Fate/Zero S1E8: "Knight on Two Wheels" (continued)

So, the Alexandermobile gets hit by Arturia's superlaser. White light blocks everything out, and then we jump back to Kirei and his surprise meeting with the Matou patriarch. Kirei asks him what he wants, that a man his age and disposition would go outside and invisibly touch grass for. Erm...that seems like a really stupid question. From what Kiritsugu learned in the first half of this episode, Kirei went to the Matous' house, knocked on the door, and told their Grail War champion to come with him for something secret. Why the hell would he NOT follow him?

Hell, having the clan's strongest wizard follow the champion surreptitiously into danger so he can sneak attack the opponents with his spells would actually be a pretty good strategy. Especially after Daisy's last battle, in which he lost a one-on-one duel with a superior spellcaster. Wouldn't having Darth accompany him out in the future in case he runs into Tokiyomi again just be logical, after that?

That isn't what Darth is doing, of course, but why would Kirei assume he was up to anything besides that?

Anyway, Darth tells Kirei that he just wanted to see what trick he's planning to use to destroy his grandson. Kirei asks him why he's just standing by and letting him walk into it, then, if he suspects a trap. Darth replies that he never had high hopes for this Grail War, and with Daisy's track record so far they've only dwindled. So, Darth has decided that watching his defiant runaway grandson die horribly like the fuckup he is will just have to be his consolation prize.

Well, at least he can still see the bright side of things, I guess.

Kirei asks if he's really that unrepentantly gleeful about seeing his own grandson suffer. Darth says that that's a surprising question, coming from Kirei. When Kirei - looking rattled by that reply - asks him to clarify. Darth cackles, and says that Kirei gives off the same stench that he himself does; that of a maggot, drawn gleefully to Daisy's rotting flesh.

...

Okay, so. I kind of got semi-spoiled on this, but since I don't think Fate/Zero ever says it explicitly and just expects you to already know it, it's not the biggest deal. I'll have to explain it as well for those of you who aren't Fate-knowledgeable, mostly so you know why I'm not WTFing at this exchange.

Kirei is some weird kind of philosophical mutant who is only able to feel pleasure when he sees someone else suffering. The worse the things that happen to them are, the more he enjoys it. He cannot enjoy anything other than this. Additionally, the closer of a relationship he develops with someone, the more he wants to see them suffer and die; its like the emotion of love has been replaced with sadistic urges for him. My understanding is that in the original Fate visual novel, the bizarre premise of this character is part of the work's philosophical exploration. If Kirei sounds like a thought experiment that might get thrown at you in an ethics class, it's because that's more or less what he is.

Which also means that outside of the specific didactic narrative he was built for, he's pretty hard to accept. Even in a world of magic and weird entities, his existence is a challenge to my suspension of disbelief. I actually wonder if that's why the story has been talking *around* what makes him tick so much; even Urobuchi realizes how ridiculous it sounds in what's supposed to be a grittier, more character-driven narrative.

I think that Fate/Zero could have done something at least kind of interesting with him, though. Like, in those conversations with Snek, the story could have had them be open about the premises and then done some actual philosophy. Kirei coming to accept and embrace his inherently evil nature through a series of discussions, following premises to conclusions and determining intellectually that for a being like himself it's right to do wrong. Instead of that though, we got Kirei and Snek exchanging nonsequitors while the latter gives the former meaningful looks until eventually Kirei decides to go for it.

You could probably tie that into Fate/Zero main theme about ideals and what they say about the people who construct and subscribe to them, too. At least, I *think* that that's Fate/Zero's main theme. I really can't be sure what, if anything, it's actually trying to say at this point.

...

Alarmed by Darth Matou hitting so close to home (seriously, how DID he know so much about Kirei's inner world? Some kind of mind-reading power that not even his Executor abilities can't repel?), Kirei decides to end this discussion. He hurls one of his enchanted blades at Darth, slicing right through the head...but Darth Matou's voice just laughs - coming from somewhere else now - as his body breaks up into a swarm of insects and flies away.

