Sorry for the late entry, been sick for the past few days! I’m feeling much better now, so lets get started!
I’m so proud of Coco! She didn’t know it at the time, but Agott deliberately set her up to fail her test in Dadah Range. Ordinarily, when one goes in to do the test, they at least have decent amount of experience and foundation of knowledge when it comes to magic. Coco however, she has maybe a day at most of actual practice, and barely just scratched the surface when it comes to learning the foundation of it. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, Agott pressed her to do it all while knowing that this was the worst and most dangerous time to be doing the test! And she did all of that because she couldn’t tolerate the fact Coco’s an outsider, and is projecting her bias onto her that she lacks the talent to become a Witch. Sheesh!
Because of that, I do hope that Qifrey wont turn a blind eye to this. He left Coco in her hands, trusting that she was going to help supervise and guide her in her beginning studies, not cast her into Dadah Range during his absence. This is exactly what Alaira (another Witch) had warned him. Children require adult supervisions, he cannot simply trust that they’ll do as he says. Unfortunately he learned this the hard way. But he (and Agott especially) certainly got lucky that Coco didn’t get seriously injured or killed, because she very well could’ve, had she not been able to use the shoes properly to soften her fall into the water!
I will confess, I was a touch annoyed to see it was only Coco was the one to receive the (though gentle) scolding instead of Agott who just stormed away, pissed off to see Coco actually succeeded in retrieving the Diadem herb, (Consent of the Crown). So I sincerely hope that Qifrey will confront Agott properly about this stunt. Especially since, while I understand where he’s coming from about how dangerous it is to cast magic while lacking the fundamental knowledge, what was Coco supposed to do? She had been told that once she enters Dadah Range, if she failed to retrieve the Consent of the Crown flower, she would be disqualified from becoming an apprentice. She has far too much at stake to fail! So she wasn’t going to sit around and twiddle her thumbs. She had to experiment around to figure things out.
And that’s exactly what Coco did, which ultimately led to her success. Once she realized how difficult it was to actually control the shoes for flight, she spent the entire day practising until she got the gist of how it worked. Finally, when she got the hang of it, she managed to make progress, but she ran into yet another problem. She could only get so high with the shoes (something Agott was well aware of when she had lent them to her). With the shoes, Coco was never going to reach where she needed to get to.
However a surprise encounter with a Brushbuddy that resulted her falling into the water below turned out to be a critical turning point. With the loss and ruin of the supplies that had been to her, Coco needed to figure out how to cast magic in her own way, which meant thinking outside of box. It was then, when she recalled how Qifrey described the way she had drawn and cut the fabric to be like magic, just the way her mother had taught her to. And that’s when she realized what she needed to do. So she gathered some rocks ideal to her preference of shape, and then used the mud for her ink, and finally her cloak as the source to inscribe the spell on.
Coco’s plan was to make the boat she had fly, so the cloak’s intention was to be a sail to bring her upwards. However what she didn’t calculate properly was the direct and sheer strength of it (especially since the spell was drawn larger). So the boat ended up getting destroyed, but luckily since she didn’t lose grip on it, the sail had turned into a glider instead, which proved to be far more effective than the spell on the shoes. Coco had just enough knowledge and the skill set needed to create her own magic tools that she was most comfortable with. This goes to show that there’s no real limit to what one can use to draw these out. It can be a pen, a rock, a brush, anything that allows one to draw the precise, clean lines. So I’m curious to see if Coco’s will be able to use the tools she’s most comfortable with to practice magic instead of the pens that everyone else had been trained to use from the get-go.
That being said, while Coco did indeed pass the test to become a Witch’s apprentice, it appears Qifrey had intended to bend the rules and give her the apprentice uniform anyhow. This was interesting to see considering in the beginning of the episode, in the conversation he had with Alaira, he claimed that Coco has yet to officially become his apprentice because she hasn’t taken her tests. Notably, tests is plural meaning that perhaps Dadah Range is just one of many.
Additionally, we learned that the group Qifrey appears to be trying to track down are the ‘Brimmed Caps’. Apparently nobody has used forbidden magic in four years— and Coco broke that trend. But what’s also interesting and chilling at the same time was to see that it turns out one of those shady guys (unclear whether it’s the same individual who had given Coco the picture book at the time), had been watching Coco do her test, and appears to have referred to her as ‘the seed has sprouted’. It’ll be interesting to see whether or not Coco has always been someone they’ve been keeping a close eye on as a potential candidate in whatever agenda they have.
Finally, last but not least, it was also very interesting to see that Qifrey has a complicated relationship with the Great Hall. The place is the Witches’ headquarters, based on the seabed (truly the best place to steer clear of Humans). The apprenticeship is generally done here, but Qifrey intentionally fetches all the materials they need himself, and then brings it back to his base in the grasslands. Needless to say, this guy may have a gentle deposition, but he is loaded with secrets!
