Blood, Mayhem, and a “real enemy”.
Most of this episode is the city devolving into an angry mob in the middle of an apocalyptic scenario (or at least a major Tesseractor outbreak, slaughtering people and causing them to dissolve into blood), with the survivors hunting witches in the hopes that it will stop the catastrophe.
In the middle of this, Koko starts to remember her past – a past in which a cast of comrades suspiciously similar to the current cast died gruesome deaths. She pushes herself hard, wanting to believe in Kugel despite all the horrible things that have happened.
In the middle of the witch hunt, as Koko fully breaks through her repressed past, she does a fairly impressive bit of real world magic before going after Kugel.
Kugel we’ve seen dealing with another figure, who Kugel identified as his “real enemy” before seemingly being hacked. This enemy, identified as Maxwell, will have to be addressed later. When Koko confronts Kugel, she manages to talk him down, but only enough that he’s able to turn his absurd magic gun on himself. After that happens, Koko knows what to do, and sings to lay him to rest, causing a rain of light throughout the city that brings the panicking and blood-crazed folks back to their senses.
When all’s done, we’re kind of left with a “What now?”. Kugel’s core seems to remain, but inert in Koko’s possession. The chief is still dead or MIA meaning the girls aren’t likely to have more official support and even if the witch-killing frenzy was cured the fact that their faces got places and people are inclined to believe them responsible for supernatural mayhem rather than fixing supernatural mayhem doesn’t seem likely to go away.
We’re nearing the halfway point of Kamitsubaki City, and I’ll say… I don’t hate it. But I do think it could be stronger. I don’t really feel like I know most of the girls, despite quite a few involved flashbacks coming out, and more than that I don’t have any sort of knowledge regarding what’s going on or what they’re supposed to do. Purify Tesseractors, okay, that’s fine, but the show’s been moving us from one critical crisis to the next, not doing monster of the week stuff. It’s clear that there is some larger-scope scenario that we ought to be addressing and we can’t really address it because we know next to nothing about it.
And as I may have said before, this isn’t a fatal problem. The thing about reviewing this show week by week is that I don’t know what’s coming next, whether we’re going to get good answers in an appropriate time scale to use them. It could be that the emotional experience of being ignorant like the girls themselves, lost in a setting that’s bigger than what we know, could be an intentional and even brilliant thing. There are a lot of shows, including ones that clearly have an influence on Kamitsubaki City through its genre DNA if not directly, that have done that sort of thing. Or things might not work out or come together, resulting in a production that’s too lost and confused for it’s own good.
Right now, I’m starting to worry about Kamitsubaki city, not because we need answers per say, but because we need direction and purpose. There’s a disconnect between these lost girls and a world that seems to be aggressively moving towards some sort of huge endgame. Even if the direction we gain is temporary, it really is required.