Fate/Zero S2E4: “The Eighth Contract”

That would have been a fitting (if cheeky and deliberately misleading) title for the previous episode, heh. I expect it's going to refer to Gilgamesh and Kirei though, which means that this might be the end for Toto G. Tohsaka. Poor guy. He was a total innocent who never wanted anything bad to happen to his daughter, according to my readers. I'll mourn him surely.


The teaser has Kirei coming back to the church and finding his Father did on the floor where Archie left him. I still wonder what the ramifications of killing the referee are for the Grail War, since it seems to be a supernaturally appointed position that's part of the War itself. Kneeling over the body, Kirei checks for a pulse, and then solemnly shuts the corpse's eyes and looks silently downward. Either grieving quietly, or just lost in thought. Given the implied coldness between him and his father, probably at least a little of both.

Wonder if he's going to blame Grey for this, since he's the combatant with the greatest penchant for bullets? On the other hand, he's also an accomplished assassin, so I can only assume he'll be thorough in his forensics work. After all, Grey's gun usage is well known enough for that to be an obvious method for one of the others to frame him, which I'm sure Kirei would think of.

Or, again, perhaps Kirei just doesn't care that his father was murdered at all. That's also possible.

After the OP, we follow Kirei as he returns to the Tohsaka house to give Toto the shocking news. Toto isn't looking great himself; understandable, after the all-night battle sequence that he likely hasn't had a chance to sleep since.

It's possible that killing (as far as he knows) Daisy might also have taken a bit of an emotional toll on him. Toto's ruthless, but he may not be quite as inhuman as he tries to present himself, and Daisy was a longtime family friend. Or it could just be stress and exhaustion from a long night of fighting Gilles and tolerating Gilgamesh.

Toto bangs his fist on the table and rants a little about how unacceptable this is, before recomposing himself and giving Kirei a dignified "sorry about your dad dying, that must be very sad for you, I liked him too" speech. Goatee's mask is crumbling for sure. He tells Kirei that he'll start figuring out a plan for how to best react to this development immediately, and bids him goodbye for now. Meanwhile, Gilgamesh stands off to the side of Toto's office and gives him this smug, side-eyed smirk while he has his back turned.

Gilgamesh couldn't have had anything to do with Archie murdering PriestyPants, I don't think. I'm guessing he's just enjoying the sight of Toto being blindsided and losing his unflappable persona.

...

You know, I think this would be a better story if it was made clear that there wasn't any continuity from the Servants' historic pasts at all. If they were explicitly just reflections of their Masters' aspirational ideals.

The problems with Arturia are all solved. If she's just an expression of Grey's guilty conscience and confused utopianism, then the interactions she's had with him and Alexander aren't just made less infuriating, but actually become really interesting windows into Grey's moral angst. Her being female* could say something weird about Grey's view of gender politics as they intersect with heroism, or it could just mean that he's an egg. Either of those would be totally fine.

And like, just...Toto and Gilgamesh, in scenes like this one where Gilgamesh just stands back taking childish glee in Toto's humbling. Gilgy works *so perfectly* as a vain, self-important bully's idea of a "hero" come back to bite him in the ass. To the point where saying that he's also a manifestation of a real, historical Gilgamesh just dilutes the concept and makes it thematically weaker.

This would probably make it incompatible with the Fate premise. But as a standalone story, I think it would improve it a lot.


*Obviously, there's a whole lot to be explored with the idea of mythic characters being so different from their historical selves that even stuff as fundamental as Queen Arturia's sex being lost to time, but Fate/Zero doesn't really seem to be trying to explore that. It touched on it again a little in some later scenes, like Waver interrogating Alexander about his height and Gilles weighing in on his own trial, but only barely. The story seems to be much more interested in personal ideals and how they reveal our flaws as much as our merits, so I wish it could just be about that.

...

As Kirei leaves through the manor house, Gilgamesh follows him and asks him "why didn't you tell Tohsaka?" Erm...why didn't he tell him what, exactly? About saving Daisy? Does Gilgamesh even know about that? Kirei asks him what he's talking about, and Gilgamesh asks him if he couldn't find it in him to at least *look* a little sad about his father's death.

