I don’t quite trust Qifrey. He seems amiable enough, and it’s hard to deny that he’s a good teacher. He’s clearly never been in a position to teach someone like Coco before, who has zero experience with magic, and he’s going out of his way to adjust his teaching methods for her. When he sees her struggling with traditional studying like the kind Agott thrives with, he brings her into the kitchen to change things up. Coco practically learned her drawing skills: if she couldn’t help her mother with at least measuring and cutting fabric, she would be a burden. Qifrey finds a way to translate those skills and that style of practical learning by using cooking to teach her. Like helping her mother, this has tangible results and thus is easier for Coco’s learning style. It would have been easy to try to force her to keep going with a more traditional teaching method. Qifrey didn’t take the easy way out.

But at the same time, there’s something dark about him. For every moment when he takes the girls on a rainy day picnic and reminds them of the joys of being a witch, he whips out an insanely powerful spell, like last week’s brilliantly animated dragon or does something just this side of the line. Taking in Coco was one of them, and that’s largely been framed as a positive, because otherwise we wouldn’t have a story. But it still went against the teachings of the magic world, and the Knights Moralis, the magic police force, wouldn’t quite approve, to put it mildly. And the return of Olruggio, the Watchful Eye for Qifrey’s atelier, drives this home.

Watchful Eyes are basically the mandated reporters of the magic education world. Olruggio’s role at Qifrey’s school is to make sure he’s not mistreating his apprentices, but also not violating any rules – and he’s perilously close to doing so with Coco. It makes you wonder whether he took Coco in with such alacrity because Olruggio was gone; had his friend been present, it might have been substantially more difficult to keep her out of the Knights Moralis’s hands. And this is where my mistrust of Qifrey really comes in: he’s knowingly putting his own wants above everything else. I don’t necessarily doubt that he cares about Coco, but she also represents something more for him, something he seems to have been chasing for a long time. He’s willing to turn his magic against Olruggio to keep Coco, another just-this-side-of-the-line action on his part. Alaira referred to Qifrey as the problem child of the magic world. His actions towards Olruggio make it easy to see how that could be.

Not that I think the Knights Moralis ought to get their hands on Coco, and possibly not even on Qifrey. I likened them to the Morality Police of the Prohibition Era last week, and while we haven’t met them yet, nothing is convincing me otherwise so far. Olruggio clearly doesn’t think that they should erase Qifrey’s memories alongside Coco’s, which seems to indicate that he fully believes the Knights would do that, which speaks of a history of heavy-handed solutions to perceived problems. It’s also worth noting that the Knights Moralis’ caps seem to be somewhere in between brimmed and brimless – there’s a slight protrusion that extends over their eyes. For a group that’s supposed to be the moral center of the magic world, that seems suspect. It indicates that they’re not as open as the regular witches, that they won’t be held to the same standards they impose on others. That makes sense, as erasing someone’s memory seems to fit the definition of magic enacted on the body, and therefore forbidden. But it certainly doesn’t make me – or Olruggio – want to entrust them with a nuanced case like Coco’s.

Olruggio’s reaction to Coco and her love of magic is another hint that most witches don’t have many day-to-day interactions with Outsiders. Qifrey seems to have more than most, enough to chide Olruggio for using what he sees as a derogatory term. (And potentially aligning him more with the Brimmed Caps in philosophy.) But it never occurred to Olruggio that magic could be, well, magical to people. Coco’s reaction to his glowstone pavement is bizarre to him, but it helps to drive home the point that Qifrey’s making: depriving this child of magic would be wrong. It may be the first time Olruggio has thought about what magic means to the magicless. It, and the fact that he dries Coco’s hair, indicates that he’s grumpy, not bad. That he leaves his door open rather than shutting it all the way after she leaves says that he’s rethinking his position vis-à-vis Qifrey’s newest apprentice.

Sadly, Olruggio and Agott can’t appreciate the wonder of magic. Even the little details here, like the gentle flow of Qifrey’s water magic or the sudden glow of Olruggio’s fire rings, show us how beautiful and special magic is. Not only is it a phenomenal animation job, but it’s also a way of driving home that magic is a gift and a treat. If you stop seeing it as such, you risk turning into Agott, who seems to only view it as a means to some as-yet-unspecified end. Will she find it if Qifrey lets her tag along on next week’s rescue mission?

Rating:

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