neko's thinkbox

Took me some time, as always. Had to find a boring moment to finally get to write this… oh well ^^ As long as I write anything it’s okay, no? lol

So… Episode 3. I immediately noticed that the opening is a bit longer, much to my enjoyment, because the song simply rocks. During that extended time, they show a brief recapitulation of the previous episode. Until now I have only seen previews embedded in endings only, and I find it a nice concept. Well, now that I think of it, Meitantei Conan has openings with previews, although they are mostly at the beginning of the song.

Directly after watching ep 3, I found that the confusion somewhat returned in Baccano. The chronological order of the second episode vanished in the third, and so we are wandering across random times and scenes, from one character to another, without a visible link between them. There are… a LOT of examples for this. I might as well summarize this a bit.

For example, it starts in 1932 with Eve Genoard and her butler standing at some quay looking at a huge pile of mud being fished out of the sea, Eve longing for her big brother Dallas. Then all of a sudden, we’re back in 1931, where 2 mafiosi from the Runorata family go to the Daily Days’ office to get some information about the same Dallas Genoard. 1930, some big-mouthed Runorata lad gets beaten up in the Gandor’s turf by some wannabe gang, and Luck Gandor pops up to make them stop.

  

You guessed right. We’re back in 1931 now, aboard the Flying Pussy Foot. Ladd is dancing with Lua, telling her that he is lusting to kill every single person, and eventually her as well. By the way… that Lua sure is cute as heck, but she has like absolutely no willpower at all – she’s even willing to be immediately killed… o_o Seriously, she’s whack. Amen. Then, one of Ladd’s henchmen rushes off to the dining car with a weapon, which makes Ladd jealous. As he walks out the door to join him, Ladd bumps into… Jacuzzi (I’ll never forget that name), who is running towards the back of the train to see the train conductor, as we remember from episode 2. Amidst all of this randomness, finally two pieces of the huge scrambled puzzle can be joined. But very soon a new set of pieces gets thrown onto the stack.

Ladd remembers a wanted poster that had Jacuzzi’s picture on it with a $5000 bounty on him… That scaredy-cat Jacuzzi a criminal? You must be joking. But who knows… Anyway, Ladd tells Lua to follow and catch the boy while he heads off towards the dining car as well, mumbling something about “releasing” himself. Now what… is a monster hidden inside of his body or what?

  

Change of scene. In New York, a man is trying to show off to a friend that he can set his hand on fire without risk. The friend trying to imitate him doesn’t have the same fireproof glove, and his glove starts burning for real. He quickly throws it away… onto a pile of wood, soaked in inflammable liquid, and the house obviously catches fire. Meanwhile, a level below, Szilard Quates has completed some regeneration elixir, which successfully worked on a laboratory rat. Ironically, it is exactly his house which caught fire, and he has to leave the burning house, only taking a few bottles of his completed elixir with him. At the same time, Eve Genoard is entering the Daily Days’ main office (right after the 2 mafiosi from earlier left).

Once again, the scene changes, this time we’re in a hat shop, where Maiza buys Firo a hat, which is a traditional wear for executive members of the Martillo family. As they exit the store, they bump into nobody less than Isaac and Miria, who are most probably going to live out their kleptomaniac addiction in the shop. Firo then spots the billowing smoke clouds from the burning house and runs to the scene, where a crowd of curious pedestrians is gathering. And as if there weren’t enough coincidences, he bumps into Ennis, who is looking for someone and immediately runs off. But since she lost a button, Firo hurries after her to give it back to her.

  

Sigh… Back on the train. Jacuzzi rushes past his accomplices telling them about an imminent danger. Nice appears and tells Nick to take care of the dining car… which he probably misunderstood, because he takes out his knife to keep the car in check.
Daily Days’ office. A friend of Eve’s maid can’t get her any information about the whereabouts of her big brother.
Some dark back alley. Firo beats the crap out of the wannabe gang from earlier who was beating up old man Szilard (who was obviously protecting his bottles of elixir.) After Firo leaves, the boss of that gang still manages to get the old man back, stabs him to death with a knife and steals the bottles.

Dining car. General mayhem: The Lemures rush into the left side of the dining car with machine pistols, Ladd’s guy stands in the middle of the car with 2 pistols, and on the right side we got Nick with a knife. Glad this ain’t cs:s, huh…
Back alley, Ennis finds the corpse of Szilard, who is regenerating though (since he presumably took some of his elixir beforehand).
Finally, the conductor’s car at the end of the Flying Pussy Foot, Jacuzzi discovers two corpses, confirming his bad omen.

    

So. What is my problem with all of this? It’s that I don’t know whether most of those scenes happen simultaneously or not. The train scene and the scene in New York definitely aren’t, because Isaac and Miria are present on both locations. Maybe the year of the happening is only shown once, and we need to remember that for the same scenes later in the episode? Meh… Also, there are a lot of scene changes for only a little bit of useful info. But that might be because there isn’t a real main character to this story (yet), which is quite outstanding for an anime. In ep2, I’d have said Isaac and Miria, but here in this episode they barely made an appearance. Firo and Eve were featured a lot though.
Actually, Baccano reminds me a bit of soap shows or other series like 24: we have heaps of different people, and we change from one scene to another to see how things are developing on that end. But still, that doesn’t really explain the temporal change. Yeah, we are presented the different pieces of the puzzle and we have to assemble it to discover the actual timeline. The further we get into the story, the more pieces we get, and the last episodes will bind them all… hah.