The St. Petersburg Chainsaw Massacre.
So, our first episode of the new arc throws us deep into a flashback, showing how Harold began working with the department. It seems that he and his brothers were stolen from the Royal Family they were initially gifted to and sold at a black market auction, and that Harold was eventually induced to escape from his new owner.
Picked up by the cops, he ends up helping with a case, and forming a bond with one cop in particular. That cop’s wife has previously been referenced as Harold’s current owner in the present, so you can guess something happens to the first partner here.
Sure enough, there comes a gruesome case of a serial killer known as the Nightmare of St. Petersburg, carving people up with a chainsaw and leaving their bits places for… some reason to do with robots, honestly if you can figure this guy out from just this episode you’re a better detective than I am.
And, while investigating the case, the one person Harold has grown closest to ends up taking off on his own to confront a suspected serial killer, getting captured, and ultimately when Harold follows his trail and gets captured as well, carved up while still alive, right before Harold’s eyes thanks to a masked maniac with a chainsaw.
First of all, does nobody know how to call for backup in this world? You’ve just got to commando mission your leads in the dead of night rather than having anyone to watch your back? At least when Echika got the damsel treatment in the first arc she was bushwhacked and isolated before she knew what was going on, what’s the excuse of both the leads in this episode for flying totally solo?
Second, the murder scene is… extreme. Your Forma is a serious show, clearly intended to be watched by adults, but up until this point it had still been essentially… a clean show, more concerned with philosophical yammering than with graphic violence. The buddy cop’s death by dismemberment here is like something out of a goresploitation horror movie, it’s an entirely different genre.
I don’t mind per say. Like I said, this is a show aimed at adults, and it is used effectively – we got to know the victim decently over the episode, and even though you kind of expect he’s not going to get out of the flashback damage-free, it’s still pretty shocking for him to be murdered in this extremely gruesome way, with all the imagery needed to support the agonizing demise. In something like PsychoPass, that had used gruesome imagery from the start, it probably wouldn’t be worth noting overly much. But coming right out of nowhere in episode nine, after eight episodes that had normed around the same level of Gene of AI instead of PsychoPass, it’s a little jarring.
It’s not clear right now if this whole arc is going to be the flashback. Knowing this is adapted from light novels, and given that there was no preamble in the present before launching into the flashback, I would kind of expect that it is. Which, when you think about it, is rather odd. Ending on a flashback would mean that we never really do anything with what was accomplished in the earlier arcs, leaving episode 8 as effectively the climax of the series, with very little resolved or even addressed. We could have two episodes of flashback and two of a follow-up case later in the timeline, but that would have its own issues in that we haven’t really established any reason for acquiring this information when we’ve been left in the dark about important prior cases before. Either way, it’s pretty troubled; there was a reason why Boogiepop and Others switched the order of its storylines around from the novels in order to have the prequel not be the last one.
I expect next week’s episode to shed some light on this matter… no, perhaps that’s the wrong term. I hope it will shed some light on the matter and convince me that the production staff knows what they’re doing, but I don’t precisely anticipate it.