Fate/Zero S2E11: "The Last Command Seal"

The teaser has Kiritsugu entering a giant room with this bizarre unfolding fluorescent light array on the ceiling. Not sure what this place is supposed to be at all. Anyway, he enters the weird room. Kirei is in it. Kiritsugu looks exhausted. Kirei looks smug.

After a brief staring match, Kirei and Kiritsugu draw their enchanted weapons and start the fight. Kirei charges with his knives in hands trying to close the distance. Kiritsugu stays back and tries to shoot him before he can. Roll OP.

The show really wants their first face-to-face meeting to be the payoff for a series-long buildup. Maybe for some audiences this worked. For me, though? I've been asking why Kirei and Kiritsugu got so fixated on each other from the pilot. I've been waiting and waiting for the show to explain to me WHY they care so much about one another, or see some sort of weird kinship in each other that goes beyond "they're both magic assassins." I still don't have any idea why Kirei thinks that understanding Kiritsugu will help him understand himself, even after both characters have had their secrets delved into. I've been waiting. and waiting. and waiting. It never happened, and now I'm clearly expected to feel something at this encounter but I have no idea what.

Well, good thing I stopped really caring about this show a while ago now, so this isn't as disappointing as it would otherwise be.

After the OP, we return to the Arthurian grudge match in the parking complex. Lancelot is slowly gaining the advantage, largely due to Arturia being - as per her default state of existence - too emotionally devastated to fight back properly. Daisy is still just sort of leaning against a wall nearby and staring into space while his Servant wails away at Arturia. Then we return to the edge-off between Kirei and Kiritsugu. Kiritsugu is using his anti-magic rib bullets, and Kirei is blocking them with his knives as anime characters tend to do. Kiritsugu is puzzled about the bullets failing to collapse Kirei's magic circuits, but then realizes that he's using an external mana source to toughen his blades against them. I'd have thought that the daggers themselves had the power to do that, but no, Kiritsugu determines that Kirei is using Command Seals as ablative armor.

How can he tell that? And...how do you even tap Command Seals for that purpose? IDK. I guess I have no choice but to assume that Kiritsugu the magic weapon fanatic knows what he's talking about here, but I feel like "the daggers are magic themselves" would have been a better explanation that raises fewer questions.

They close the distance, repel each other, and close again. Kiritsugu uses his time dilation trick to try and shoot around Kirei's defenses, but Kirei uses his illusion trick to no-sell that and gets close enough to land a punch.

At least he was out of daggers at this point. That probably is the only reason why the battle didn't end outright right there. As it is, Kiritsugu just gets knocked back into the nearest wall and appears to have broken something. Kirei is very good at punch.

This is a pretty entertaining fight, at least. Some aspects don't completely make sense to me, but most of it does, and it's very well animated and dynamic. So, on a technical level, it provides some amount of entertainment.

Arturia barely fends off Lancelot some more. Then, we go to Iri's body laid out on the stage in a...it looks like the room that Kirei left her in is like a big auditorium or something. I guess that's what this building is? A theater or a convention center or something along those lines. Well, anyway. Iri's corpse is surrounded in eldritch red fire, and then transforms into a literal golden chalice.

I thought the "holy grail" was just a figure of speech, referring to the ultimate goal of magecraft? I guess not. I guess it's literally a golden cup. But not the actual Cup of Christ; a different literal cup that happens to be magic. Why, though?

I guess it might just be the Nowhere King deciding to mold his host into something that conforms to most of the Masters' expectations?

...also, I still really want to know what the significance of Iri being dead rather than alive when the transformation came might be. And why she needed to ever have been alive in the first place, if a dead body will do. Also, don't at least six of the Servants need to be sacrificed before this can happen? Maybe it's all just more Nowhere King fuckery. IDK.

Arturia and Lancelot keep fighting. Kiritsugu, who's apparently been punched into the wall hard enough to leave an actual crater, slumps down to his knees. He lets himself drop the rest of the way to the floor on his side and plays dead, and Kirei is so stupid that he actually buys it and turns his back to him.

No, seriously. That actually happens.

...

Kirei the devilishly clever assassin with a career of killing wizards and vampires with clever survival tricks behind him. Fighting a man who he knows to be another devilishly clever assassin with a similar history. We've seen Kirei himself play dead to get the drop on an enemy in earlier fights, particularly the one with Iri and Maiya, so this is absolutely 100% something that should come to mind for HIM SPECIFICALLY as a possibility to watch out for. But no. He does nothing at all to confirm the kill. Just gives Kiritsugu a cursory glance from twenty feet away and then turns his back and starts leaving the room.

Sorry. I don't believe this.

Kirei isn't a character I'm particularly impressed by or attached to, but he is a distinct character. For all that Fate/Zero has been vague about his motivations and dancing around them with word salad in his conversations with Gilgamesh, he's been very consistent in how he behaves on the battlefield. Kirei Kotomine's fastidiousness, ruthlessness, and caution are the most memorable things about how he's conducted himself throughout the show's action scenes (and really, that's where most of his characterization has been expressed period, at least until the last few episodes).

My point here is that this isn't just a moment of bad writing. It's character assassination. The story is hinging on Kirei behaving the opposite of how he normally does, making a mistake that anyone who's been paying attention knows that he never would, for no given reason.

Which means that, frankly, as far as I'm concerned, Kiritsugu is dead. Kirei killed him just now. Game over.

...you know, it occurs to me that this is the second time that a shrewd, details-focused villain has made an improbable lapse in attention in order to hand Kiritsugu a shoehorned "badass" moment. It's much, much more blatant and more destructive to the narrative this time, but still, looking back at Professor Archie's death I'm much less inclined to make the charitable "doesn't translate well" reading of how that played out than I was before.

...

Kiritsugu allegedly pulls out a machine pistol and unloads into Kirei's back, and Kirei supposedly turns around just barely in time to block it, but still ends up getting his right hand shredded by bullets. Sure. right. That's exactly what happened show, I believe you.

Anyway, both men are injured now, but Kirei still has one working hand, whereas Kiritsugu is completely out of ammunition. Kiritsugu comes up with a whacky last-ditch plan to use the Scabbard he's carrying's healing powers to make a "suicide" attack against Kirei with some grenades. It's a real longshot, but at this point it might be his only shot.

Kiritsugu pushes his time-acceleration trick into overdrive, dealing even more damage to his body in the process, and meets Kirei's final, one-handed charge. Their arms impact each other. Kirei grunts in pain as his broken hand feels the impact. Then, in the other room, the Nowhere King starts spilling out of Cup!Iri and into the physical world.

The CGI of the slime spilling out of the grail and across the altar and stage is surprisingly bad for this show.

Kirei and Kiritsugu keep having their superhuman gimp-fight where they flail their wounded arms at each other at hypersonic velocities. Seriously, it actually looks like a little kid slapfight, only with over-the-top sound effects to inform you of how much force their wriggling their hands at each other with and dramatic faux-Latin choir music playing. It's kind of amazing. Somehow they get separated again, and make a knife-armed charge toward one another. Wasn't Kiritsugu going to do some kind of hopefully-not-actually-suicidal-suicide-bomb trick with his grenades? Maybe he's just waiting for the right moment.

Suddenly, their battle is interrupted by the Nowhere King smashing through the ceiling and engulfing both combatants. I guess this weird room is right under the auditorium.

Then, we jump to the parking level, where Arturia has defeated Lancelot.

Where last we saw them, Arturia was getting knocked around the room just barely keeping herself together. I guess she got ahold of herself since then. Good for her, I guess. It would have been nice if this took place onscreen, as it's really pretty jarring to have jumped from there to here, but whatever. It's not like I ever cared all that much about this particular subplot even before the show lost my investment as a whole. Heck, it wasn't even clear that this WAS a subplot until midway through the Mion River battle, and even then it was mostly just a background curiosity.

I guess I'll just use this as another reminder of how weirdly absent Team Berserker was from most of the story. Like, "I legitimately forgot they existed for most of the first season" absent. A lot of setup for this battle could have been done, but wasn't.

