Pumpkin Scissors – 11

Summary:
Alice is visiting the grave of her grandfather and briefly catches sight of another woman at a different plot. Back at the office, the group gets their picture taken for a newspaper piece about the 3rd Section, and Alice gives the reporter Dalton a speech on the future that the Pumpkin Scissors are working for. Later, Dalton pays a visit to Dr. Colt, the same man the Pumpkin Scissors group visited some time earlier to inquire about a tank. Looking at the Door Knocker gun on Colt’s wall, Dalton reveals that he saw one of the weapon today being carried by Oland. He is interested in the point blank range project that was abandoned by the military and also in the Door Knocker itself, though Colt wants to know about Oland from him in exchange. The next morning, Oland gets woken up in his normal sleeping spot outside by some other city folk who are impressed by what he does from the newspaper story. Oland passes the good word along to the rest of the group, but what they don’t know is that there are also people who look down upon Alice as a noble. In particular, the girl who Alice briefly saw at the cemetery is planning on something that involves using her brother’s manuscript.
When Alice leaves home the next day, she finds Schultz at her door with flowers in hand, offering to take her to work. Alice insists on taking her normal routine of walking and is ambushed by the woman she saw at the cemetery. Alice goes willingly and tells Schultz that’s it’s for work. Meanwhile, at the office, Dalton tells the group that he wants to do one by one spotlights on each of the members and uses Oland as an example. But before they can respond, Schultz bursts into the asking about Alice. He had suspected something earlier and now thinks that it was a kidnapping. Alice has actually been taken to a run down part of town where she learns that the woman’s brother had been killed by a noble who was a soldier, just like Alice. The woman explains that her brother wrote about gossip, but had stumbled upon a military scandal that was being covered up. She believes that they killed him to shut him up and took the manuscript, but she has a portion of a duplicate that he made and split into three parts. They are searching for the rest of it and want Alice since she said all those things for the newspaper that they don’t believe in because of the poor circumstances around them. They want to change the government for the better and think that the manuscript has the power to do that. Reading it, Alice realizes that it talks about the Invisible Nine.
During this time, the Pumpkin Scissors group has found the carriage Alice was taken away in, but not her location yet. Oland decides that he’ll go search for her even though he doesn’t know where. That night, Dr. Colt is paid a visit by Muse Kauplan concerning the Door Knocker. She tells him that it was an experiment, but also that the war is part of the past and the experiment is already in the next stage. With the ways of fighting changing, her experiment will evolve. And then, after learning that Colt initially got his information from Dalton, Muse Kauplan kills Colt and bombs his apartment. Meanwhile, Alice’s kidnappers are making it clear that for Alice to live up to her words in the newspaper, she can’t overlook what’s in the manuscript and must do whatever she can to help change the government. The woman gets angry because the hope that Alice spreads doesn’t help them in their current poor situation, but Alice counters back that they themselves should be enacting change instead of just talking about it. Alice’s lecturing causes the woman to point the gun at her, but the woman’s accomplice stops her and presents Alice with two pictures instead – pictures of her sisters – with the implication that they could be hurt.

Preview

Finally, a to-be-continued episode! And for the matter, it seems to be something that will move the overarching plot forward since it relates to Kauplan and the Invisible Nine project. Colt and Dalton both seemed like bad guys, but it wasn’t entirely clear what their ultimate intentions are. It’s even more interesting that Muse Kauplan killed Colt, which might make her a bigger bad guy given how they portrayed her in this episode and how everything is supposedly being covered up. The other good thing about this episode is that the animation quality got better too compared to last week. It’s a shame though that Schultz had to be in this. I really hope we don’t see him next episode.