Fate/Zero S2E2: "Golden Shine" (continued)

With Diarmuid's yellow spear broken, Arturia's hand is healed again. She wraps both of them around Excalibur's hilt, says something something honor of Grayskull, and draws it out of its scabbard again. Rather than being invisible like usual, Excalibur's blade is now a blazing golden light.

Ohhhh, right, I know about this! It's one of the lesser known Arthurian legends; in some versions of the Second Siege of Camelot story Arthur could turn Excalibur into a lightsaber, but only as long as he kept both hands on the hilt. Nice bit of mythological accuracy here!

Music gets all dramatic. The others stare in awe at the golden flashing sword that...doesn't look more impressive than any of the other radiant magic weapons or spells that have been shown so far, but oh well. Before Arturia can demonstrate what the sword can do now that it wouldn't before though, the Berserker suddenly abandons their duel with Gilgamesh and buzzes the group. Before they can even properly register this, he brings his plane around for another pass and starts firing its machine guns. Seemingly focusing his fire on Arturia, and tracking her once she separated from the others. She flees across the water, and the Berserkerplane keeps strafing her.

Not sure what switch flicked that caused that. Daisy's death might have caused Berserker to just attack people at random since he's no longer being ordered to fight Gilgamesh, but singling out Arturia like this? Something weird is going on.

Up above, Gilgamesh gets salty that the Berserker would so dishonor him by just veering off after another target. Literally a few seconds ago, he was salty that the Berserker would dare to join him in the sky while being such a lowly creature. I suspect that Uruk's salt mines were the initial source of Gilgamesh's wealth. He chases after the Berserkerjet while it strafes Arturia, but before he can shoot the Berserker reveals another secret power of theirs. Apparently, while reinforcing a vehicle, they can cause it to leave a wake of purple anti-spaceship sparkles behind itself. The USS Gilgamesh ploughs right into the anti-spaceship sparkles, and explodes on impact.

So, Berserker's identity. Medieval looking armor. Improvised weapons. Can down small spacecraft. Angron? I think he's Angron.

Now, what I'm wondering is if Gilgamesh can just teleport onto the back of Angron's own fighter and attack him directly. I was surprised when the Berserker teleported onto that plane himself, since we've never seen Servants show that kind of speed and finesse with their teleportation before. I guess that could just be a unique power of the Berserker's, idk. Was Angron ever established to have a teleport affinity via the Warp or something? I forget, it's been a while.

Anyway. USS Gilgamesh goes down in flames. Arturia keeps dodging Angron's machine guns. Then, we flash over to Daisy's body where it lays, broken, against the pavement. He doesn't appear to be visibly burned, strangely; maybe that fireball Toto shot him with was actually something other than fire, dunno. Kirei creeps up to Daisy and stares. Isn't he going for Toto? Maybe he's decided he missed his chance and is waiting for another one now; Daisy just didn't hold out quite long enough to set up the shot for him after all. Inspecting the body, Kirei sees that it's still breathing; Daisy isn't quite dead yet after all. Kirei just stares down at the dying man for a moment, and thinks back to part of his conversation with Gilgamesh about how he has a special empathy and identification with Daisy and how Gilgamesh thinks that's hilarious. Kirei pulls out his knives, seemingly to euthanize Daisy, but then he changes his mind and puts them away again. Instead, he kneels over him and starts casting some kind of spell.

At first I thought he might be healing him, but no, that's not it. Daisy starts thrashing in pain, whimpering. I thought it still might be a *painful* healing method, because Daisy has to keep suffering, but it doesn't look like it's that either. Especially when the camera flicks back to Kirei's face and we see a malicious grin as he does whatever this is.

Not sure what he's doing, then. Stealing his Command Seals? Turning him into a zombie? No idea. I'll probably find out soon enough though. Whatever it is, I wonder how Kirei's spell might interact with the crest worms; I doubt Kirei knows that much about how they work in practice.

On the promenade, Iri's homunculus senses detect a sort of magical tremor. Diarmuid says that this is a sign that Alexander's reality marble is buckling; it won't be able to contain OctoGilles for much longer.

Waver sends a mental signal to Alexander, and Alexander sends a rando Macedonian ghost out to talk to him. Waver tells the ghost to watch for the signal flare and then go back into the bubble to alert Alexander where to release Gilles. I hadn't realized Alexander's ghost army could exist outside of his reality marble, but okay I guess. Unfortunately, they won't be able to do much with Grey's signal if Arturia is too busy dodging bullets to use that anti-kraken lightsaber that Arthurian legend speaks so famously of. So, Diarmuid teleports onto the plane to deal with the Berserker.

...there IS a reason he couldn't have just done that to begin with, right?

Right?

Also, there's a reason Gilgamesh didn't do the same thing when his ship went down, right? Yes? There is?

