What an odd little episode this was, even by Mahoutsukai no Yome standards.  This series has always marched to its own drum, often eschewing conventional narrative structure.  If there’s a surprising element for me it’s that this season is only a cour, and the pacing is still very deliberate.  With no signs of picking up, I might add.  This was an entire episode of dialogue, basically, and much of the development devoted to a secondary relationship in the story.  The main one got a push, too, but we’re still moving along quite sedately on the whole.

The narrative intra-episodically moves in very choppy fashion, leaving us to fill in a lot of gaps with our imagination.  It all starts with Elias pigeonholing Renfred to ask him for some input on his relationship with Alice – to help him answer a question Chise has posed to him – “why did you say you intended to make me your bride?”.  Alice overhears, and doesn’t necessarily like Renfred’s response about how he looks at Alice as his daughter, and how he has a duty to protect her.

From there, we cut straight to Alice “borrowing” Chise for the night – basically looking for a sympathetic ear from someone her own age.  Simon picks her up from the station, and very neatly ensnares the girls in a rhetorical trap to get them to admit that they’re friends (as delightful as this was, I’m not exactly sure why that should have been so difficult).  His point about the elastic nature of facts is rather a theme of the episode, as is the nature of perception and how the reality each of us sees is different from everyone else’s.

Alice and Renfred have a pretty horrifying history with Joseph, so I suppose it’s for the best that Chise didn’t bring up their current relationship during the sleepover.  Things between Alice and Renfred don’t actually seem all that complicated to me.  She’s obviously in love with him, and he’s quite sincere in stating that he sees her as a daughter.  The whole bodyguard thing is just a proxy for that, really.  It’s rather more complicated between Chise and Elias of course, and ultimately that’s the real reason why the Alice-Renfred angle got so much play here – that experience can shed light on the main one in the series.

What seems clear is that neither Elias or Chise have any idea what their relationship is, what they hope it can be, or where they hope it’s going.  And neither do I to be honest.  I mean, I assume when they talk about sleeping together they’re being literal.  But what is a husband, what is a master, what is an apprentice?  Is it really just an “eyes of the beholder” thing, or does there have to be some objective clarity to their roles?  Both of them are still in the process of learning to be human, so I suppose there’s no rush where finding the answer is concerned.