It’s been a wolfy weekend for anime. I knew based on the conclusion of last week’s ep that Witch Watch was going into serious mode. And you know it’s serious when it skips the OP. My instinctive reaction was strongly negative, because so far WW has worked by far the best when embracing humor like a bear hug. But this is Shinohara Kenta, and it’s not like he doesn’t know how to do battle shounen. My favorite of his works by far is Kanata no Astra, and that certainly has its share of serious passages.

I’ll say this at least, there was no gradual transformation. This was pretty much a light switch – from a run of episodes that could hardly have been less serious to one which had almost no comedy at all. Maybe that’s better in the end – the whole “rip off the band-aid” thing. And it was good – Shinohara is good at this. I did miss the laughs I was getting every week, but a solid premise and execution makes up for a lot. The first clue that something is amiss comes when Keigo is being bullied by a kid for his sneakers, and when Kanchi interferes it’s revealed that some sort of aggression drug called “Drops” is responsible.

Nemu enters the fray here, the urgency of the situation giving her the courage to ring Moi’s doorbell (no double entendre at all) in human form. She doesn’t reveal that she’s been there twice already, but that’s not strictly relevant. Turns out that bad vibe I talked about last week was the “Alert” spell – one that’s cast on every witch to warn them if there’s a warlock nearby. Nemu tells Moi and Nico of a long-ago war between witches and warlocks, won by “good” witches, and the safeguards put in place in its aftermath. She also informs Moi that Nico is an extremely powerful witch – “The Witch of Thousands” (1000 spells, 1000, people helped, born every 1000 years), and that her mother probably didn’t tell her all this because stress and anxiety can make witches turn to the dark side.

So, bottom line, this turn establishes both the power system and the fact that Nico is a scary proposition that has witchworld on high alert. Also, trainee witches are forbidden from using offensive spells (again to prevent possible temptation from the dark side) so it’s no wonder they use beings like ogres and tengu as familiars. Nemu promises to try and find the creepy cabin again but can’t – until she realizes it’s likely on the other side of a portal in a pocket magic world. She switches to neko-mode on the grounds that she must have stumbled upon it before, and now does find it again. But the warlock senses her presence, orders its assistant (who we now know is Wolf, the leader of the Drops gang) to kill her.

There are any number of questions I could raise here, but one of them would certainly be whether witches and warlocks are definitionally female, or it’s just that we haven’t met any male ones yet. In any case Moi hatches a plan to fight back against this prophesied treat to Nico, with an attack looming according to Keigo (who’s put himself on the Drops mailing list to gather intelligence, he says). In truth Keigo is actually Wolf (as in “were“), and he’s signed on as the warlock’s familiar in exchange for a promise of a cure for the injury which robbed him of his figure skating here. He’s gotten close to Moi and Nico as part of his duties, which now including oni-napping Moi to the magic world so his “dogs” can attack and capture Nico unhindered.

Well, that was certainly quite the twist. Hell, Keigo being a figure skating prodigy is a weird twist in and of itself. I’m not sure how I feel about it to be honest, but I’ll be shocked if he doesn’t get turned back to the good guys before it’s all said and done. This is obviously a pretty major series of events and it doesn’t feel as if it’s going to be wrapped up in one episode, which is all well and good but honestly compels me to say I hope it doesn’t go on too long. As smartly as this was pulled off, it’s Witch Watch’s sense of humor that really makes it stand out.