Either Darth can resist injury by turning himself into an insect swarm, or that was just a Hebert Decoy he put together while hiding his real body somewhere else.

Kirei just glares as Matou chuckles, and tells him that if that's how he's going to be then fine, he'll leave. They'll meet again though, and when they do Darth hopes that Kirei will have come into his own as a monster like himself.

All of these people telling Kirei that they can't wait to see how evil he gets are starting to blur together. How does Darth Matou know any of this, anyway? And also, why does he care? Of what interest is Kirei to him at all?

As Kirei stares after the disappearing swarm, a flash of light draws his attention away. Looks like someone just fired a superlaser off of one of the highways just outside the city.

Once again, I have to wonder how much of this the nonwizards can see. I'd assumed "none of it" based on the UBW pilot, but after the Mion Bridge thing I really can't say. And after the JSDF has already been called in to deal with weird shit in Fuyuki within the last few days, it seems like this...

Oh, wait, I'm trying to put thought into this story. Sorry. I'll stop.

Anyway, Kirei stares until the laser stops firing, and then retracts his magical extendo-blades again. With Darth having left, and whatever the hell Arturia just did not concerning him, he figures he can just take it easy now.

Over at ground zero, an embarrassed Team Rider are hanging from a tree branch, regretting their recent decisions.

The highway behind them has been destroyed, along with a chunk of the hillside above it. There's no sign of the Gordian Chariot; it appears that Alexander angled it upward and used it to shield himself and Waver while they leaped out of the brunt of the blast. It's been completely destroyed, and from the sound of Alexander's next few lines it seems like he might not ever be able to regenerate it. The Rider has been dismounted, permanently.

Waver tells him to summon his army/pocketdimension thing, but Alexander just shakes his head sadly. He's not confident that that would be any use against Arturia once she already has them in her sights, and he's lost too much already in this encounter. It's time to accept defeat and hope she doesn't put much effort into preventing their escape. Waver is aghast to hear this, but he realizes that if even foolhardy, accustomed-to-victory Alexander thinks that discretion is the better part of valour here, then it probably is.

Below them, at the edge of the undestroyed section of highway, Arturia stares up at them. Then, she does something that truly baffles me.

I'm so confused by this scene.

If she didn't want to fight them, why didn't she try asking about Iri when she saw that she wasn't present?

If she DID want to fight them, why is she letting Alexander live now? She's going to have to kill him at some point if she wants her chance of bringing her kingdom back. She knows this. She seems to have made her peace with this. If she really doesn't have anything left to say to Alexander at this point, and she has him at her mercy, why isn't she finishing him off? It's not like she knows where else she should be hurrying off to to rescue Iri (and if she did, she'd have tried talking to end the fight after she saw Iri wasn't there!).

It looks like this is some sort of humiliation tactic. Telling Alexander that she doesn't even think he's worth killing. That would make sense if it weren't for the rules of the Grail War mandating that he IS, in fact, worth killing, regardless of her personal feelings. Is she really undermining herself that badly in her quest to restore her Britain just to give Alexander a symbolic "fuck you?"

I mean, that might actually be understandable, given the way he's been talking shit since the Banquet of Kings scene. But it still feels off.

She leaves. Alexander marvels at what graceful machines motorcycles are. Heh, well, for all his flaws, Alexander really does have a good attitude when it comes to competition and the wins and loses it results in. Waver gets mad at him, and then asks how the hell they're even going to get back into town from here without the chariot.

Alexander's reply is pure gold.

Okay Fate/Zero, you've still got it. I wish you'd use it a little more often, but it's good to know that you still, in fact, have got it.

