You know what? It’s spooky season and I haven’t covered even one remotely spooky show. Enough (for now) of these cutsey witches and their kind hearts, you deserve at least one entry where the idea of a “witch” lives up to having a place on monster line-ups.
The show that promises that is The Witch and the Beast.
Well, we find out pretty quickly that witches in this ambiguously Victorian-ish setting are a mixed bag when, shortly into our main characters Guideau (angry lady) and Ashaf (suave dude who wears a coffin as a backpack) encounter a shark kaiju running rampant and the local witch puts the threat down
At the very least, it seems believable that some witches might not be pure evil. That said, Guideau seems pretty insistent on beating up any witch she finds and Ashaf (a mage himself), while inclined to do research, is rather skeptical of any witch’s good intentions. This turns out to be well-founded, as the seemingly heroic witch actually has a grudge against the city and is more than willing to do a lot of murder to have some ancestral revenge.
We learn that Guideau is under a curse, and that there are two ways to really remove such a thing: True love’s kiss, or the witch who cast it having a change of heart. Apparently, snogging a witch (any witch) also works as a temporary dispel, which when Guideau claims some lip time by force, unleashes Guideau’s true form from Ashaf’s coffin: A giant hulking Jason-like being. Though this true form appears to be male, we don’t see it a lot and I question its humanity, so I’ll refer to Guideau as female throughout for convenience.
The incident resolved with the ensuing beatdown of the vengeful witch, we learn that Ashaf and Guideau work for something called The Order, a society of magical entities that seeks to control magic. If this were a masquerade setting, they’d be the powers maintaining said masquerade, but it’s not so they’re just a secret society that’s interested in collecting Witches. Thus, we have the general pattern for the show, engaging with individual mysteries that are generally going to tie back to witches while indulging a fair bit of darkness and gore along the way.
The next story runs two episodes, delving into every gory mystery’s favorite topic, a serial killer
Guideau and Ashaf partner with a local cop/mage, only for said cop to seem to be targeted, in that the witch is killing those close to her, the first victims having been her adopted sons.
However, it turns out that nothing is as it might seem; the “witch” is actually the sons, in possession of an evil grimoire that they have to kill in order to feed. They end up taken out, with adoptive mom herself having to deliver the killing shots. Seems cruel, but I guess it’s her way of taking responsibility for not raising them better?
The next two-parter is a lower deck episode. The situation involves the undead. In this world, it’s possible for fully legal necromancers to operate, reanimating loved ones and maintaining them as full humans. If not maintained well, the undead go berserk, and multiple cases of that are why the Order gets called in, with Ashaf referring the local cop to a different member of the group and then exiting the arc.
They track down the necromancer, who is admirably loony, taking out a load of undead along the way. Our main group are the Order’s necromancy specialist (an ice-cold beauty type), her put-upon assistant, and the local cop who has a bad impression of necromancy to begin with and a dead fiancee.
Seems that the cop’s impression isn’t that of base, as we’re told that the true cost of necromantic reanimation is that the resurrected is severed from the cycle of life and death and will fall into a Void of existence within nothingness when they return to death. Makes it awkward that the rogue necromancer has brought back the cop’s fiancee among others.
The necromancer also takes the assistant “hostage” (dead) and is goaded into gloating and explaining his petty little plans, at which point the order rep reveals that she’s something a little beyond an ordinary necromancer.
Also, her assistant was undead the whole time, so slitting his throat did fairly little. The necromancer is killed, reanimated by the Order witch, and then bound to maintain those he wronged as full humans forever more. Including the dead fiancee, as is awkward.
After that, it’s back to Guideau and Ashaf. This time, they’re going into turf where the Paladin Corps, a church group that purports to solve magical crimes but really seems to indiscriminately hunt and kill witches, is operating. Surprisingly, the Order and Paladins aren’t on the same page.
