Episode 41 of The Witness goes straight back to the flashing panel that Episode 40 left unsolved, in the white room full of flowers. The whole video is spent on it: sorting out which dots belong together, testing what the sun allows, and drawing route after route. A minute before the end, the line goes through, and the next panel in the row lights up.
Back at the panel
After the edited-in title, the view is already on the grid with its purple left half and its color-shifting right half. "I already looked at this one a long time in the last episode," the commentary says. The first job is to pin down the colors by ignoring the flashing: "green green green green, okay, pink pink pink pink." Then the shapes: "This is a sun, so it needs to be with one pink," and "this is a pink L-shape, which can either be here, or it can be here."
Testing the rules
Most of the first half is experiments, each line drawn to see what complains. Some results surprise. "So these dots don't care if it's with the wrong color sun. I thought it did." The commentary sums up what the panel seems to allow: "dots can't be mixed together," but "you can have the wrong color sun hooked up." Even so, lines that look right keep failing, and "when they don't error the way you expect it kind of makes you confused a little bit."
A look back along the row
Around twelve minutes the view swings left past the panels already solved, to explain them. "If it's the same color, they need to be grouped together and you can't have mixed colors." On the orange panels among the vines, the commentary points out "a sort of translation between the blinking and the non-blinking side."
Back at the hard one, a new idea: "It might not be that you can't have them together at all, but you just can't have them outnumbered." It does not settle things. "I don't know how to solve this one. If this were somewhere else in the game, I would just return to it."
The solve
Then, mid-sentence: "Wait. Did I just solve it? Yes. Yes." A line runs from the start at the bottom left, winds through the lower half and climbs to the top right corner, and the next panel in the row lights up. The commentary explains it afterward: "I realized that I need to keep these two things put together."
Where it ends
The view moves up close to the newly lit panel, its squares glowing in every color at once. "I just noticed what's going to happen in the next one." The picture fades to the end card with that panel untried.
