Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood S2E9: “The Shape of this Country”

It sure has been a hot minute since I did an FMA:B episode, hasn't it? And what a point to have left off at, what with Sloth on the rampage and General Armstrong's loyalties still unclear. Going by the title, this is also going to be an information-dense one going into Father's plan, what with the callback to MacDougle's babbled warning back in the pilot. Are we actually acknowledging that pilot now? Maybe.


With Edward having told Armstrong to her satisfaction that he's on her garrison's side in this battle, she tells him its time to try "the Briggs approach" to tackling Sloth. There going to give him a wacky initiation ordeal? Okay, sure. Edward protests that his and Alphonse's situation prevents them from assisting directly, but Captain Hook helpfully provides them an escape route from the promise they made to Wrath.

There we go!

The Elrics, Hook, and some others bring as much fuel as they can to the location that Armstrong specified, while she and a couple other officers use the tanks to ram Sloth and push him back into the cargo lift. It takes a few of them working together, and he very nearly flips Armstrong's before the others catch up and knock him off his feet, but they manage.

Also, for all her flaws, Armstrong's willingness to put herself at the head of her forces is admirable. And probably does a lot to keep everyone loyal in the face of her less personable traits.

This tactic wouldn't have worked against most of the haemonculi, due to how long it takes the door to close and the lift to start moving once engaged. But for all his strength and toughness, Sloth is slow of movement and even slower of mind, which gives him abysmal reaction time. He's also not really smart enough to understand where he is and what he should be doing, so when the door closes and the enemy is out of sight he makes no attempts to break his way out of the lift and climb back up at them or the like.

The lift lets him off at what looks like a service exit, which he cluelessly shambles out into. There, Captain Hook runs out of hiding and...judo throws?...Sloth. He's as strong as three tanks? What? Edward, and Alphonse cover Sloth in tank fuel while he's down, which he doesn't seem to even acknowledge for now.

I just now noticed that those overalls are actually part of his skin. Either it's some mystical symbol that mortal overalls are a mere primitive imitation of, or Father's sense of design aesthetics is just getting weirder and weirder.

You know, a second ago we saw them hiding in the pipes above Sloth's head. So, they could have just dumped the fuel on him from there without needing Captain Hook to suddenly become the strongest entity on the planet. Another lift entrance opens, and Armstrong drives her tank out and uses its disarmed antiarmor shells to push Sloth out onto the balcony that this exit tunnel leads to. From there, a combination of tank, Alphonse, and purposefully triggered icicle falls knock Sloth off the ledge and onto the snowy mountaintop below.

Hook turns to the brothers, and explains that the fluid they covered Sloth with is a special coldweather fuel mixture with an incredibly low evaporation temperature. A few minutes out in the freezing cold with that stuff flying away with his body heat, and Sloth should freeze solid.

I'm not sure if that's actually going to work. If Sloth's metabolic energy is all coming from his philosopher's stone, then won't he just keep pulling more juice from it until the fluid has all evaporated? If you kept him under a constant trickle of the stuff for long enough then I guess you could deplete his battery the same way Mustang did to Lust, but that doesn't seem like a viable option for them.

But, it looks like it's working. Huh.

That says some very interesting things about how the haemonculi work. Their bodies must have a way of increasing or decreasing their draw from their philosopher's stones as needed, in order to perform their various superhuman feats, regeneration, etc. But whatever system allows their bodies to "know" when they need more energy, losing energy via convection doesn't seem to trigger it. And, we've never seen them appear to have to consciously use their regeneration in order for it to work, so this part of their physiology is likely autonomous (Envy being a possible exception).

In other words, this must be a situation that Father didn't think of when he was designing these guys, so he didn't give their bodies any way to recognize convective heat loss and turn up the soul-voltage to compensate.

Well, I guess they'd better make sure he doesn't find out about this. He definitely seems the type who can learn from this sort of mistake, and I suspect upgrading the other Sins to prevent this exploit wouldn't be too difficult for him.

...

