On one side, big deal climax, on the other, well…
Okay, let’s go over the basic skeleton. Outside, the test proctor’s hat makes its way out. Qifrey realizes this means trouble before the serpent path animates to swallow him, Coco, and Tetia. Qifrey gets pretty badly hurt on the way down.
Meanwhile, the kids find themselves in a bit of a deadly game of hide and seek with the Brimhat. As they flee through the path in terror, Agott realizes that Coco is the primary target of the conspiracy and decides to try to face their enemy with a lie about how Coco had her memory erased, only for the Brimhat to immediately call that out as a lie, make a show of tempting/threatening Agott, and start to prepare to use her as bait for Coco to perform forbidden magic.
Richeh and the anxious boy, however, manage to rescue Agott, overcoming their weaknesses and doing the whole arc… only for the Brimhat to not get trapped in the magical labyrinth, snagging the boy. Agott and Richeh aren’t able to intervene until the Brimhat’s magic quite impressively turns him into a scale wolf. Though Richeh wants it to be the other way around, we instead have her left in charge of the little penguin griffins while Agott goes to see if she can save their fellow test taker, even knowing that she might end up challenging the Brimhat in the process.
Elsewhere, Coco and company wake up after their fall. Qifrey’s cloak was torn in addition to, you know, him being dealt quite a hefty wound. This is extra bad news because the place they’ve fallen to has the still-living tormented golden people of the cursed city, seething with resentment for the witches who made them into things. Qifrey, despite his bad condition, insists his students stay safe, and prepares to fight.
And… that’s where everyone is when the season ends! Yeah, a lot like DanDaDan Season 1, this one is clearly written and edited with the expectation that there’s going to be a second outing in order to get the story to a more sensible ending point, choosing to leave us off on a cliffhanger for the time being. It was something I was concerned about going into this episode knowing how complex the Serpent’s Path sequence is, and sure enough we aren’t actually resolving anything.
This is a technique that leaves me badly torn. At least 86, which had the second cour all lined up (I’ve yet to find an official announcement for Witch Hat, though it has only been out a day) gave us a first cour ending that would have been fully satisfying (though bleak) if things had ended there. Leaving something completely unfinished where there’s supposed to be some sort of ending doesn’t really pay.
On the other hand, it seems here to be in service to an uncompromising eye for quality in storytelling. I’ve often praised the older OVA format for being able to tell stories that don’t neatly fit into twelve half-hour episodes or something close to that, instead being as long as they need to be and as numerous as they need to be. In the case of classic OVAs, this was usually shorter overall, but then you get ones like War on Geminar that did use that leave in order to sprawl as much as the plot demanded. Season cuts aren’t dictated by the pacing of a story or how it should be told, they dictate the pacing of a story with market forces like time slots and syndication. If temporary false endings like the one here in Witch Hat that don’t end anything are the price to pay in order to tap into some of that OVA spirit of cutting the running time to the story rather than the story to the running time, I’ll take it.
Either way, I feel like I’ve largely made my opinion on Witch Hat known. The studio had the task of spinning gold into gold, a task that some studios have failed at, but that’s at least easier than trying to do it with a different starting material. The manga was already amazing, the production just had to do it justice. And it did. To anyone out there who is reading these without watching the show, I’d highly recommend it, though if you want closure, perhaps keep your eyes pealed for that second season announcement.