In fact, this arc’s witch is a young lady (for real, not just young looking because witches are ageless) who is explicitly weak for a witch and seems like a pretty decent ordinary girl. She’s being hunted to the tune of city evacuation because she’s been framed for murders.
Though, it probably doesn’t help that she’s in possession of a talking demon sword said to have the power to destroy the world.
It turns out that the whole “kill all witches no matter what” faction is actually a secret society within the paladins, called the Executioners. Its agent betrays the paladins, mind controls or kills them, and ultimately claims the sword and the witch, using said witch to unseal the demon sword into its true demonic state, thinking he can control it. When he can’t, it’s a good thing he just threw the cute witch girl away like trash, as Ashaf is able to heal her and Guideau snog her, letting Guideau’s big mode come out.
And from there it’s just absurd power scaling where Guideau beats the demon sword with one hand tied behind her back (so as to not kill it) and the gang drops the traitor and makes peace with the paladin leader who was actually kind of cool as well as being the first level of overpowered that needed to job to both the demon sword and Guideau. Little miss witch and her sword (knocked the hell out) join the Order and all seems well.
We get a one-off where the body-hopping witch who cursed Guideau shows up to say hello and confirm that she’s evil, followed by what the show decides it wants as its grand finale: a two-part episode showing how Guideau and Ashaf met. It involves Executioners being jerks, which we saw before, and pretty much retreads emotional and plot beats we’d seen in prior arcs; particularly the demon sword arc, but also the first two cases like prejudice from the intro episode or violence to children from the serial killer case.
And that’s it. That’s the show. Why it chooses to go out on a flashback, I don’t know. Even Boogiepop knows better than to do that. Sure we get a tail where it seems our leads will chase the witch down an elevator to a world of vampires, but who cares? There’s nothing else that actually happens.
The End.
The Witch and the Beast is not a good show, and its lack of quality comes down to one exact issue: the characters aren’t interesting.
Ashaf is a single gag: he’s soft spoken and polite, even when it’s incongruous like when he’s just been pummeled. At first, this is kind of cool, but you catch on pretty quickly to the fact that he’s all exposition and no range.
Guideau is an angry idiot. I sort of see her as Baby’s First D&D Character. You know, when someone has figured out that they should have something going for them in order to roleplay so they actually give their character a backstory, but they still only have a single note of brute violence because it’s all their stats tell them how to do? That’s Guideau. There’s a real art to writing meatheads, especially meatheads in a central protagonist role, and making them interesting and personable enough to follow. Caiman does it really well. Denji does it less well, but he still does it. Guideau can’t hop even that fairly low bar. It’s fine if she has no charisma in character but you’d think you could at least make it fun for the audience.
Instead, The Witch and the Beast is focused on other things, like how evil they can make their antagonist, or how much super hype they can give to Guideau’s true form in power scaling. And I’m sorry, but those aren’t interesting. Making your bad guy really bad can be a useful tool, but that’s all it is, and frankly I’m of the opinion that power scaling is dang near worthless. At best it’s a buy-in to a visual spectacle, but you don’t need it to get flashy things to happen. Guideau isn’t the worst example, since the true form only comes out as an end-of-arc panic button, but it’s still not doing her any favors.
This sort of reminds me of how X had so much dedication to looking cool in a way that’s now charmingly dated, but X actually has other things going for it. The Witch and the Beast doesn’t. The final product on screen comes off as passionless kitsch, something that only vaguely flirts with even exploitation material, and that couldn’t even exploit too well. Sure, the fights are bloody, but there’s not a solid and visceral thrill to it, or a creativity like Chainsaw Man had or even Magical Girl Spec Ops Asuka. It’s not Elfen Lied levels of bad, but it’s also not clicking.
For all that, The Witch and the Beast gets a D out of me. It’s a D and not a Fail because the individual arcs work, the one-off characters are sometimes rather solid for one-offs (better than the leads, for sure) and the art and the bones of the mystery aren’t horrid. All the same, if I can scare you off of this show for spooky season, that’s for the best.