Heh. It occurs to me that Sloth is the best possible haemonculus to run into for these sorts of purposes. He's slow enough and stupid enough that you can keep evading him and trying different things until you stumble into something Father didn't account for. They happened to discover such a something pretty quickly, thanks to the environment they're working in, but if they hadn't they could have just kept going until something else stuck. No wonder Father keeps him out of sight.

That said, this just makes the coincidence of him happening to break up through Fort Briggs' basement floor right when the Elrics were visiting that much harder to swallow. Like, pretty much deus ex machina levels of fortuitousness.

Unless...could this have been a deniable act of sabotage by Wrath? If anyone besides Father would be capable of giving Sloth orders and getting those orders to him all the way from Central through some covert means, it would be him. And he certainly would have known that the Elrics were headed north, since they took the train directly and openly from Central, and he likely would have at least suspected they'd head to Briggs due to Major Armstrong being a major ally of theirs. It's a stretch, but it's possible.

...

Armstrong hopes that Sloth will stay frozen until spring, and that they'll have a more permanent solution by then. She also has the Elric brothers imprisoned; they were forced to help her fight Sloth under threat of death, so it would look pretty suspicious if she just let them go afterward. Good thinking, Armstrong. Besides which, she really would appreciate them telling her what the hell just attacked her base and almost killed a bunch of her men, which is entirely reasonable.

At this point, I'm 90% on the side of "Armstrong honestly doesn't know anything, and is just really unflappable in the face of the unknown." The latter fits her personality in general, and the former fits with her being out on a border assignment (the generals who are in on it mostly seem to be clustered around Central).

Edward and Alphonse wake up in their cell the next morning to a cup of thank you coffee for having saved a bunch of Briggs soldiers. They're told it'll still be 100 cens, but I'm pretty sure that's just a joke at this point.

They inform them that Armstrong sent a team to examine the tunnel that Sloth dug up into their floor, and that she'd like to speak to the brothers now that said team has returned. Also, the soldiers inform them that Major Miles the phenotypically Ishvallan guy is in town talking to an officer who was hospitalized after an encounter with Scar on the way north. They don't name Kimblee, either because they haven't heard that detail themselves yet or just because they don't expect the name to mean anything to the Elrics. Mostly they're just sharing this information because the Elrics have fought Scar more than once in the past, and they should probably know that he's headed this way. Reasonable of the soldiers.

Cut to a hospital room in the town of Briggs. Miles debriefs Kimblee on what happened, and politely (but stiffly) wishes him a speedy recovery. He also assures him that the Briggs garrison will be proactive in hunting Scar, and that Kimblee should take it easy and let himself recover.

Kimblee, brilliant mind and cunning diplomat that he is, tells Miles that he'd like to ask the Briggs garrison to hold off and let him handle Scar. He's his quarry, and his responsibility, so the well-equipped and powerful local forces should take no action against the deadly terrorist headed their way and wait for this guy who already fucked it up once to get better and try again.

Kimblee's inability to affect normal human logic even when he's really trying is darkly amusing, I'll give him that. Miles finds it much less entertaining than I do, though, and tells the maniac to chill the fuck out and let the adults clean up after him; this is a harsh place, and a harsh opponent, and Kimblee clearly isn't up to the task.

Oh, goddamn. That's got to sting. I don't know if I can even think of a better way to piss Kimblee off than by telling him something like that.

Kimblee doesn't take that laying down (well, okay, he is *physically* laying down, but you know what I mean) and tries to argue with him. Miles replies by removing his goggles so Kimblee can see his characteristically Ishvallan eyes, and tells him in much more explicit terms that if he gets his incompetent ass in the garrison's way, he's dead. With the implication that Miles would just love an excuse to kill one of the more notorious war criminals, regardless of the story he told the Elrics previously.

I wonder if he feels the same way about Mustang? I suspect we'll find out by the time the series has ended.

