I could gush forever about the opening seven minutes of this

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I could gush forever about the opening seven minutes of this show, which are genuinely among the best I’ve ever seen. From the arresting cold open to the haunting, unspeakably beautiful rendition of Scarborough Fair I was just entranced. The cold open is the most fascinating since Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica (I had literal goosebumps), and the Scarborough Fair sequence does more and better world-building than any light novel wall of text exposition dump could ever hope to. I’ve been playing it on loop while writing this whole post.

Even though it’s never quite captured that magic again, it’d be unfair to expect it to. There’s a pretty dense story being told here and that requires getting down and dirty with the details of the plot. While I think the show is moving a little quickly at times, it’s doing it relatively elegantly. It always manages to justify what feel like leaps of logic or convenient shortcuts. Even its iffier decisions (see here for my thoughts on the massage scene) still feel like they’re grounded in a desire to tell a genuinely thoughtful story. One of the most crucial things the show needs to do is sell us on what will almost certainly be a romance between Willem and Chtholly. I was taking a wait and see approach to that, but their conversation near the end of episode three has me completely on board with the pairing right now.