I’m getting more and more surprised at the lack of attention Baccano has been getting. I’ve only seen one blogger who also picked it up beyond the first episode. I mean, what’s not to like about this series? I really expected this to be one of the more popular series of the season, but yet again I was wrong. I guess that people really do like to watch Schooldays, Moetan and Zero no Tsukaima than this series. O_o

Anyway, while watching this episode, I realized another thing why I love this series: it features so many different types of criminals. We have the demented Ladd and his companions, who are after the people with money on the Flying Pussyfoot. Chane and her companions belong to a sort-of cult, and are completely devoted to their master who is in jail. Then there are Firo, Maiza and the Gandor-family, who may look nice but definitely also have a history of shady business. The Runorata-family is the typical mafia-family, in the middle of vetes with many different parties. In the midst of all this seriousness, there are Isaac and Miria: two simple yet surprisingly brilliant train thieves. Jacuzzi and Nice also steal for “good” purposes, though they steal nonetheless. Czeslaw has also meanwhile showed that he’s more than just an innocent boy and Dallas and Eve could be victims, who happened to be member of the wrong family. I can hardly believe it, but this anime knows exactly what it’s doing with its huge cast of characters.

Anyway, the character most featured in this episode was Ladd. He quickly ends the stick-up of the previous episode by killing some of the guys in black suits. It also seems that he’s a member of an important family. A family who worked under him became the victim of Isaac and Miria’s ‘little’ robbery.

I also mistook Szilard Quates from another guy in the previous episode. We see the real guy make his entrance in this episode, and the guy from the previous episode seems to be working under him. This also busts my theory that every person in the OP is immortal and every person who isn’t in the op is mortal, since we saw the scientist revive in the previous episode. If I’m not mistaken, his name is Barnes. I’m not sure how you spell that, though.

Anyway, it seems that Ennis works for Quates as well, and she’s been ordered to retrieve him. We saw Barnes flee afterwards, though, and I assume that he’s set his place on fire. It’s probably here where Firo helps Ennis to find Barnes, which explains how he turned immortal. But what about Luck, Czeslaw and Isaac?

Also, the mysterious green-clothed girl intrigues me. She’s definitely in te train for a reason, but her mission is still one complete mystery. She’s one of the few people to survive the mess that happens on the Flying Pussyfoot unharmed, and this episode shows that she likes to act as careful as possible when she escapes through a train window when Ladd throws is tantrum.

The episode also ends with quite an interesting cliff-hanger: a mysterious glowy-eyed figure appears out of the train. Is this the same shady figure we’ve seen in episode one? It’s also interesting how Chane has received even less development than her companions, even though she turns out to be their only survivor. It seems that she’ll be doing something interesting in the next episode, though.

Another thing that I’m curious about: Firo, Maiza and the Gandor family. What is their role in this story? I mean, they’ve got nothing to do with what happens on the Flying Pussyfoot. They should be just friends of Isaac and Miria. If that’s the case, then why is so much development spent on them? They can’t just be getting their immortality without having to play any major role in the future…

Taking screenshots was quite hard for this episode, considering the raw file I obtained. It seems that Japan was hit by quite a big tsunami, which covered the entire east-coast of the country, and most of the second half of the episode had some warnings and information pasted on top of it. Let’s hope the damages were minor.

Anyway, this episode introduces the third story: Nopperabou. A woman has killed a number of relatives, and now she’s sentenced to death. The Medicine seller doubts this story, and suspects that a Mononoke is behind the killings, though the woman keeps insisting that she was the murderer. The Mononoke then arrives, in the form of a man, wearing a fox mask. The mask prevents MS from finding out the katachi, and the Mononoke uses this to erase the guy’s face.

The Mononoke flees with the woman, after which he proposes to her. She agrees. Later, we see that MS got his face back with the help of a Japanese ritual. He then tries to see the real face behind the Mononoke’s mask, and the episode ends. Luckily, the episode was fairly understandable again, but I must wait till the next episode to be for sure. If it’s again incomprehensible, I’ll wait for the subs for the last two arcs, unfortunately.

Anyway, I think that this Mononoke was the one who committed the murder, without the woman knowing it. The question is: where does he come from? It’s in any case clear that he’d do anything for her.

I’m a bit afraid, though. In this episode, I noticed some flawed animation for the first time. There were a lot of shots of people in the background, and a few shots of the medicine seller were just off.