I'm sorry, but I just cannot follow these dialogues between Kirei and Gilgamesh. At all.

What is Gilgamesh implying that Kirei should have told Toto?

Is it about not caring about his father's death? Why would he think that Toto cares about Kirei's daddy issues?

Is it about saving Daisy? Why the hell would Gilgamesh think Kirei would ever WANT to tell him about that, if he even knew about it himself?

I still don't understand what Gilgamesh is supposedly tempting or corrupting Kirei with. I don't understand how the other Masters tie into whatever's going on with Kirei, or what Gilgamesh thinks they mean to him, or what Gilgamesh is trying to accomplish by needling Kirei about it. All of their scenes feel like the two of them talking around something that hasn't been hinted at, and it's not in the cool mystery-building way, because the show seems to want this to elicit feelings in me other than passing curiosity and/or confusion.

I'm getting the sense that this is either an adaptation issue, or (more likely) a prequel issue. The audience is expected to already know a bunch of stuff that I don't. So, I'm not sure if I can really critique this for better or for worse.

Suddenly, Gilgamesh asks Kirei if he wished he could be the one who killed his father himself. Kirei practically jumps in place, looking up at Gilgamesh way too quickly to admonish him for such a suggestion, but Gilgamesh has already teleported away.

Okay, so Kirei hated his father rather than merely disliking him. I still don't see what Gilgamesh is getting at here, or what he thinks he perhaps should have told Toto. It's also not like Priestypants was a particularly likeable character or anything, so this doesn't have too much weight for the audience either.

Like I said. I feel like there's something I'm just totally missing in all the Kirei and Gilgamesh scenes, and I don't know if its my fault, the show's fault, or just a prequel issue.

Jump over to Team Saber. Iri is laying in a healing glyph, and...huh, I didn't know Arturia could do this kind of thing:

Maybe Grey set it up and then just left it to work while Arturia stands guard? That could be. I don't think Maia is actually a wizard, so it couldn't have been her.

As Iri pulls pulls herself together, Maia enters the room and informs them that they've just gotten a call from Toto. He's calling a temporary truce between Einzbern and Tohsaka to discuss yet another very serious complication that's just been discovered. He's inviting them to the church where the complication took place so they can talk about this on neutral ground.

No one is quite sure what to make of this. Especially given their pretty strong suspicions that Toto and Kirei have been doing some underhanded collusion dealie from the beginning, and with Kirei having made a pretty brutal move against them early on in the War. Additionally, Iri muses, if he's inviting them to negotiation but not the other remaining teams, then that probably means that he sees them as less of a threat than Teams Berserker and Rider. Heh, a reasonable inference based on what they know, but there's a lot of recent goings-on that they don't know. This means that he's likely going to try some way of using them against the others and taking them out of the fight in the process. He's a tricky one, after all.

Still, Iri decides that they should go talk to him. From what she knows of him, while Toto is a bastard, he's also not the type to do something as crass as openly abuse the white flag of truce. So, they might as well go over there and see what he wants, even if they decide not to give him it. Additionally, it's possible that Kirei might have faked everyone out again after the Banquet of Kings incident just like he did after Hassan's "attack" on Tohsaka manor, and still be acting as a secret henchman for Team Archer. In that case, they can't afford to NOT negotiate.

Hmm. They're still really afraid of Kirei. Reasonable, I suppose, given how close he came to taking Iri and Maia out on...I think two separate occasions now. Grey's weird fixation on him from the early episodes also probably left a mark on these two (Iri even says that if there's anyone involved in this Grail War who's likely to beat Grey, it's Kirei). So, they're going to try and use this to either gather information about Kirei and his current relationship with Toto, or to negotiate for him not attacking them again. Probably with a self-geas scroll for enforcement, in the latter case.

I feel like the story could have done just a biiit more in the recent episodes to remind the audience that Kirei is such a deadly assassin. He made an impressive showing for himself in mid season one, but it's been quite a while since then, and he's been pretty passive and inoffensive ever since. Granted, I'm also watching this series over a much (much, much, much) longer period of time than it was intended to be watched, so that might be skewing my perceptions of this sort of thing.

