It seems a little early for the darkest hour, but then again this show likes dark so maybe it’s yet to go 100% black-hole-black.
We start the episode with our antagonist, Maxwell, wandering the eerie desert outside Kamitsubaki city, talking about the loops. He brings up the witch that evidently causes Phenomenon and the reset, Sophia.
In the city, we spend most of this episode dealing with Kafu’s issues. The Tesseractor gang reveals that they’ve got five days left until the end of the cycle, but that if all the girls are able to unlock the same kind of world-rewriting song that Koko deployed, the just might be able to change fate.
Kafu, who if you recall was finding herself unable to sing because of how her songs might rewrite reality, takes this kind of hard. To her credit, she tries, even throwing herself into a Tesseractor encounter in an attempt to force herself to sing when there is no alternative. It doesn’t go well, and luckily Laplace called the other girls in to save the day.
This causes them to find out about Kafu’s problem, and not all the girls take it well, with Rime in particular getting mad that Kafu kept it from them (and, of course, regretting harsh words almost immediately).
Just as the gang turns themselves around and catches up with Kafu to try to work things out, Maxwell appears. Maxwell then pretty much just explains things, in a way seemingly calculated to break Kafu. This world is a simulation, the “true” events are a thousand years gone, everyone is just puppets in some kind of game between him and the witch Sophia, all that sort of stuff that might or might not be entirely true but falls prey to that thing in media where nobody ever assumes diabolical villains lie.
For his last act, once Kafu is already teetering and seething with black aura energy, he manifests a pallet swap of Laplace and declares that Laplace was his creation and servant the whole time, which Laplace (despite having an established backstory) does not manage to deny.
Kafu thus goes completely off her rocker and… Well, let’s assume that maybe, just maybe, the creators of this have seen Madoka Magica. And that maybe, they might be emulating Madoka Magica, you know, just a tiny bit. The same “tiny” bit that Yuki Yuna emulated, or that RahXephon emulated Evangelion. If you know Madoka Magica, you know this scene. We get the closeup of Kafu’s face as she cries, focus on a single tear falling, and then black awfulness and a broken-hearted line as our nice girl turns into a monster. Or in Kafu’s case gets dead eyes and some squiggly markings, but close enough – she’s been convinced to seek the destruction of the world herself and been transformed by it, much to everyone’s horror.
And that’s where the episode ends! As you might expect from the show’s behavior so far and all.
Now, keep in mind this is episode 7 and we expect the show to go to episode 12. That’s a whole lot of show – five episodes – to have after turning our closest thing to a main character into a baddie. It’s even enough time that we could probably pull a reset in the next couple of episodes and then try for a next run, possibly with the non-corrupt Witchlings doing the same thing here that Koko did last time, though we’re far from guaranteed to go that route. So, at this point, the only thing to do is ride the ride.