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Windmill Pondering, Episode 32: The Witness

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Episode 32 of The Witness stays with the green panel that stopped the last video, the one with axes like a graph. Most of the video goes to comparing it with a windmill nearby. When that runs dry, Basket goes back to a door from early in the game, opens it, and finds a drawing the commentary thinks is the missing piece.

Studying the windmill

The video opens where the last one stopped, looking at the green panel. The commentary has a plan: "double check the windmill," because one sail "has a broken part." Up close there is more: "there's a couple ones that have cross beams but not all of them."

A wooden windmill with four orange and tan sails against a blue sky, a stone tower with a dark doorway below, boulders and green trees around it, and two thin white beams of light crossing the sky

Inside, the panel in the floor sends power one way or the other. One way turns the sails; the other is a mystery: "I never figured out what it actually does." Stopping the windmill so it lines up with the graph is one idea. A walk past some drawings by the pink trees turns up nothing about windmills: "This is just about the brain and body stuff."

A bright green panel in a dark frame with a black cross of marked axes like a graph and a small round dot at the right end of the horizontal axis, no line drawn, trees and a black cable beside it

Guesses on the graph

The first guess is a line to the spot "right before the broken thing." It is wrong, and a wrong answer means going back to solve the vine panel again first: "I have to go back to here to solve this one."

Back at the windmill, the commentary counts the cross beams on each sail, "slot four," "two," "six," trying to match them to the marks on the panel. A viewer suggested combining all the arms. The commentary works through it: "what's missing is a little bit on the end." Three more lines go in, up, left and all the way down. None of them work. "You could technically brute force this one, but it would be a pain."

An old door

Basket moves on and heads over a hill to "a door over here" from "the beginning of the game." Its panel is a gray grid of black and white squares, and the rule, as the commentary puts it, is to "keep the dots not mixed together." The first starting points are ruled out one by one, and then the line goes all the way around. "I think I followed all the rules. Yes!"

A gray grid panel in a pale frame on a gray door, scattered with small black and white squares, with a glowing teal line winding from a round start on the right across the top, down the left side and along the bottom

The door opens on a dim room with a black post and a red slot, and the commentary backs off from it. Further in, a sheet of paper lies on a table, drawn with hexagons and a zigzag line along their edges. "It's a thing we need." The commentary thinks it is "potentially the answer to the other thing that I couldn't figure out before."

A sheet of pale paper on a wooden table in a dim brown room, drawn with a faint grid of hexagons and a dark line that zigzags along their edges and ends in a small loop

Where it ends

With the drawing in mind, Basket heads back through the village: "now let's go into the windmill because that is the answer for, I think, this thing in the windmill." The windmill comes into view, and the video ends before Basket gets there. The green graph panel is still unsolved.