After Haruhi Suzumiya and Memento shows seem to be more free to mix up their timelines and scramble them up by attempting to make the shows more interesting. With Haruhi, the series was pretty good even in chronological order even if the storyline made more sense out of order. With Memento, it absolutely made sense for them to rearrange it in the way they did for storyline reasons, and it was entirely consistent and not random.
Nobody has put Baccano in proper order as far as I can see. Without seeing it in proper order, or it being storyline oriented, it’s hard to tell if there’s an actual decent storyline there or if they’re masking a mediocre or lousy storyline with the flipping about through time.
It just feels like after I’ve put a bunch of pieces together that it seems like a picture is emerging that is the rough anime equivalent of dogs playing poker…
After a few jumbled episodes where they pluck bits and pieces from all over the timeline, it settles mostly into 3 storylines. There’s a 4th storyline shoehorned in the middle about episode 7. All 3 of the other storylines are descended from the 4th, but are mostly only loosely related to each other. The following section will have many spoilers. ;)
the 1700’s story is about demon summoning on a ship, and how the demon makes a group of people immortal, under a few specific rules, then how one of the people on the ship turns on the rest and starts murdering them to find the knowledge to make others immortal, before ultimately falling off the ship.
The 1930’s storyline follows the murderer and his assistant from the first story as one of their lackeys finally perfects the formula. The formula is repeatedly stolen and restolen and ultimately ends up causing 2 groups of Mafia people along with one 2 thieves to become immortal. One of the mafia people ends up defeating and eating the original murderer, rescues the assistant, and everyone is happy…
The 1931 storyline only has 2 characters from the prior storyline, but a character from the 1700 storyline as well. 1 gang of thieves, the original 2 thieves from the prior storyline, 1 group of murderous cultists, and 1 group of murderous mafia people, and a train conductor known as the “rail tracer” all end up on a train with the Senator’s wife and daughter. Thieves 1 want to steal the cargo of explosives, the second group of thieves just want to go visit friends, The cultists want to ransom the senator’s wife and kid for the release of their leader, The mafia just wants to kill people for ransom, and the rail tracer just wants to protect his train and kill everyone who is disrupting his train… Ultimately, the senator’s family survives, the thieves get their cargo, The other thieves meet up with the immortal and take him back to their immortal friends, the cultists mostly die aside from the leader’s daughter who starts dating the rail tracer, and the surviving mafia people get arrested.
1932. The lowlife mafia person who first stole the elixir is missing. His sister is looking for him. Yet another group of Mafia is looking for him. The mafia people shot at each other for quite a bit, they talked to some newspaper people, and ultimately worked everything out and went to fish the partially immortal lowlife mafia person out of a concrete barrel in the river…
See what I mean? After putting all the pieces together, the story just doesn’t seem interesting…