Miles leaves, and Kimblee just kind of shakes his head and murmurs to himself about Ishvallans being such an odd people. Not long afterward, he has a new visitor: General Raven, from Central. Naturally, he's hear to debrief Kimblee on what happened, and to tell him his mission is still on. Kimblee shows him that he still has both of the protostones on him (presumably he kept them in his mouth as per usual. Won't it be hilarious if he dies by choking on one after someone startles/shakes him?), which Raven is pleased by. To get Kimblee combat-capable again, he's brought a medical alchemist who can use one of those stones to have Kimblee in perfect health again in just minutes.

It's um...I don't think we ever got this guy's name, or if I happened to catch him in a screenshot before. He was one of the people running the compound where the Wrath candidates were raised, and I think we also saw him in the background during Dr. Marcoh's protostone experiments. He's quite a bit older now than he was when Wrath-To-Be was a young man, but evidently still an active participant in Father's cult.

If he's such a great medical alchemist though, why can't he fix his own teeth?​

So, Kimblee is back in the game now. And I suspect he's going to try and kill or humiliate Major Miles along the way of hunting Scar, even if that makes it harder and riskier for him. Yeah, sorry, I'm still not taking Kimblee all that seriously as a threat.

Cut to the dilapidated old cabin where Marcoh and May dug up Brothar's notes. Dr. Marcoh is trying to understand them, but his understanding of alkahestry is too limited for them to make sense to him. May gives him a primer. The basis of alkahestry, she explains, is manipulating a force that they call the Dragon's Pulse. It's a type of cosmic energy that enters the world from the mountaintops, and flows out through the ground and oceans. Is this a pseudo-mystical explanation of geomagnetics? Maybe? Some of the details don't fit, so maybe not. Whatever this force is, it's the same stuff that gets absorbed into living things, and becomes known as ki.

So, yep, ki-sensing is basically very simple, intro-level alkahestry; I figured that was the case, but it's nice to get confirmation.

Anyway, alkahestrists have better range than western alchemists because they know how to manipulate the flow of energy through matter, thus allowing people like May to use a transmutation circle in one spot and have her pentacle-daggers create a sympathetic effect in another. Basically, the spell gets conducted away to the second location and happens there instead. Because the Xingese traditionally understand the world's ki-flow as something along the lines of a biological system, alkahestry lends itself easily to medical purposes.

Interesting. What comparative advantages does alchemy have, I wonder, assuming that it has any?

Dr. Marcoh explains that in the Amestrian tradition, they don't use energy flowing across the land, but rather call it upward from below. Ooooh, are we going to learn where the reaction energy for transmutations comes from? From near the beginning, I was wondering how, eg, Edward can reshape rock with enough force to send someone flying if he's supposedly stuck with Newton's laws. I'd begun to think that was just a creator oversight, but no! According to Dr. Marcoh, the reaction energy for alchemy comes from tidal forces acting on the tectonic plates under them.

Does this mean that if you had enough alchemists casting at the same time, they'd produce a measurable slowing effect on the geodynamics? Or that they'd cool a chunk of mantle into solid rock for a little while? Interesting.

May responds that she's not sure if that's quite right. Ever since she entered Amestris, she felt like there was something off about the environment, but it wasn't until she approached Father's sanctum that she realized what. There is another kind of energy being pulled up through the ground under Amestris, but it doesn't feel like what you'd expect from tectonic plate movement being shunted off. It feels more like, in her words, "a lot of people wriggling."

O....kay. That certainly raises a lot of questions. She's making it sound like the entire country is built over philosopher's stone bedrock. Which...well, if that were the case, why is equivalent exchange even still a thing for them? And, if Amestrian alchemy was designed around these local conditions, wouldn't that mean that it would stop working as soon as they left the area? You'd think people would have noticed that by now, and thus the tectonic stress theory would be replaced by another (perhaps equally incorrect, but still different) model?

Maybe what she's sensing isn't the power source for alchemy itself, but something closely related? Maybe Father is using the underground tidal forces to "recharge" a matrix of philosopher's stone he planted there? Or...actually, depending on where Sloth has been digging, maybe he's still in the process of planting it? It does cut to Armstrong and the Elrics in the Sloth-tunnel while May is saying this and the creepy music plays, so it's definitely hinting at some kind of relationship...

...oh. I see. That's how he shut off all the alchemy in Central that one time, isn't it? We saw him doing something to the ground when that happened. If he has a matrix of philosopher's stones planted in a glyph formation all around the place, maybe he can use it to block anyone else's attempts to pull energy up from the mantle? It doesn't interfere with alkahestry because their power source is moving horizontally through the planet's surface, and thus doesn't have to pass through the barrier.

If I'm right, then this is probably just a beneficial side effect of him planting the stones where he did. His main reason for planting philosopher's stones underground throughout the country is probably just part of preparing the macroglyph for his big ritual; he can just also use it for other, more minor things in the meantime. Same way that MacDougal seemed able to borrow the central part of it and repurpose it for his giant glacier spell.

Well, if that's how it is then maybe they can stop Father by locating and digging up the philosopher's stone caches. Setting his ritual preparations back, and also potentially neutering his anti-alchemy trick. And also euthanizing the people in at least some of those stones, of course. In any case, IF that's what Sloth was actually doing digging those tunnels (rather than setting up a black flag operation to cause a war with Drachma, as per my initial hypothesis), then following them should lead to the stones.

So. Edward, Alphonse, Armstrong, and a few soldiers go down into the tunnel. It's wide enough that they can ride horses through it, almost three abreast. There are also railroad tracks on the ground, which...I'm not sure if Armstrong's men are supposed to have just laid those down since yesterday, or if Sloth was building them as he dug.

According to the scouts she sent in ahead, the tunnel continues onward seemingly forever, but follows a slight curvature. So yeah, it's probably following the Amestrian border, rather than creating a secret passageway to Drachma. Although...hmm. There's that chunk right at the top of Amestris that isn't circular, where Drachman-claimed mountains still come downward. I'm not sure where exactly Fort Briggs is in relation to that, but if the tunnel follows only a slight curvature then he's seemingly moving along that circular border at least at this point.

Granted, Amestris' claimed territory might not have to fill the circle, I guess, but in that case why would Father even be bothering with taking over the government and prompting its latest military expansions if all that mattered was having a physical circle dug? Yeah, no, Amestris needs to be made to fill the circle, that's the only way that the political side of his plan makes any sense. In that case, a war with Drachma is, in fact, in the cards...though if Fort Briggs is at the base of that missing chunk in the north, then...

Oh. That sneaky bastard. He just pushed out a liiiittle bit further than he needed to in every direction, so that Amestris could lose some borderlands in unforeseen mishaps without leaving any part of the circle unfilled, didn't he? Okay then. IF Fort Briggs is at the base of that chunk, then that means that the outer few dozen miles of Amestris in every direction is just a buffer. The bounds of the circle are slightly smaller, at Fort Briggs' distance from Central. No claiming of Drachman soil necessary.

Unless Fort Briggs isn't actually along the missing chunk, but just right next to it. In which case, Sloth IS following the national border as it exists, and Father will be instigating a war with Drachma to finish the (living) human component of his glyph.

Armstrong is disturbed by an enemy having evidently been working for so long right under her feet without detection. When Edward asks, she says that there have been no incidents in her section of border since she took command 20 years ago (damn, she's older than she looks...), which means that yes, the Fort Briggs soldiers really have just gone crazy getting obsessed with an enemy that never comes. Although, right before she came up here, there was a string of incidents involving a mysterious woman who repeatedly stole food and supplies from Fort Briggs and its support convoys over the course of a month and never got caught.

Before Izumi the antifa supersoldier mom, there was Izumi the antifa convoy raider.

Armstrong takes them deeper into the tunnel, bringing only Falman (who they trust) and Hook (who she trusts) with them. When they're far enough from the entrance that she's confident no one could be eavesdropping, she demands a full explanation from the Elrics. She correctly surmises that they're being kept silent by enemy threats rather than loyalty to a superior, and - given that they're able to move freely - the enemy is holding someone or something of theirs hostage. This seems like a really impressive display of intelligence, but given that a) she's had most of a day to mull this over and people to talk to about it, and b) she's a veteran of a corrupt military bureaucracy where officers probably pull this sort of shit on their rivals semi-frequently, it might just be common sense for her at this point. Anyway, she's done enough to demonstrate trustworthiness and competence at secret-keeping to the Elrics, and after seeing Alphonse's empty suit and Sloth's everything she'll likely believe them. So they tell her everything, and Falman is able to confirm at least some of it.

She muses about the hostage situation. Falman and the other ones whose names I can't remember are probably safe where they are, but Hawkeye and Havoc are not. Armstrong says she's done a number of training exercises with the eastern command center, and those two officers made a good impression on her (her brother likely introduced them). She notably doesn't care for Mustang, though, and in fact murmurs something about wanting to be rid of a "rival" like him.

She has indeed been planning a coup of her own, then. And already at least suspected that Mustang is one of the other officers doing the same. Well, hopefully once she's had time to process this she'll understand that dealing with the soul-eating robodemons who are plotting to sacrifice the country she and him would be fighting over takes priority. For now, she asks Edward and Alphonse what they think this tunnel is for.

Edward inspects the tracks, which appear to be both fairly weathered, and to extend a long way out ahead of them. Yeah, Sloth must have been installing these as he went. Wonder what sort of cargo Father is planning to roll through these tunnels? Based on the tunnel's direction and curvature, Edward infers that this might be running along the Amestrian border. And, since he already has the concept of sacrificial nation-states in his head after his adventure in Gluttony, he starts figuring it out. He has Falman take out a map of Amestris, and begins circling points on it just as Hughes did before Lust killed him. And, as he draws, he asks the others for a timeline of particularly bloody local conflicts or massacres around Amestris. He's already got Ishval circled, of course.

Falman, who sees to be either the most historically inclined or just the most talkative of the adults, starts listing incidents. An incident in the year 1588. A bloody uprising in 1661. Another in 1791. And so on, and so forth. More recently, in the late 18 and early 1900's (what year is it supposed to be now? Unclear), there's been a series of border wars with the southern nation of Creta that's seen heavy losses, including the one in which Amestris bit off much of the southernmost part of the South Province.

...

Huh. If a big chunk of South was a recent addition, I wonder if Izumi's dissent might have a regional or ethnic aspect to it? Maybe she was born in Creta, and Amestris came to her? Or, at least, to her parents? If so, how many other southerners feel the same way? Interesting thought.

...

Most recently, of course, is the civil war that wracked the southeast, with the genocide of an entire small country in Ishval as its climax. And, more on the order of most of the earlier events in magnitude, there's the Liore Insurrection that only just happened within the past year. After "Cornello's" reappearance and the subsequent riots and terrorism, the Eastern command center occupied Liore and its Letoist sphere of influence and was starting to get things under control again when another task force arrived from Central and told them that Herr Hapsburg Borgia de Medici wanted this done by his own people. So, old General Grumann just kind of shrugged and had his men withdraw, and whoever led the forces from Central (probably one of the generals we saw in Wrath's evil council room) turned Liore into an even bigger bloodbath than it was before.

Edward roars in anguished frustration. He's already had the "we're the baddies" revelation, but now it's been confirmed that he personally played an instrumental roll in setting up Father's latest atrocity. Which...well, that's sort of true.

By arriving and discrediting Cornello when he did, he actually made Lust, Envy, and Wrath have to scramble to make it still work. But a) he has no way of knowing that, and more significantly b) he's realizing that because he was a State Alchemist and acting as one, everything he possibly could have done would have played into Father's hands one way or another. If he hadn't handled the Liore situation the way he did, he'd have helped let it happen in a different way. He ended up helping the haemonculi cause a massacre in an inefficient way that cost them more resources than they'd hoped, but he still helped them cause a massacre. Good apples fundamentally cannot exist within the Amestrian junta.

