Ancient Magus Bride: Season 2 – Episode 21 Review

A scattered dream that’s like a far-off memory. A far-off memory that’s like a scattered dream. I want to line the pieces up… yours and mine.

The twenty-first episode of the Ancient Magus Bride Season 2 has aired. Zoey stays behind to confront the werewolf and the others press on to save Philomela. But they end up in a tricky situation and secrets are laid bare as they attempt to save her life.

Let’s go over the details of it all in a Recap and Review.

Recap

The episode opens with Zoey in full gorgon mode holding off the werewolf, but using his eyes strains him quite a bit. The Mother Wolf strains against the effect to move closer, but he notices something abnormal in her mind and blinks. The moment he does she goes in for the kill…

And it is revealed Zoey has another pseudo-personality as well. Not only does he sprout more serpents but his eyes change along with his demeanor. He considers whatever chaos within the werewolf’s mind to be unnecessary, petrifying the screws in her head and shattering them. Doing so causes her to regain her lost memories of her family and breaks the mind-control upon her.

Meanwhile, Zoey doesn’t even know what he just did and has to tell her he isn’t a god for breaking the curse on him. Zaccheroni, who was sitting nearby and watching it happen, just lurks as she leaves. Some chaperone he turned out to be.

Back with a good chaperone, Alcyone, she notes that Philomela’s body has begun to disintegrate and passes her soul back to her body. Philomela had extracted it and handed it over to her in order to be able to hide from Chise’s ability to detect when she was snooping. However, even with her soul returned, her body is still falling apart and Alcyone doesn’t know what to do as she picks up Elias’ scent.

Chise, likewise, picks up Philomela’s scent while all the other humans are missing. Elias theorizes that Morrigan, or the shade left of the ancient god, drew all the other people into a battle frenzy and so they went to confront her instead. Before Lucy can get an answer as to what they are talking about, Alcyone approaches them and asks if they are here for Philomela or the book. Once they confirm that they want her to live, she sends the children up to Philomela but has Elias stay behind since he isn’t really all that concerned about her wellbeing.

The kids find Philomela, but the roots of her hair attack them only to first be fended off by the protective amulet and then by Isaac pulling out a sword from hammerspace and telling her not to touch his face. Lucy then gets mad because she sees one of the dead spiders and punches Philomela so hard that she apologizes, which gets her even madder since she took everything from her and only now acts as a victim.

Philomela explained she was constantly abused by her grandmother and listed as a failure, but she was afraid that if she didn’t listen the old hag would have tampered with her head. So all she could do was apologize, and if that’s not enough anymore then what can she do instead? She then demands that they tell her what she can do if they believe her to be guilty, unleashing a wave of power strong enough that it shatters their protective amulets. Chise runs to get in front of Lucy and tells her that’s enough before she absorbs them and the magical power she gets from them overflows to the point that she turns into a tree. At that point, Elias, who has his hand sticking inside of Alcyone’s chest as he holds her limp body up, feels something has happened with Chise.

We then see a Chise as a child picking up a flower petal that turns into Philomela. They go through what looks to be the school and run across various scenes of her memories, such as playing with Rian or being left in the dungeon by her grandmother. Then they come across one of Chise’s memories back in school when someone she talked to got injured and people spread rumors about her being cursed.

The scene then goes through various memories with Philomela gathering them up like petals of a flower before they recombine with her. Philomela asks why she did so much for her, and Chise explains that it’s because she has the same eyes that Chise once had before others picked her up. By helping her, she was helping her past self, though she apologizes that it wasn’t because she wanted to help her specifically. Philomela admits if she had told her that she would have run away before Chise asked her if she wanted to leave or stay. When Philomela states she doesn’t know, Chise tells her she’ll help her until she does.

They then continue collecting more pieces and stumble into an art room. There they find pieces of Isaac, who laments being born into his family. Philomela approaches him and it causes him to remember them, which he’s embarrassed about since guys aren’t supposed to cry. Then they go to find Lucy in the Library, which is covered in cobwebs.

Unlike Isaac, Lucy runs into them as she seems aware of herself and states she has no reason to sit in her memories and keep crying. She wants to get mad and change things so that she won’t have to sit still and think about the past. She also tells Philomela to stop crying and do something, at which point the memory of how the slaughter happened plays out in front of Lucy.

The old hag ordered it be carried out and originally let Lucy’s survival slide because they got the spiders before handing over the grimoire to her. She wanted her to gather magical power to raise her parents from the dead and to use the College kids as sacrifices before gaslighting her into thinking that doing so would make her proud. That basically has Lucy confronting her about it and Philomela asks what she should have done at that time. Isaac tells her that no one can help anyone’s past, but she’s allowed to speak up now about everything so people who want to help her can.

Philomela pulls away from his touch, believing that no one would. So Chise tells her even if that’s the case, she should speak up if she wants something to change. Friends and enemies walk among her and all she can do is shout when she wants something to change. Finally, Lucy asks her what it is that she wants.

