PinkuBentoBox

It’s amusing to go back to what I wrote a few weeks ago after playing the first episode, and see just how completely wrong I was. Since I’ve now finished episode 2, I thought I’d continue where I left off, with a ton of comments and speculation. And a hell of a lot of unresolved questions. Episode 2, as expected, asks more questions than it answers - and the answers it did give I’m not sure about, either. Anyway, same as last time - episode 2 spoilers within, and I haven’t read through episode 3 yet so please don’t spoil me.

First off, it is now of absolute certainty that an entity named Beatrice exists, and that she has supernatural powers. This is confirmed by the framing story that has Beatrice and Battler engaged in an ever-repeating ‘game’. The jury is still out as to whether the murders are carried out by a supernatural Beatrice or a mundane Beatrice, though it’s pretty clear that after her revival, she is definitely the supernatural Golden Witch. As much as it annoys me to do this, since I still think that there is a mundane explanation for a lot of stuff, at this stage there is really no alternative explanation than to accept that the murders are carried out using ‘magic’.

We’re once again confronted with a series of closed-room puzzles. The first episode had two major closed-room puzzles - The chained door murders, Kinzo disappearing from his room. We add several more puzzles to this set. More importantly, Beatrice adds some important information to each of these situations, which actually gives us a bit more ammunition to work with, though it in turn makes them that much more puzzling. I’m going to assume that a lot of her general statements regarding the situation are common to the closed room puzzles in the first episode too. There are five master keys (one each controlled by Shannon, Kanon, Genji, Kumasawa and Gohda). The windows cannot be opened from the outside, and they are all locked. There is no secret device to unlock the doors. The keys are the only way to unlock them. There are no hidden doors or passageways.

One of the two closed rooms from the first episode actually seems to have the main explanation confirmed early on. Kinzo suggests that he actually retains his memory of the previous episode’s events somehow, and that he left his office at some point and was killed when he left.

However the clarification regarding the windows means that my argument regarding the chained room murders in episode 1 doesn’t work. I suggested that the door was chained with the killer already in the room, either invited in or already present. They could not have escaped out a window. I would suggest though that if the killer was capable of hiding inside the room from Eva and Hideyoshi, then they should also be capable of hiding from the rest of them.

Battler himself finds an answer to the first of the episode 2 rooms, so there’s not much else to discuss. This may be one of the times that RikaBernkastel suggested that Beatrice chose a sub-optimal strategy to cut corners. There’s also some suggestion that she deliberately made it possible for Battler to guess the answer so that she could knock down his confidence later, and that seems to fit with the character she presents to him (more on that in a bit).

The other closed rooms are much more difficult as there is simply not enough information, but at least in the case of Jessica’s room, Beatrice didn’t confirm that Jessica’s key did not have a duplicate. Also I want to know about the design of the door lock. Given that it’s a western-style house that’s definitely recent enough to have decent locks. I’m going to assume that they have standard Yale-type Pin tumbler locks. The thing with these sorts of locks is that they are very commonly built with what is called, at least here in Australia and in the UK, a ’snib’. A snib is a button or catch on the internal side of the door which locks the mechanism when engaged. Unlocking a snib-locked door with the key disengages the snib. I’m fairly sure that most people have seen something like this before. The thing that’s significant about them is that when you engage a snib on a lock, the lock is engaged. You can engage the lock without the door being closed. So Beatrice could do her business in the room, fiddle with the bodies or whatever to mess with people, place the key inside deliberately, engage the snib, step through the door and close it behind her. The door would then be locked.

Putting that aside, I’m actually starting to get the impression that focusing on the nature of the method for the murders might be the result of deliberate misdirection, a red herring designed to divert our attention away from the real issues. In the first episode, we saw what will happen if people do not believe Beatrice is real, and instead turn on each other in suspicion. In that situation, Beatrice revived and everyone was killed. There was some confusion about whether she really existed, so in episode 2 she shows that she really does exist. And even though the whole cast ends up believing that she truly exists in the end, she still wins - she is resurrected, and everyone dies. Belief or disbelief in Beatrice makes no difference, because if you manage not to get stabbed by a loli-demon, you’re going to end up the main course at Beato’s welcome home banquet.

In fact, quibbling over whether Beatrice exists or not, whether she committed the murders using magic or mundane means and so on is distracting us from the real issue. The characters are all locked into a high-stakes game where there appears to be only one path to winning, which is to discover the location of Beatrice’s gold. Quibbling about whether or not the witch or her gold exists is counter-productive. She practically comes out and tells them to stop wasting time when she puts some of the gold out with the first set of murders in episode 2. Yes, her gold does exist. And so does she.

To find Beatrice’s gold, though, we will need to know a lot more about her. She’s a very interesting and ambiguous character, really. Previously we’d only seen her directly interacting with people during the episode 1 Tea Party. Her antics in episode 2 basically paint her to be the most black-hearted, wholly evil villain in years. And I’m not sure that I buy it, honestly. There are little hints every now and then that the character that she presents is not necessarily the true Beatrice.

This is entirely speculation, of course. We really need to know a lot more about her relationship with Kinzo and the exact wording of her contract with him as well. Regardless, I struggle with the idea that she could truly be as evil as she presents in this episode. For one thing, it seems odd to me that Kinzo could have been so obsessed with her if she was going around figuratively kicking puppies and stabbing children. The impression I got was that Beatrice was Kinzo’s lover and possibly fiancee, but that Kinzo did something to her which essentially destroyed their relationship and seemingly her corporeal body with it. Whatever it was that he did, it clearly left her quite bitter and full of grief, which really comes out in the way that she takes special care to torment the various couples in this episode.

In Kinzo’s case, we know that the entire Ushiromiya family was pretty much wiped out when he was younger, and that through a contract with a Witch, whom he is described as having ’summoned’, he was able to secure gold and rebuild the family again. Is it possible that the current situation is not the first time that Beatrice has been ‘resurrected’? Were Kinzo’s family sacrifices towards Beatrice’s resurrection? If Kinzo somehow won under similar circumstances, but he chose to have Beatrice herself, then it would potentially explain her references to being a ‘caged bird’.

Regardless of the circumstances surrounding Kinzo, I think Beatrice’s motivations are going to be quite important. I wonder if the overbearingly sadistic approach she took throughout the episode might have been deliberate. Her resurrection is described as being instigated through some magical ceremony that Kinzo has enacted, and that that ceremony requires her to kill everyone. She can’t escape it, so it’s plausible that she might deliberately make people hate her as it’s the only way to motivate them into finding the method to beat her.

Her attitude towards Maria is also interesting. We found out in this episode that Maria had met with Beatrice many times before at previous conferences. The servants suggested that it was make-believe, and that she was meeting with an imaginary ‘Beatrice’. That’s quite possible, however the familiarity she showed (’Beato’) and Maria’s comprehensive knowledge of magic - which she says ‘Beato’ taught her - suggest that Beatrice really had been meeting with her. Add to this the fact that Maria lasts right until the end in both episodes, and that she even tried to shield Maria from seeing the final two murders in episode 1, and there is some suggestion that the malevolent witch may have a slight soft spot for her. Which may also explain her torment of Rosa at the end of episode 2 - Rosa was a pretty shitty mother who liked to beat her daughter. Additionally the two of them potentially could have escaped in the end, had Rosa not been greedy and taken the gold as well. It’s entirely possible that this was Beatrice somehow visiting justice on her, in a twisted way.

Finally there’s the way she behaves toward Battler. She announces that she intends to torment him by endlessly replaying through the event, until he backs down and gives up. We should remember that Battler-playing-the-game is able to see all the events which occur through each play through. Earlier I suggested that Beatrice may be deliberately being evil in order to make people hate her. She may also be doing it to try and keep Battler angry at her, so he continues to indulge her with more iterations of the game. I got the impression that she was a bit disappointed with the way that he eventually capitulated in this episode. In fact, I suspect that Beatrice wants to be defeated. She’s not going to make it easy, naturally, because Kinzo’s ritual essentially forces her hand - she must be resurrected. And she clearly derives a lot of enjoyment out of the battle of wits between herself and Battler, so making it difficult for him probably amuses her. But when you get down to it, if there is a solution to the situation, a way in which Battler can win, then giving him infinite chances means that even if he were groping around in the dark, eventually Battler will find the solution. Furthermore, he’s not performing a random, uninformed search. Every iteration he will be gathering more and more information. He should converge on the solution to everything eventually.

If Beatrice does indeed want to be defeated, then it might also explain why RikaBernkastel refers to her as being ’soft’. Very likely, Beatrice has been dropping all sorts of hints and clues and deliberately choosing sub-optimal moves in places. We probably just haven’t seen these, because we have such an incomplete picture to work with.

Hopefully Episode 3 will expand a bit more on the past, because I’m fairly confident that learning the nature of Kinzo and Beatrice’s relationship and Kinzo’s history will give us a lot of ammunition to work with.