He finishes circling all the disaster zones they can think of from the last few centuries, and then connects them to recreate what Hughes must have drawn and plots the path of Sloth's tunnel to go with it. An inverted pentagram within a pentacle, just like the glyph he saw in the ruins of Xerxes and in lab 5.

We cut back to May and Dr. Marcoh, who are discussing more or less the same thing from a different angle. Marcoh had already suspected that the haemonculi were planning to sacrifice Amestris, when he asked Envy about it back in "Inside the Belly." What May just told him about the crust under Amestris feeling philosopher's stone-y, strikes him as quite probably related to Father's preparations for this spell. He also confirms that when he told Edward about "the truth behind the truth," he wasn't talking about Wogdat (at least, not intentionally) but hoping to lead him to investigate not only the stone but also the entities who created it, without tipping his hand and getting them hunting for him. Unfortunately, that last bit didn't quite work.

Regardless, if Father can mess with Amestrian alchemy using whatever he's seeded the ground with, that's all the more reason for Marcoh to start learning alkahestry. And, he's got both a powerful alkahestrist with him, and a book written by a guy who was all about mixing the kind of magic Marcoh already knows with the kind he needs to learn.

He also hopes that this will have discouraged May from wanting to claim - let alone replicate - the philosopher's stone herself. She doesn't answer, but looks distressed. What is going on in Xing that has everyone so desperate?

Back to the tunnel. With the first of the incidents dating back over three hundred years, just slightly after the Amestrian state came into existence as such, this means that Father must have been actively guiding this from their nation's genesis onward. This definitely raises some questions. If Amestris was a democracy until somewhat recently, how was Father controlling it? It could have always been a sham democracy, sure, but if that was the case why did he even bother changing it? And why would he have risked putting a haemonculus like Wrath in such a visible position when he was already doing just fine with human stooges? The story has got to be more complicated than this.

Maybe Father originally only controlled one military or police agency, which was enough to get things started but which needed to slowly take over more and more functions of government as time went on? Or maybe Father had some major setbacks a century or two back, had his puppets overthrown, and then had to start over again undermining the new democratic government to get back control? That fits. We know he's hardly infallible, so him having lost much of his control of Amestris at some point and taken a long time to get it back with the recent Meiji->Showa style transition is likely enough.

...

Also, it kind of beggars belief that they're not getting any false positives. Has any decently sized country ever gone through multiple centuries without at least a localized bloodbath or two? Amestris (and the other countries that it absorbed to reach its current size) were really such happy-go-lucky, innocent places that not a single massacre happened without Father having to push them to do it? And, they've continued to be this peaceable even long after their society's corruption with atrocity having become part of their shared culture and history?

I guess it works as a metaphor, if you take Amestris to be representative of the human condition or whatever. But in that case, surrounding it with other countries full of humans and giving characters from at least one of those countries a major role in the story is kind of counterproductive.

So, as it is, this just seems like yet another escalation of the story's treating guilty societies with kid gloves. Amestris and its former neighbors are not only more moral and less violent societies than almost any real life ones I can think of, but they've continued to be so even after being ruled by a demon for generations.

Maybe the manga had them finding a bunch of false positives but eliminating them after spotting the events that fit much too perfectly onto the glyph to be coincidence. Also, even in the episode, the diagram-drawing bit is followed by Falman pointing out the role that the Amestrian military had in the events (more on that in a bit). If this dialogue happened in a different order in the original, with Edward having specifically asked for incidents in which Central's forces played a major role rather than massacres in general, then that makes all the difference. Brotherhood has fucked up enough details like that in its adaptation so far that I wouldn't be surprised either way.

...

With the incidents identified, they start analyzing how each of them happened. In at least most of the cases, forces led by an officer from the city now known as Central played a significant role. In the first incident, heralding Amestris' first war of expansion three hundred and some years back, Central's forces kicked it off by seizing a neighboring country's border town in a preemptive strike with no declaration of war until after the fact. In most of the internal rebellions or civil wars, things always got more violent right after reinforcements from Central arrived to assist or relieve the local forces (I'm guessing Amestrian history textbooks spin this as the central military always arriving just in the nick of time before things were about to get too hairy for the regional garrisons to handle, and weathering the storm for them).