And Philomela asks that they help her before the blackened version of her swallows her up and her pieces scatter once more as the episode ends.

Review

Lucy was right, Chise does make a good therapist. Granted, it requires having your soul broken into pieces that have to be picked up again by dream-walking through a mental mindscape. But the results speak for themselves after one session.

So, let’s line the pieces up.

First off, we had Zoey versus the werewolf. His eyes paralyzed the mother wolf long enough for everyone to get away. But he couldn’t hold it forever and that was a death sentence for him since Zaccharoni decided to sit out the situation. Dick.

However, Chise isn’t the only one who gets taken over by a dark personality at times. Zoey straight-up changed from being an introverted kid who has some confidence issues to a soft-spoken but terrifying gorgon that managed to petrify the very curse that was screwing with the werewolf’s head. And I have no idea how or why it happened.

I mean, we’ve known that something about his eyes was off for a while now. It was said the myth about turning people to stone wasn’t true and the eyes only caused paralysis. But we’ve seen one example of him turning the hand of the sorcerers in the Waste Tower into stone and crumbling.

I suspected that was due to him being a half-breed causing some quirk in his biology, but I’m not sure where the alternative personality comes into play here. It might be his gorgon half assuming direct control. Or maybe the werewolf had the right of it when she called him a god.

We’ve got at least one other one currently slaughtering people outside the manor. And she apparently pulled in everyone else aside from the old hag and Philomela. So… I guess that worked out better for the kids since the only resistance they met with Alcyone.

And let’s talk about Alcyone housing Philomela’s soul inside of her. I knew that she brought up how Mages could track the scent of the soul, but brushed off the fact that Chise couldn’t tell Philomela was the one behind the attacks from the scent due to the grimoire. Instead, it was because she had shunted her soul into her familiar, which is something documented well enough that she could pull it off with a reference book. I want to assume that book is a rare one considering the nature of their family’s line of work, but that was still something you’d want to question considering every other time we’ve seen that it usually involved one of the neighbors shuffling them off to the afterlife in the First Season. Then again, the whole point of all of this is to raise the dead, so…

And apparently, her soul was pretty fragile. After she turned into a tree her soul shattered into pieces and got mixed up with the other kids. So Chise went around collecting them so they could be made whole, which reminded us that her past was pretty bad as well.

Don’t think I didn’t catch the underlying meaning of her wanting to go flying on the rooftop. She was referring to how everything she lived through was so scary that she wanted to kill herself. The Japanese Neighbors are dicks compared to the ones she interacts with now.

And then there’s Isaac. For a guy who has no face, he has earned his spot as one of my favorites among the College kids. We’ve seen his insecurities being compared to Rian and others, his aversion to someone touching his face, and both the comradery and support of Philomela. He might consider himself second to Rian in life, but he’s best boy in my book.

Still, all of these poor children have just suffered so much that you want a happy ending for them. Especially Philomela. But that can’t happen as long as her grandmother is around.

But with an angry mother wolf now freed from her confines and the knowledge that the old hag had the grimoire, I suspect she won’t be living that long.

Changes from Manga

This episode covers from Chapter 85 to part of Chapter 87:

• Morrigan is featured after killing the rest of the people in the manor, mentioning that she smells a scent even more vile than rotting flesh that can’t be escaped.
• The manga explains there’s a Hexcraft that can achieve a goal even if the body perishes, and the soul can be split from the body or a copy of it can be created and implanted in a vessel to keep it safe-guarded. It was something Adam was well-versed in and what Philomela used to physically transfer it.
• The soul is different than the will of the person, and the body is the cradle of the soul and can never distort its form. But if you have a soulless body it creates a loophole, allowing you to pull the stunts she has and get around Chise’s nose.
• Turning his hair into snakes is draining for Zoey in contrast to other gorgons and he ended up bedridden a lot because of it as a child. More so using his eyes, which led to him being bullied by all the other gorgon kids.
• The Mother Wolf was speaking in a language that wasn’t English, but Zoey could understand it since she comes from a people whose language is close to “The Very First Language”. He isn’t even sure how he knows that, but instead laments that his secret was found out by someone he didn’t want to know when Zaccheroni comes by and picks him up after the fight.
• Elias explains that Morrigan exists only as a mere vestige by being connected to the seasons and the moon. She had to be granted a name for her existence to be anchored and she had to accept it, with her only gaining a sliver of her former power due to not being worshipped like in the old days though witch covens still do.
• With the Chise memory, a classmate of hers who was injured got hit by a car because the Japanese neighbors got angry since they wouldn’t let them eat her. She has a delicious scent to them as they waver between chiding her for running away, saying it is and isn’t her fault. She could only lament it always had to be her.
• Chise also brings up how her father took her little brother and left both her and her mother before she died. She doesn’t know where they are now.
• Philomela saying a prayer over Lucy’s dead family was a tribute to the departed since when a person is killed their soul still lingers. I suspect its meant to prevent them from turning into wraiths or something like that.