We finally have an actual Arturia victory! Not marred by someone else having to rescue her, or someone else needing to talk her through using her own damned abilities before she can use them. She actually had a fight with some real (though admittedly probably not immense; Alexander wasn't going for the kill if he could help it) stakes, and won it on her own merits. I don't know if this will keep up, but it having happened at all is such a welcome respite from the low-effort Arturia dunking that I'm pleased for now. There isn't a lot of time left in this show, but if it does more stuff like this then that could potentially make up for a lot of the misogyny and spite. Not ALL of it. I don't think that's possible at this point. But *enough* of it that I could end up not hating Fate/Zero as a whole by the end.

...

Just wait, I'll bet it's going to turn out that this scene was completely different in the light novel and the studio changed it against Urobuchi's wishes lol.

...

Speaking of misogyny and the lack thereof, god have I been missing season one Team Rider before they got turned into a vehicle for Arturia-bashing! It's great having them back. All the way down to the Loony Toons detail of them being blasted into a tree, covered in burn marks but otherwise totally unharmed. I could watch these two dumb shmucks get in and out of shenanigans for hours. It's also noteworthy that while Alexander is condescending in the way he talks about Arturia before the final clash here, he's not contemptuous or dismissive like he was the last few times she came up. He even refers to her as "the King of Knights" again, and seems to mean it. He's back to being his old "can't root for him, but can't root against him either" ridiculous self, and his interactions with Waver likewise seem like a natural and fairly evolution of the early series status quo.

Stuff like this is why I can't completely write Urobuchi off as an author, even though sometimes I really want to. He can do this kind of snappy action-comedy really well when he isn't too busy being performatively grim or malding at people with vaginas existing. You can draw a line directly from Team Rider's tree conversation to Shang bashing his head against the wuxia tropes in "Thunderbolt Fantasy," and recognize that they're both (charming) products of the same mind.

Like I said at the start of this series, my feelings about Gen's writing are complicated. Fate/Zero has made me think less of him on the whole, but it hasn't fundamentally changed my assessment of what he can and can't do.

...

Well. Time for the last scene of the episode now. Oh boy.

Daisy limps down the street toward the church, wondering how much time he has left. His latest healing/infusion session from Darth has strengthened him for now, but it's probably also further decreased his lifespan. He can't have more than a week or two at this point.

As he reaches the door, he remembers the worms, his skin bursting from the effort of spellcasting, being burned alive by Tokiomi and falling off the bridge. How much longer can he keep going, even regardless of his limited lifespan? How many more times can he still fight, at this rate? Nonetheless, he's determined to make this coming kill count.

...

You know, it's kinda hard for me to reconcile "dying man struggling desperately to complete his mission while he still can" with "completely absent from most of the story until just the last couple episodes."

Team Berserker might as well have not existed at all between the initial confrontation and the Mion River sequence, aside from showing up to save Rin in the last five minutes of her interlude episode. Which makes almost half of the damned series' runtime, and the VAST MAJORITY of the in-universe timescale of the Grail War, that he spent sitting around doing jack shit while his clock was allegedly ticking.

Daisy should have been relentless. Reckless. The most aggressive player in the Grail War, or at least a close contender. That would have both made more sense for his situation, and much better captured the "berserker" concept.

...

Daisy throws the door of the church open, and sees Tokiomi sitting alone in the front pew.

Not moving. Not visibly restrained. All by himself. Doing nothing. This naturally arouses Daisy's suspicion, so he moves around tohahaha no he falls for it completely and thinks Tokiomi is alive and present.

So, remembering his defeat last time, Daisy strikes immediately before Tokiomi has a chance to counterattack, conjuring his insect swarm and sending the demon-wasps shooting across the sanctuary to hopefully take him by surprise while Daisy takes cover behind the pews in preparation for the next fire attackahahahaha no he staggers sloooowly down the aisle while shouting threats and curses.

Unless I missed something, Kirei never told Daisy that Tokiomi would be unconscious, or de-powered, or tied up. He just said that he would be at the church at midnight. If that really was a living Tokiomi sitting there, Daisy would have been a pile of carbon ash before he made it halfway down the aisle.

