Fate/Zero S2E6: "Where Justice Is Found" (continued)

Natalia takes care of the ghoul and bees that made it into the luggage compartment (what she did about the insects, I'm not sure. The fight is offscreen. Maybe some kind of improvised flamethrower or point defense spell, idk) and then uses her magic radio to signal Kiritsugu again. At this point, she tells him, it's unlikely that there are any living humans left on the plane. Also, Natalia apparently "didn't come equipped to go skydiving."

Erm.

She didn't?

Why would you not bring a parachute on a mission like this one? It seems like a pretty obvious precaution to take.

Also, she somehow knows that the undead have taken the cockpit. Despite her not having left the baggage hold. Eh, I guess she used a divination cantrip or something. Kiritsugu asks her in a horrified whisper if she's going to do the thing, but she insists that no, she's planning on coming home from this mission with Barzok's body in hand. I guess he was afraid she was going to take a suicide pill or something. So, he wishes her luck, and she tells him to have a soft bed and a hot bath ready for when she arrives.

Natalia starts trying to make her way to the cockpit, and we cut back to Kiritsugu.

Just, him standing there by the ambulance he managed to wrangle, being stressed.

And then, we jump to...the sun rising over New York City.

Just, the city at dawn.

Then we jump to...Kiritsugu getting another call from Natalia on the magic walkie talkies. She sounds fine. He sounds "as you know."

I'm sure Natalia appreciates you explaining that to her. Dumbass.

He's just walking around some...gloomy...place?...while they banter. I guess the ambulance is parked somewhere nearby, probably.

She explains that she fought her way to the cockpit, offscreen, while we watched Kiritsugu making constipated faces and the sun rising over New York. She's flown a Cessna, and she thinks she can more or less keep this intercontinental in the air, but she knows she won't be able to land it. She was able to get in touch with the control tower and tell them some kind of story that has them ready to help guide her to a landing. However, she's still going to have to do something about the undead. There were almost three hundred people on this plane, and at this point every one of them besides her is either a vampire or a mangled corpse. The cockpit door is sturdy enough to keep them out, now that she's locked herself in, but they've been banging on it nonstop.

Kiritsugu says that he has a plan in mind, and gets into a motorboat. She's about an hour away from JFK at this point, so he should be able to plant himself somewhere in her path easily enough.

I guess she's going to attempt a water landing and hope she can get clear of the plane before the zombies do. Obviously it's going to fail and Kiritsugu will have to destroy the plane himself - we've been spoiled on that from the first or second episode onward - but that seems to be the current plan.

There's a lot more exterior footage of the plane in flight and the boat crossing the water, and lovingly detailed closeups of the vampire wasps climbing over piles of dead passengers. Then, more back and forth between Natalia and Kiritsugu. