天下制覇

Witches were not formally admitted into evidence!

Impressions:

And finally… finally… after four long weeks, we get to Beatrice and the meat of this series. The first half of the episode was not any more interesting than usual, unless you’re counting all the different ways that Deen is messing around with Maria’s face. People yell at Maria for a little bit, she makes silly faces, everybody dies. Been there. Done that. Kind of sick of it at this point. If only they would combine the three in some way… like people yelling at Maria while they kill her because she’s making silly faces. That would be a dream come true. Uu~.

I do have to admit that the whole "Tea Party" thing works a lot better in the confines of a game than in a show, especially since those kind of extra explaination sequences are generally part and parcel of many visual novels. 07th Expansion subverts that in the game to lead into Battler vs Beatrice and the debate of magic vs logic. The extradimensional tea party doesn’t really translate particularly well to an animated form, and the only thing I can really think of that comes close are the "How and Why" sequences that some older shows used. Anime really tends not to break the fourth wall all that often, especially in recent years… but I digress.

I am pleased with how Deen handled it for the most part. You just need to conveniently ignore that Battler’s arguing the existence of magic from what is essentially an interdimensional tea parlor after watching half his family explode into bloodstains. His whole "I don’t believe in magic" speech could have definitely been a little bit shorter, and they probably could have stood to have tried to avoid framing shots with Beatrice’s chest obscuring half the foreground, but eh… it’s Deen. It was a little sad to see how much they focused on camera shots an inch away from staring up Jessica’s skirt after every other female above legal age was dead. There are definitely some lonely illustrators in Deen’s studio.

Brief Summary:

When pressed, Maria tells them that Beatrice did it. While the kids try to shake intelligent information out of her, Natsuhi bars them in the room and yells out to Beatrice. By the time Battler breaks down the door, Natsuhi’s got a bullet in her head. Maria starts congratulating Beatrice, pissing off Battler. He grabs the gun as more butterflies appear because the time is up. They’re all screwed.

At a tea party, everybody admits that it was a definitely a bad ending, but they’re all in good spirits and joke about it. You just can’t win against a witch. That irks Battler, who protests that they just don’t know what really happened. The mood shifts again, and Beatrice appears and confronts Battler. He’s shocked for a moment, but asserts that there is a logical explaination for everything, nothing was magic. Beatrice lists off all the mysteries of the latter going that he’ll have to explain, and has a new one for him, as everybody but the two of them explode into bloodstains before his eyes.

At another tea party, the witch Bernkastel and Beatrice trade less than friendly pleasantries about what Beatrice has now put underway.