Another sort of marking time episode for Mahoutsukai no Yome.  Technically faultless and thoroughly competent, but somehow for me not very engaging.  We’re spending an awful lot of time with characters I feel like I’m expected to care a lot more about than I do.  And as adversaries go, Philomela’s grandmother is pretty one-note.  She’s a mean old hag who makes people miserable because she can – at least from what we’ve seen of her.  And the reveal that she may be behind the werewolves’ suffering (man, it’s been a tough year for anime werewolves) doesn’t do much to alter that.

Philomela is part of the problem, unfortunately.  She’s effectively the MacGuffin of this whole school arc, but she’s just not compelling enough to carry that burden.  I do feel for her, and Chise’s treatment of her certainly reflects well on Chise.  But is the fact that Chise is a selfless and non-judgmental person news?  It is new in any way that it need to be reiterated over and over?  For her part Philomela too is basically one-note – sad sack.  She’s a rundown and self-loathing little thing who obviously got a lousy hand dealt to them but doesn’t really take any initiative to change things.  As a de facto deuteragonist, that’s not much to grab onto.

That ties into the other major problem, which is that the true deuteragonist of the series has been more or less written out of the story.  Elias is here (occasionally) but he really has little to nothing of consequence to do in the entire arc (so far). As his relationship with Chise is both the most important and most interesting in the series, that sucks.  About the only important moments he’s had to do was on the camping trip (not coincidentally among the best episodes of the season), and the interaction with Simeon (the one minute of which we got last week was the most entertaining of the cour so far).

So anyway, the witches have determined that the grimoire is still inside the college.  Which of course makes the whole lockdown thing seem a bit ineffectual, though it remains to be seen if the situation will change (dropping it would tip the culprit off that they were onto them, I suppose).  And speaking of them, they seem to have targeted their next victim, who’s one of the St. George twins, but I’m honestly not sure whether it’s Violet (the boy) or Jasmine (the girl), because the pair of them have made so little impression.   Guess we’ll find out next week.