Cut to...I thought it was a virtual reality thing at first, but nope, flashback! Not to very long ago, though. In fact, this scene is an interquel to episode 2 of the series, when we saw the rest of the Tohsaka household leave the city to sit out the Grail War.

In fact, it's a flashback that I've seen before, albeit with different mood lighting and from a different POV.

The first scene from the first piece of Type Moon media I ever consumed. Full circle, huh?

The sad music and wistful visual effects do hit a little differently now, of course. As does Toto leaving Rin that briefcase of Grail War paraphernalia so she can fight the next one in the event that he doesn't survive this one. The UBW pilot shows us these glimpses of Rin's father as she remembers him, through the lens of her biases and limited knowledge.

Well. I guess it's good for her that she has memories of what she understood to be a loving father. And also that she was able to do most of her growing up without his active influence.

...

...hmm. Thinking about the snakeskin in the case, I think this might actually be one of Type Moon's rare good uses of the source mythology. What role did the snake play in the Epic of Gilgamesh? Honestly, you could easily interpret this as the heroic servant "Gilgamesh" actually being the snake from the story. It took the immortality that Gilgamesh had been after. Who's to say it couldn't also take his name and appearance?

...the entire shtick of appropriating noble phantasms from other myths. That theft, and oblivious, consumptive use of what was stolen. That works for the snake much better than it works for Gilgamesh. And, of course, he's replaying his role in the original myth now, with Toto unwittingly playing the role of Actual Gilgamesh.

I'm pretty sure I've read interpretations that cast the snake as a sort of sin eater, consuming Gilgamesh's ruinous ambition and egotism along with the immortality he craved, thus allowing him to become a wise and just king after that. And yep, he's all of the younger Gilgamesh's worst traits, distilled.

It really illustrates how stubborn and monomaniacal Toto is, that he misunderstood the story so badly. He looked at the Epic of Gilgamesh, and thought "yes, this is something I can use in my quest for divinity." He saw the snakeskin, and interpreted it as "this is a byproduct of the power that Gilgamesh sought" rather than the more legitimate "this is a byproduct of the power-hungry being foiled and humbled."

Brilliant wizard? Maybe. But this guy wouldn't be able to pass a high school literature class, let alone a college one. And, well...if symbols and legends actually have real magical significance in this setting, as they do in many fantasy settings, then Toto's refusal to understand them means he isn't even that brilliant of a wizard either.

...wait a fucking second. Let me look back at something.

......

holy. shit.

Look at his eye. I thought the show was trying to make him look generically creepy and maybe sort of catlike to go with his generally feline demeanour, but cats aren't the only animal with vertical slits for pupils.

He's the snake. Tokiomi literally summoned the fucking snake.

Additionally, If we're going with mythical connections as well as the summoner's ideals influencing the Servants' manifestation, then that also casts a new light on "Gilgamesh." The snake from the Epic is clearly from the same taproot of Semitic folklore as the one that tricked Adam and Eve out of their immortality in Genesis.

The role he's playing for Kirei? The tempter, the corrupter?

One of the mythical figures he's drawing from is Satan, via the serpent of Eden.

So, yeah. I'll give the Nasuverse this one. This is top-notch use of the source mythology. Fate doesn't usually do a good job of this, but it did in this case.

It also gives new meaning to Rin's decision to reject the snakeskin and rely on her own skill and power to summon a Servant, despite her father's misguided wishes.

...

The flashback ends with Toto and Rin bidding each other goodbye, hoping it'll just be a temporary one, and then Kirei watching them creepily from a nearby car. Envious? Uncomprehending? Or just seeing his own father in Toto and hating them both? Could be any of the above.

Back in the present, Iri, Maiya, and Arturia enter the church. The camera angles are longer now, and the lighting is darker; really makes the church seem like a tenser, less secure place to reflect Priesty's absence. Toto is waiting for them, and they're unsurprised to see Kirei by his side. Toto introduces them all, and tries to handwave away Kirei's presence by saying that they just went back to being buddies after Kirei's loss in the War, nothing suspicious going on here.

All three of the Team Sabre representatives wince and grit their teeth at this assertion, but they decide not to call him on his bullshit.

