Episode 17 – Witch Watch

Witch Watch has been on a pretty good stride lately, so I suppose it was only a matter of time before we hit an episode that was a bit on the slow side. No comedy is perfect, and it’s not particularly strange for this show to have shorts that don’t quite land for me, but this is the first time where both the ones we got felt kind of weak, and neither featured a good or memorable punchline. This isn’t exactly a deal breaker, and even a slower episode of this series isn’t completely without its charms, but given the highs Witch Watch‘s comedy usually runs on, this is probably the weakest offering we’ve gotten thus far.

The first of this episode’s shorts is the better of the two, and sees Morihito and the boys being trapped in a death game scenario while Nico is held hostage. Between how elaborate death game scenarios usually are, and the mastermind being a pretty blatant parody of Jigsaw, this feels like it should be ripe for comedic potential, and it does capitalize on that…at first. As not-Jigsaw explains the rules of this death game, it quickly becomes apparent that he gave it way too many rules, and by the time he finishes going over everything, it’s hard not to share in the boys’ growing impatience over how convoluted this all is.

This short takes a bit of an odd swerve as soon as Morihito figures out how to break the game. He and the others immediately start thinking of ways to make it more exciting and transform this locked room scenario into a tutorial in proper game balance. I’ll admit it’s a creative way to spin this, and one that turned out to be a lot less predictable than just having the boys act out the Saw movies with jokes, but “creative” doesn’t quite translate to funny, and while the shift in tone is decently entertaining, I felt like the short ran through most of its good jokes beforehand. The punchline is also a little weak, as Nico shows up midway through the boys’ reworking of the game, and we discover that she was never really kidnapped but rather working with Keigo to test out his newest game idea. Making an overly elaborate game feels on brand for Keigo, so it works as a twist, but I can’t help but feel like it would have been funnier if the game had played out longer before pivoting in a different direction. For what we got, this wasn’t the show’s worst short, but it’s not nearly as strong as the last few.

Sadly, while I thought the first short simply squandered an otherwise funny scenario, the second one just completely fell flat. We discover from Tenryu that the teachers have gotten wary of Morihito and the others after all the incidents they’ve caused, so he asks them to try laying low and avoid causing trouble with magic. Trouble happens almost immediately, as Nico accidentally hits them with a spell that extends parts of their bodies, so we see Morihito have his nails turned into Wolverine claws, Keigo grow so much hair that he looks like a fuzzy monster, and Kanshi and Tenryu having their neck and arms stretched into rubber. They all look pretty ridiculous, and that’s… also basically the entire joke. It’s not completely bad on paper, but even with how much I can roll with how silly a lot of this show tends to be, it just didn’t work for me. I’ll at least give this credit for a couple of interesting gags in between this like Morihito having to pretend he’s into Vega from Street Fighter to explain the claws to a teacher, or learning that Tenryu can remove his hat but chooses to maintain his sci-fi anime pose for posterity, but none of them could quite manage to make me laugh.

The overall concept here feels like it’s trying too hard to be wacky in a way that the series tends to be more clever about, and it didn’t help that it ended with the predictable punchline of Nico attempting to fix the problem only to make it even worse. The short isn’t lacking in charm, and we do at least get a nice scene of Tenryu seeing how good-natured the boys are as they try to help someone despite their “afflictions” throughout the episode, but otherwise, this short doesn’t have much going for it. I’m sure this is ultimately just a case of the anime team happening to pair two weaker manga chapters together so I wouldn’t take this as a sign of this adaptation losing steam, but it is a bit unfortunate for that to happen after the show’s been pumping out some consistently funny episodes lately, so hopefully it’ll be back at perfect form with the next episode

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Witch Watch is currently streaming on Crunchyroll on Sundays.