Episode 5 of The Witness spends most of its time on rows of panels standing in shallow water. Basket covers every dot, works out how a blue line and a yellow line share one grid, and then keeps going when the yellow fades out of sight. Later, an orange panel in the rocks wakes a machine that fires a beam into the sky. The video ends on a glass panel by some stone pillars, with its lines turning green.
Cross all the things
The video opens on a row of panels by palm trees, with small black dots along the grid lines. "With this one you have to cross all the things," says the commentary, "so maybe I'm supposed to be doing this literally." Two lines leave the starts together, one mirroring the other. One panel needs a second try ("Oh, I missed one"), and after that the power runs on down the row. "Now we are sending power this way. Onward."
Two colors
The next panels have blue and yellow dots. Now the two lines are different colors, and the first guesses turn the panel red. "They can't cross each other." Then it clicks: "Depending on which one you click on, is what color it starts as. Oh, I figured it out." From there the row falls one panel at a time.
The fading yellow
The next row stands over the water by a line of stone pillars. Blue and yellow lines are drawn together again, but from panel to panel the yellow gets "fainter and fainter" until it is gone. The commentary works it out: "We have to pretend like there's actually yellow." Getting the hidden line past the yellow dots takes a few careful tries. Then: "This might do it. It did."
Copying the shape
A noise turns out to be a gate opening. A white panel in a red frame opens a door ("Doors open"), and past it, by a yellow building, are panels with yellow dots ("Get all the yellow") and then dark panels with no dots at all. Small panels nearby show a shape, and the dark ones want that shape drawn again, "but reversed," then rotated, then flipped. A wrong line turns things off: "If you get it wrong, you have to go back. So you can't brute force it, I guess."
The beam
Farther on is an orange panel set in the rock face. A line up it lifts a machine out of a yellow box. It turns toward the sky and fires a beam. "It's hitting something up there I haven't seen before." At a little lookout nearby, and on the walk after it, a voice reads a long passage, starting "One nature, perfect and pervading, circulates in all natures."
Where it ends
Back down by the water is a see-through blue panel with stone pillars standing behind it. It takes a few tries. Then two lines go out from the left and wind around the pillars, they turn green, and the video ends.