I guess the worms have just been eating more and more of his neocortex over time. :/

He stumbles his way up to Tokiomi, and the vibrations of his footfalls cause the corpse to slide off of the pew and fall to the floor. It appears to be the actual corpse, so I guess Kirei actually went back and picked it up after leaving it in the Tohsaka manor.

I'm trying to figure out where and when Kirei would have done this, and the possibilities are all pretty dang silly.

Maybe Gilgamesh just pulled a copy of the corpse out of his treasury? If Kirei considers Tokiomi's corpse to be a treasure, then Gilgamesh should own a noble phantasm of it, right? I think that's what happened, just for the expression I'm imagining on Sneky's face when Kirei explains to him why he logically must have a bloody carcass in there getting ichor all over his gold and liquor.

Daisy stares at the carcass, dumbfounded. A tear actually escapes his eye. Apparently he was committed to being the one to kill Tokiomi, rather than just wanting him dead. Understandable, but still, you'd think he'd consider this better than nothing at least?

...also, he knows there are at least two other Grail Warriors still active, right? If the rules about neutral ground are off, then what would have prevented the Rider or Sabre teams from just following Tokiomi in here and ganking him as soon as Kirei wasn't in the room? Even if I can understand Daisy's disappointment, him being surprised to the point of inarticulate incomprehension like this seems wrong.

And that's when the most ridiculous thing in this entire series happens and Wife Tohsaka walks in and accuses Daisy of having murdered Tokiomi. Even more ridiculous is the fact that Daisy reacts like this:

Where do I start?

First of all, did Kirei seriously go through the effort of dragging Tokiomi's corpse over here, exposing himself to the Matous to pick up Daisy, and set up a meeting with Wife (how did he even get her back into the city at such short notice???), in the middle of a Grail War where anyone could be gunning for him at any juncture, so he could start his fucking YouTube prank channel? That's literally the kind of energy that this setup has. "Wife Thinks She Catches Him Killing Her Husband! CRAZY Reactions!"

This is supposed to be an act of ultimate depraved sadism, and I guess it technically is, but...it's just too silly. Not only for how overcomplicated and effort-intensive it must have been to arrange, but also just the concept at its face.

Second, the miscommunication that this prank hinges on is her thinking that Daisy just killed Tokiomi. In fact, she accuses him of killing her husband in front of her a moment later, which makes me wonder if Kirei actually had an illusion going because nothing that Daisy did could have looked like killing Tokiomi. But even with that assumption, this requires her to step into the room JUST when the corpse is on the floor and Daisy is standing over it.

What if the corpse didn't fall?

What if Daisy immediately suspected a trap when he saw it fall, and leaped back to look for the attackers?

What if he did anything besides the literally dumbest possible choice of physically walking up to Tokiomi in the first place?

Kirei would be feeling pretty dumb about now if any of those things happened, wouldn't he. I guess he was just really, really lucky.

Third, unless Kirei actually went through the trouble of transmuting the corpse so that it had bug bites instead of a stab wound (something I'm not sure if he or Snek even can do), it should be pretty damned easy for Daisy to demonstrate that Tokiomi was already dead when he got here. Daisy doesn't have a knife on him.

And fourth, finally, probably most importantly...even if there *wasn't* an easy obvious way for Daisy to explain the situation, so fucking what?

Grail War. WAR. They're trying to kill each other. All of them are trying to kill each other. Any blowup from Wife should have happened the minute she learned that Daisy had entered the ring. The fact that Daisy has extra antipathy toward Tokiomi is barely even relevant in light of the circumstances. From the moment that Daisy and Tokiomi stepped up as the Matou and Tohsaka champions, one or both of them was most likely going to die, and there was always a good chance it would be at each other's hands.