Arturia promises to use her wish to redeem both of them when she gets the Grail. Lancelot mumbles something about how stubborn she is as he slides off of her blade and dissolves into smoke, returning to the spirit world. I don't know the details of how Arturia and Lancelot's falling out happened in the Fate version of the mythos, but I'm sure this is very touching for people who do.

Meanwhile, Daisy dies. I guess his body was weakened enough from the worms that the system shock of losing his Servant was just too much for him. I guess. So anyway, yeah, he's dead, kay.

Cut back to Kiritsugu, who has suddenly found himself in a simulation of Alimango Island faced with either Iri or something pretending to be her. She congratulates him on making it this far, and tells him that they're inside the Grail. Well, sort of. She kind of contradicts herself a minute later.

She points up at the sky, and at a celestial body hanging in it. Looks like the monsters are all about to respawn, but so are the ingredients and critters, so Kiritsugu should get ready to pick up hearty blueshell snails.

NowhereKing!Iri claims that the blood moon overhead is the Holy Grail, waiting to make itself manifest in the world. Despite her having just said that they're inside of the Grail right now, which would make this entire virtual world the Grail rather than any one object within it. Like I said, she's not making all that much sense. She tells him that he needs to offer it his prayers, and then it will be able to enter the physical world and enact its - and Kiritsugu's - will.

Well that isn't ominous framing at all. Nice try, Nowhere King, but subtlety has really never been your strong suit. Kiritsugu quickly starts seeing through the bullshit, and demands that the entity tells him who it really is, because he can tell that it's not Iri. He draws a gun on it, not that that will actually do anything here, but it helps him feel more in control.

Without missing a beat, the Nowhere King tells him that he's correct of course, it isn't Irisviel. However, it did take a complete personality scan of her at the moment of her death, and is using a faithful simulation of her in order to communicate with him. So, really, he should think of it as his wife. It's simulating her well enough to functionally be the real thing as far as he's concerned, right?

...holy fuck, the entity is really bad at this. It's only a matter of time until it convinces itself it can emotionally manipulate him by drawing hearts on metal cubes and promising him cake.

Well, unsurprisingly, Kiritsugu tells it to cut the bullshit and just act like itself. If it's the Holy Grail, then refer to itself as the Holy Grail. If it's some other involved entity, then just call itself that. Leave his wife out of this. It tells him that that's alright, it doesn't need to indulge any more pleasantries. He just needs to pray to the giant evil moon-apparition in the sky, and it will realize its desire of releasing itself upon the mortal world.

....hahahaha oh my god it just can't keep it in its pants for the three fucking seconds it would take to trick Kiritsugu. This demon is a goddamned joke. No fucking wonder it still hasn't gotten free after all these Grail Wars.

Kiritsugu asks it, eyes now so narrowed in suspicion that they're practically just slits, why the hell it keeps talking about its own desires if he's the one who's supposed to get a wish around here. It responds with more evasive cryptic bullshit that has Kiritsugu looking as frustrated as most audiences probably are. Something about how Kiritsugu already knows how to save the world, so now the Grail is just going to do the same thing that he's already been doing. Um...okay? He begs it to please, PLEASE just fucking explain itself already. In response, it changes the scenery to put him in a reconstruction of the hotel room he recently shared with Maiya, and starts addressing him - now with an intimidating masculine voice - through the TV set.

And then it starts giving him an extra convoluted version of the Trolley Problem.

There are two ships crossing the ocean, carrying the last five hundred humans in all of existence, with Kiritsugu as the five hundred and first. One ship has three hundred people on it. The other has two hundred. Both ships have sprung leaks, and Kiritsugu is the only person able to fix them. What does he do?

Well, obviously, he replies to the disembodied voice, he'll start plugging the hole on the ship with three hundred people, and hopefully he'll finish it fast enough to save the people on the other ship as well. The voice then asks him what he'd do if the two hundred people on the second ship took him prisoner and tried to force him to fix their ship first.

...okay. Demon. You need to make this a lot less abstract. The relevance of this analogy is really not clear. What are the bad outcomes that Kiritsugu is actually being forced to choose between? What are you actually trying to describe here?


...not even halfway through. I guess I'll split this here and continue the Nowhere King's nonsensical thought experiment next time.