Sanda embraces its inner weird, and its inner pain. It’s shit’s fucked up, no question about it. It was looking like a pretty “normal” episode after a string of really dark ones, but that didn’t last. This is just such a messed-up world, and much of how messed up the kids are can be put down to that. But not all of it. And I think that was pretty much the thrust of this episode. Kids may be unformed clay in many respects, but that doesn’t mean they can be exempted from personal responsibility.

We begin, though, with some of the most grounded material of the series so far. Amaya-kun (whose impression has moderated considerably since his introduction) declares that he and Fuyumura must “split up” with Sanda. His reasoning is solid enough – Yagyuuda now knows the two of them are connected to Santa Claus, and the more the three are seen together the sooner he’ll make the connection. But Sanda doesn’t see it that way, unsurprisingly. One might also surmise that Amaya feels something deeper for Sanda along the lines of what Fuyumura feels for Orono, but that’s at the conjecture stage at this point.

Speaking of Oono, there’s some bad juju going on with her at the moment. Whether it’s a direct result of her angst over Fuyumura’s increasing closeness with Sanda or a side effect of her having been sleeping, something is very clearly going wrong with her body. For all we know this could be some sort of sleeper agent implanted in kids who disobey their elders, to weed out the troublemakers. As messed up as this society is that seems very much like the sort of thing they’d do.

That’s only the appetizer though, as things are about to get really dark. That comes with the introduction of Namatame-san, a second-year who Sanda and Nico wind up helping carry some potted plants back to their classroom. That they were intentionally put outside in the middle of a typhoon is the first clue that something is seriously amiss, but Sanda and Nico don’t realize just how amiss until they arrive at Namatame’s classroom – Class 2-10, in the sub-basement. Sanda protests that the second-years only have five classes, but this one is clearly special.

We already knew that in this twisted world, kids aren’t punished for killing adults because adults don’t matter. But seeing the results of that first-hand is pretty chilling. Class 2-10 is a class where the kids who kill adults (or, apparently, commit other serious crimes) are sent. There are no teachers as no adult wants anything to do with them. And who could blame them, given that these are murderers who’ve learned the lesson that there are no consequences for the act? Their frozen smiles are truly something out of a horror movie. And they’re interested in Santa Claus, which is why they lock Nico and Sanda in the room to grill them about the subject.

Why Santa’s thumbs, specifically? That’s what Namatame asks for, delivered in her boot to be specific (presumably that was at Ooshibu’s direction). And Sanda – who’s returned to classroom in Santa form to face the “underworld” children as he promised Tetsudome he would – finds he has an overwhelming imperative to grant their wish. Fuyumura’s crazy finally yields a positive result here, as she arrives in the nick of time. But Itagaki Paru is once more taking some very pointed shots at the modern culture of child-rearing in Japan – specifically, the way fetishizing childhood has a way of fostering children with no sense of personal responsibility.