Baccano!

Comments and reviews

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  Member review

  Stu Kline

  Sep 11, 2026

  8/10

  Baccano! does not ease you in. It drops you into several stories at once and lets the connections surface on their own schedule. That choice will annoy some people right away. It worked for me after the first couple of episodes settled into a rhythm. The setup involves alchemists who got more than they bargained for centuries earlier, then a whole mess of crooks, thieves, and opportunists in 1930s America. A train called the Flying Pussyfoot becomes the main stage for a stretch of the show, and that stretch is where the series earns most of its keep. Chaos piles up fast. People get shot, stabbed, thrown around, and some of them simply refuse to stay down. The tone stays almost playful even while the blood hits the floor. That balance is harder than it looks. I like how little the show lectures. Nobody stops to explain the moral of immortality or the wages of greed in a tidy speech. Characters chase what they want—money, thrills, payback, a quiet life—and the consequences arrive without a sermon attached. The immortality angle is treated as a practical problem more than a philosophical one. Once you cannot die, the ordinary rules of risk change, and the show follows that logic instead of turning it into a metaphor for something else. The cast is large. Some faces stick harder than others. The twin thieves with the manic energy, the young guy who thinks the whole thing is a grand adventure, the quiet ones who have been alive too long and just want the noise to stop. You do not need every name memorized on the first pass. The show keeps circling back until the important links are clear. I watched it straight through the first time and still caught new threads on a second look. That density is a strength when the writing stays sharp. Pacing is uneven by design. Some stretches feel like pure momentum. Others slow down so two people can talk in a corner while the rest of the train goes to hell. I never felt padded, but I did feel the gear shifts. If you need a clean three-act climb with a single protagonist, this will frustrate you. If you can live with a story that behaves more like a pile of connected incidents, it pays off. The animation holds up better than a lot of mid-2000s television. Action scenes have weight. Faces carry personality without turning into caricatures every time someone opens their mouth. Music fits the period flavor without becoming a costume party. None of it feels like it is straining to look expensive; it just looks committed. What kept it at a four instead of higher is simple. A few side threads never quite justify the space they take, and the ending lands cleanly enough without delivering the kind of final jolt that would make the whole thing unforgettable. I finished satisfied and still thinking about a couple of characters, not obsessed. That is a solid result. Plenty of shows aim for cool chaos and end up messy or empty. Baccano! stays in control of its own disorder. I am not usually drawn to stories that advertise themselves as “everyone meets on a train and all hell breaks loose.” The premise sounds like a gimmick. Here the gimmick is in service of character collisions that actually matter. People make bad decisions for understandable reasons. Loyalties shift. A bottle of something that should never have existed keeps changing hands, and every new owner alters the stakes. The show trusts you to keep up instead of holding your hand through every reveal. Rewatch value is decent. Once you know who ends up where, the early episodes play differently. Lines that sounded throwaway start carrying weight. I caught myself smiling at setups I had missed the first time. That is rare enough that I notice when it happens. If you want something orderly and polite, look elsewhere. If you can handle a story that starts in the middle of several lives and lets the blood and the jokes share the same frame, Baccano! is worth the hours. It does not pretend the world is fair. It does not sand the edges off its crooks and killers to make them likable on paper. It just runs the train and lets the passengers sort themselves out. I had a good time watching them do it, and the rating reflects that without pretending it reinvented the wheel.