and her adopted one.  But is Jutte Louise, or maybe Nora?  Both?  And is Nora really dead from that gunshot wound, which has the old lady, Regi, distraught enough to confirm that Nora was (is) really important?  If someone is going around killing humans and werewolves for fun, Jutte is certainly the obvious suspect.  As for Alma, she was surely a red herring or a scapegoat –  although from Aya’s perspective, that doesn’t matter as long as she gets what she needs from the mayor.

As for Aya and Tssugaru, for them there’s not much heard this week.  Tsugaru performing rakugo on that mountain trail is a great Undead Girl Murder Farce moment, but his performance is interrupted by Victor, acting as vanguard for Moriarty.  Just as they did at Fogg’s mansion, Banquet shows up late for the party and stirs things up – which they’ll certainly do here.  I see a scenario where there’s a lot to be ashamed off on all sides here, but it does feel as if Wolphinhel is rather caught in the middle and headed for disaster.