Meanwhile, from Daisy's own perspective, what did he think would happen after he killed Tokiomi? I guess it's possible that he was just hoping to avoid facing Wife again until he died of worm damage...except that doesn't make any sense either, because someone would need to make sure that Sakura got from the Matou house back to her mother, and that someone would probably have to be Daisy. How could he be this unprepared to face her?

Heck, why isn't he perfectly ready to condemn her along with her husband? She stood by his decision. She shut Daisy down when he tried to object to it in the pilot.

But no. Wife Tohsaka acts like this was purely a malicious criminal murder rather than an inevitable consequence of how the Grail War works. And Daisy is like...shocked, speechless, unable to deal with her being mad at him.

Then, she fucking says this:

And Daisy, very understandably, reacts by doing this:

While strangling her, he screams about how she's the thing he loved most in his life, the only thing he loved in his life, he did all this and endured all this suffering for her. Not for Sakura; for Wife.

So, his main driving motive here wasn't actually to rescue Sakura. It was just to get back at Tokiomi for stealing his girlfriend.

I don't think I can really believe that. If that was actually the case, he wouldn't have made that deal with his grandfather to essentially sacrifice his life for a chance at freeing Sakura (who...okay, IS she supposed to actually be Daisy's daughter instead of Tokiomi's?). He'd have gone straight to the Einzburns and offered them his assistance in dealing with Tokiomi. Even without much magic, he'd be able to give them enough intel about the Tohsakas to constitute an advantage. So, this assertion that he only cares about Wife and not Sakura for her own sake doesn't convince me. At best, I can believe that he's just enraged and exaggerating, but the way the show frames it makes it seem like we're supposed to actually believe that this was his true motive all along.

In any case, *I* certainly don't give a shit about Wife Tohsaka. Even if she hadn't made herself unlikeable by going along with selling her daughter to the neighborhood adrenochrome dealer, the series has hardly given her any screentime or personality. No redeeming qualities or likeable quirks to make up for that. So, as far as I'm concerned, Daisy should have done this back in "Rin's Big Adventure" if not before.

He finishes strangling her to death, and then seems to be horrified at what he's done. He stares at the corpse in shock, and then looks skyward and wails.

Lol. Lmao.

...

The first volume of the Fate/Zero light novel came out in December 2006.

Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith hit theatres a year and a half earlier, in the spring of 2005.

Just saying.

...

Dubious choices in inspiration aside, a good performance can do a lot to make a scene like this work. Part of the reason why the Padme-strangling and eventual Big No scenes from RotS got the meme treatment they did was because the acting wasn't what it needed to be to sell them. Conversely, remember the last RWBY review I did, where he got Granny Cybereyes' backstory? I thought that scene was stupid and laughable as all hell, but there was still a moment where I actually winced and felt disconcerted when she got her eyes slashed because of the VA's very convincing screams of anguish.

Daisy's Japanese voice actor is not up to the task. His attempts at the anguished howls of a man driven insane with pain and sorrow aren't quite in "Nicholas Cage wants those bees out of his eyes" territory, but they're much closer to that end of the spectrum.

As he stomps and unconvincingly screams, we cut up to the banister, where Kirei and Snek have been watching the show, presumably from behind an illusion.

Snek compliments him on how delightfully evil that was, especially for a first-timer. I guess it doesn't quite compare to "just eat the apple, gurl, it'll be fun I promise," so his standards are understandably high. Coming from him, this is pretty strong praise.

They drink some of the wine, and Snek asks Kirei how it tastes. Kirei says that it's like nothing he's ever had before, and he already wants more of it. He asks Snek what he can do next time to make sure that the suffering and agony is even greater, even sweeter. Snek tells him that one approach might be to let a friend create a prequel to it. Then they both stick their heads together and go "DOHHHHHHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHO!!!"

End episode.


My preemptive apologies to anyone who was planning to commission more of the Fate S/N animes. Thanks to Zero, this is what Gilgamesh and Kirei will always be to me now.