So, it looks like I might have been on to something with my "Father used to only control one agency" theory. His seat of power was always Central's armed forces, and his cultists were always prominent - if not dominant - in that army's upper leadership. He wouldn't or couldn't take over the civilian government as well at the time, so he just slowly worked at weakening it so that the military could take its place in all important policy and enforcement matters. I guess that also explains the almost feudal structure of the current regime; Father doesn't know if his cultists can keep a military the size of modern Amestris' under their control, so he relieved them of needing to by letting ignorant dupes command their own border forces far away from Central.

In any case, regardless of how much power Father's organization has had at any given time, they've persistently had enough of it to shape the course of Amestrian history as they saw fit. Much of the history that the Elrics, Armstrongs, and others thought was their own was actually Father's. The flag they salute and the uniforms they wear were created by him in the interest of their eventual consumption. Father didn't just coopt Amestris, he all but built it.

Anyway, there's one issue with Edward's diagram, and it's a rather ominous one. He had to cheat just a bit to complete the double pentagram; the northernmost point of intersection with the outer circle hasn't had any major battle or atrocity take place there yet.

Hmm. If the last point of the map is "here, around Briggs," and Sloth was digging the outer circle when he broke through the floor, then that would mean that Fort Briggs is built outside of Amestrian territory. Although, wouldn't its placement essentially TURN everything south of it into Amestrian territory? Why does the map have a chunk missing there, then?

Maybe I'm paying too much attention to the word "here" and not enough to the word "around." If Fort Briggs is slightly southeast or southwest of that point, then they could be sitting right on the line, and the planned bloodbath is to take place nearby in what is currently Drachman borderland.

Edward realizes that Hughes' work in the court martial office likely gave him access to a lot more details of how these incidents happened, which may have been what let him figure out the pattern without knowing what to look for. Then, Edward remembers MacDougle's rant about "who he's really serving" and "the shape of the country." Forty episodes later, and this is the FIRST time that that night when a terrorist crushed half of the capital city under magical glaciers is being acknowledged, goddamnit Brotherhood this honestly just makes things worse rather than better at this point. Granted, the look on Edward's face when he realizes that he and Alphonse may have helped kill the guy who was about to save them all is sort of worth it, but still.

As Armstrong tries to decide what they should be doing about all this, another soldier comes riding up the tunnel and tells her that General Raven from Central just showed up, and that he wants to talk to her. Speak of the devil. Edward thinks fast, and tells Armstrong that they might be able to take advantage of this and try to trick some information out of Raven, if Armstrong is willing to take some risks and is willing to humor Edward's idea.

Upstairs, General Raven is being his disarming, seemingly reasonable self for Miles' benefit. He understands Armstrong's delay, considering that he did drop by with precious little warning. Also, he brought a State Alchemist with him; he asks Miles to show the man around while he waits in Armstrong's office.

Well, I guess the next time we see Kimblee he'll have been crushed in one of those freak icicle falls.

Meanwhile, Edward, Alphonse, Falman, and Hook are walking to somewhere. Alphonse is feeling sort of hopeless after the latest revelations, but Edward isn't. It's an interesting reversal from where they were at the start of the series, but I'm not sure if it has as much to do with character development as it does their understanding of the situation. Back when they were just trying to find a cure for Alphonse and dealing with an open-ended research problem, Edward got frustrated and desperate quickly, while Alphonse was better at soldiering on. Now, when they have an enemy to defeat and know more or less what it is, where it is, and how it operates, Edward is feeling more confident about the situation. Alphonse is patient, Edward is aggressive. The lot of them climb into a crawlspace near Armstrong's office, and eavesdrop on her conversation with Raven.

