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Thinking about themes...
I had a theory that each episode of the first four arcs is meant to represent the thematic elements advanced initially: Fantasy, Mystery, Anti-Fantasy, and Anti-Mystery. For example, with the first epsiodes we'd have:
EP1 - Mystery: Whodunnit? No explicit supernatural elements.
EP2 - Fantasy: A magical witch appears! Everything is the result of magic! Surrender to the witch!
EP3 - Anti-Fantasy: Supernatural elements are explicitly and aggressively denied. Events deemed suspect are declared to have never happened at all. We will finger a culprit in the end because we must to deny what we see.
EP4 - Anti-Mystery: We have no information to go on. The crime is unsolvable without information from an external source.
So I don't think that's too implausible. And I've noticed thematic parallels in each episode to the corresponding one in the main arcs, so while they're not "answer arcs," I do think they're meant to show us something.
Only recently did I think about "chiru" -> "breakdown." There are too many cracks in Chiru's facade for it all to be accidental and I've thought of too many things that just "don't click" in each episode for me to accept that they aren't somehow flawed. However... what if those flaws are intentional? Chiru arcs are a literal thematic "breakdown" where the themes are taken to their extreme?
EP5 - Mystery Breakdown: A super detective solves the crime with every trick in the book. A culprit is fingered and forced to the point of confession... but everything was wrong and she's not confessing to the right thing.
EP6 - Fantasy Breakdown: Fantasy to its logical extreme produces contradictory puzzles. Too much fantasy done wrong and things stop making even fantasy-sense.
EP7 - Anti-Fantasy Breakdown: Go to any lengths to make all the facts fit an answer which denies fantastic elements by explaining everything, even if you aren't sure it actually fits. Gloss, throw in a freakin' submarine and an alternate timeline, do whatever it takes.
EP8 - Anti-Mystery Breakdown: What is the ultimate scenario in which incomplete information exists...?
Note that these thematic problems are not their opposites - the breakdown of Mystery is not Anti-Mystery and the breakdown of Fantasy is not Anti-Fantasy. I'm not sure what else there is to that, though... and ep8 can always prove me wrong.
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