There's also a brief cut to Grey's hotel room, where he's listening in on this via a microphone Maiya is wearing.

Is Gray just that determined to keep out of sight in general, or is he specifically trying to avoid a face-to-face meeting with Kirei?

What IS those two's deal with each other, seriously?

Anyway, Toto gets down to brass tacks. The way he sees it, the *proper* candidates for the Grail are the champions of the three mage clans who set this up, with the others all being just vultures with no business being here. And, as it should be, the Matou, Tohsaka, and Einzbern teams are all still in the fight, while most of the others have been eliminated.

Huh. So Toto knows that Daisy survived their encounter? Or else he just doesn't want the Einzberns to know that he's (to the best of his knowledge) already killed him. Could be either.

Anyway! Regardless of what he knows or pretends to not know about Daisy, Toto explains that the Matous have made a very poor showing this time, sending a frail, ailing Master with a mana-hungry Servant that's self destructing even without enemy action. So, the Matous just aren't winning at this point, we can just write them off. However, Team Rider is powerful, and something needs to be done about them. Thus, Toto proposes that Teams Saber and Archer form an alliance so they can put Berserker out of its misery and get rid of that cheeky upstart Rider. After that, they can have a proper duel like the wizards of class and taste that they are.

Iri shows much more political metal than I realized she possesses in her response. She says that they're in a pretty good position right now, and see no reason not to just keep doing as they've been doing. She also says that they can just "continue winning each battle as it comes," which um...they have a decidedly mixed track record on that, and I'm pretty sure Toto has noticed this lol. Regardless of how empty of a claim that might be though, Iri tells Toto that they might be willing to consider a temporary non-aggression pact until the other teams have been eliminated, but she demands something in exchange. First of all, she wants Toto to disclose any intel that he AND his friend over there have gathered about Team Rider, particularly relating to their probable base location and anything about the mysterious British kid who seems to be Alexander's Master. Second, she demands that Kirei disengage from the Grail War and avoid anything to do with it until its conclusion.

Ideally, she'd like him flown out of Japan. But if that's too much to ask, she'll settle for him being barred from Fyuki City.

Toto is taken aback by this demand. In retrospect, it was kind of dumb of him to bring Kirei to this meeting with him. He probably should have just avoided raising the subject and tried to deny their ongoing partnership if the Einzberns brought it up. Well, "not nearly as smart as he thinks he is" is basically Toto's entire shtick (notably, Kirei himself isn't surprised to hear this at all), so. He asks why they want Kirei gone, and Iri just says that there's "bad blood" between Kirei and them and that they won't be able to trust any agreement with the Tohsakas while he's involved with them.

Toto turns to Kirei and asks what all this is about, and why he didn't tell him about this.

I'm not sure myself, honestly. Is there any bad blood between Kirei and the Einzberns? He did try to kill them last season, and came pretty close to succeeding, but...well, war. Everyone is trying to kill everyone else. I don't think Kirei did anything beyond the pale by the standards set by the other combatants, though admittedly it's been a while since I saw that episode. Iri could just be doing some bullshitting of her own here, of course.

...then we jump ahead to the end of the negotiations, without seeing how it went. Or getting to learn what (if anything) Iri was getting at with that last bit. Dragging it out for dramatic purposes I guess, which means a bombshell was likely dropped. For now, the Einsberns are leaving the church, seemingly pleased with themselves. From the look of things, they were able to wring at least most of what they wanted out of Toto.

Arturia goes on ahead of them to scan for shenanigans on a motorcycle that Grey apparently just bought her. Maybe as an apology or something. Iri probably made him do it, heh. Arturia comments that the motorbike is much more similar to a horse than the other motor vehicles she's driven so far, so she likes it better. Dawwwww. I love that we're still getting some of that early series cuteness, even if it's thinner on the ground at this point. When Iri and Maiya get into their car to follow her though, Iri starts collapsing again. Hissing through gritted teeth, she tells Maiya to just keep driving until they're far away from the church; letting Toto know about Iri's deteriorating condition would be a very bad idea at this juncture.

Then, a conversation begins that...okay, wow, this is a lot for me to process. We're not quuuite at the halfway point yet, but this is probably going to take enough unpacking that I should just split the review here.