I am very rapidly running out of patience for this fight.

Diarmuid destroys the plane. No sign of the pilot, so I guess he died without another word. Oh well. The Berserker grabs one of the plane's guns as he falls toward the water amid the debris, but then Gilgamesh snipes him off from the bridge that he's apparently teleported to. Gilgamesh's sour expression at the loss of his spesship is mildly amusing, so that's nice at least. Grey shoots the signal flare. Alexander opens the pocket dimension. Arturia starts charging a spirit bomb.

No, really, she starts drawing little bits of energy out of every plant and tree in the surrounding area and pulling them into Excalibur. It's literally a spirit bomb.

Or, well. Iri explains that she's drawing the dying loyalty of all the soldiers in the world who fell before being able to complete their missions. That's apparently the core of her heroic "shtick." Fits what we've seen of her so far, I guess. My but those trees have eaten a lot of soldierly souls.

She raises her sword, congeals all the soldier ghost energy into a giant golden sun, shouts "Excalibur!" because that's how weapons work in anime, and shoots her Final Smash at the kraken while Gilles is still getting his bearings.

The light stuns him as he sees it slice through the wall of his vehicle.

As it strikes him, he sees a momentary vision of Jean de'Arc - the REAL Jean de'Arc - giving him a momentary smile and offering him her hand. Not sure what the symbolism is supposed to be, unless this is the form Death takes for him or something.

And yeah, she does look a lot like Arturia. Not exactly, but a lot.

There's no sign of that plane that the kraken ate earlier, or of its pilot. Oh well. :(

So, Gilles finally returns to wherever heroic spirits are really called from. I half expected him to somehow survive that with yet more logic-defying surplus mana bullshit, but no, this really is the end for Team Caster.

And possibly Team Berserker, as well. It wasn't clear if Angron survived that last hit from Gilgamesh or not, nor am I sure of what exactly Kirei did to the dying Daisy. One or both of that pair might still be alive, but I doubt they can recover from whatever this is.

...hmm. Unless whatever Kirei did to Daisy is some kind of temporary strengthening, of a similar kind to what Darth Matou already did. Buffing him up for one last battle against Toto before he burns out for good. It's possible.

On the topic of people who care about other people being dumb shmucks who burn themselves out while those who exploit them sit back and laugh, Alexander and Gilgamesh stand on the bridge talking shit about Arturia. It's basically a continuation of the Banquet of Kings scene, only Arturia isn't even present for it this time. And it's two full minutes long.

Literally. It's 120 seconds of Alexander and Gilgamesh yucking it up about how much Arturia sucks after she just took out the Gillestopus.

Gilgamesh at least admits that she's powerful, and that seeing her power come to nought because of her stupid dumb baby ideals might be an amusing irony. Alexander, meanwhile, is just sad for her. The camaraderie he seemed to display toward her throughout the Gilles battle was apparently a facade. End episode.


The first half of the Gillestopus fight was super fun. The second half - this episode - sucked. For numerous and multifaceted reasons. The fight mechanics didn't make sense. The characters forgot what they were doing for long minutes at a time. There was even more cringey, low-key sexist shit. And, more than anything else, most of this episode was just a waste of time.

I'm really disappointed that there wasn't a sendoff for those JSDF pilots, also. Either a whacky irony of them both surviving, or some kind of acknowledgement of their deaths (whether its played for actual tragedy/drama, or black comedy. Either one would have been better than nothing at all, after their colourful intro and callbacks throughout the previous episode).

It would have been better if this fight was compressed into just one episode, with most of the time-wasting stuff cut out. Just getting rid of all the shit about Arturia forgetting her abilities, Diarmuid inexplicably waiting so long before teleporting onto the plane, etc, would cut the runtime by a lot. No minutes wasted on them standing around on the promenade staring blankly and/or squabbling at each other. The entire thing with Alexander pulling Gilles into his reality marble was probably unnecessary, honestly, since it didn't even produce any spectacle (we never got to see the fight inside of the pocket dimension), and it also created the "wait, what?" issue where it seems like Gilles should run out of mana if he's kept from claiming more victims for that long.

So, yeah. Diarmuid, Arturia, and Alexander try to fight the kraken. It heals too fast. Gray snipes Uwu, but Gilles is still going to make it ashore before his mana runs out. Arturia tells Diarmuid about her thing, Diarmuid breaks his spear, Arturia nukes the squid. So much boring fluff cut out that you could probably fit it into one episode and still include the stuff with Daisy and Toto, and also the silly Gilgamesh vs. Angron dogfight for levity.

At the very least, Team Caster is over and done with. While they had some amusing silliness going for them, they were also just kind of too edgy for the story's good, and the joke was pretty much played out by now. I did love Uwu's death scene though; that was a strong contender for funniest bit of F/Z so far. But, overall, tiresome episode.