Armstrong tells Raven everything that she should know about what just happened. Some kind of souped up alchemical mutant dug up through the foundations and started rampaging through the base. Their weapons barely worked, and it kept regenerating what little damage they managed to inflict, but eventually it seemed to get frustrated and they managed to chase it off. The Elric brothers happened to be up here on some mysterious business, and they seemed to know way too much about the monster, but wouldn't tell her how they knew it or what it actually was. Suspecting that the mutant was a Drachman bioweapon and that the Elrics might be spying or sabotaging for Drachma, she had them imprisoned pending investigation. Raven can interrogate them himself if he chooses.

Raven's expression when she mentioned the Elrics is telling.

When prompted, she tells Raven that Edward and Alphonse said they were up here chasing someone who could teach them something about esoteric medical alchemy. They wouldn't go into much detail about that either, which didn't exactly make her inclined to trust them when the monster attacked right after their arrival and they seemed to be much less surprised than any of her own soldiers. Then she tells Raven that she's considering torturing them for information, but they're so young and her weak feminine heart and motherly instincts won't permit her to do that to them.

As you'd expect, the listeners are chuckling and cringing at this bit in equal measure.

He takes the bait, and asks her if she has any children of her own. She answers that no, she's older than she looks (I'll say), and she let the years get away with her when she was focused on her career, which she now regrets. If only we could all be as immortal as that Drachman bioweapon, huh?

Raven tells her that Drachma might not be the only country engaged in that sort of research, as a matter of fact. Then, he makes her the same offer that he gave to Grumman a few years ago.

The plan is working. Are they going to just try and have Armstrong infiltrate the cult, I wonder, or are they about to start pulling out Raven's fingernails? End episode.


Lots of questions answered, lots more raised. Olivier Armstrong is quickly growing on me, now that she's inclined to treat the Elrics as allies. The fight with Sloth was pretty good, aside from Hook's superhuman judo skills that really weren't necessary for the scene to work.

On the other hand, I feel like the worldbuilding and backstory are starting to show their warts. Big sweeping conspiracy plots - especially of the ancient variety - are hard to do right, and this one COULD make perfect sense in the end, but I'm not as confident in that as I was before. The staggering number of convenient coincidences - Sloth breaking through the floor right then of all times, the Elrics happening to chase Scar and May up to within the same few dozen square miles that Father's about to trigger a war on - is also starting to feel like shonen-itus.

The politics are...well, I've been told by multiple people that Brotherhood waters them down considerably from the manga, so this could be Bones intentionally or otherwise diluting Arakawa's message. The weird insistence on Amestrian innocence whenever Father isn't there to wave his wand and make them act like genocidal fascists for a bit is...well, weird. Half the time, the show seems to want to be about collective responsibility (usually in Mustang and Hawkeye focused episodes) and the flaws inherent in human and all other types of nature (all the philosophy of alchemy and haemonculus Blade Runner stuff), but then it turns around and paints a picture of this super optimistic world that unfortunately happens to have a handful of corrupting demons running around in it. Like I said, I don't know how much of this is the author's fault and how much is the studio's.

So, I have mixed feelings about this one. I enjoyed it a lot while watching, but the more I think about it afterward the more I think that FMA:B might start letting me down after this point. Hopefully not.


One last thought that occurred to me, with regards to political messaging and historical parallels. I'm almost certain that this has nothing to do with Arakawa's inspirations or intent, which is why I'm putting it in it's own section at the end here, but going Death of the Author and looking at this backstory through an American lens it reads very differently. Something sinister that insinuated itself into a nation before it even had its official foundation, and has since been fighting against the people's better natures to make them feed each other to it on an industrial scale. A force that's redrawn the map multiple times to keep itself fed. Something with the appearance of a robed and bearded European god that spouts rhetoric about inferior beings existing only to serve superior ones. Born originally of a crime committed somewhere far away, but come here to plant itself and grow.

Like I said, I very, very much doubt that Arakawa was thinking along these lines, or that she even had the cultural exposure to postcolonial settler states like the United States to be able to think along these lines. But god damn if the haemonculi aren't a perfect metaphor for white supremacy as it exists in America and other former colonies. Just a thought.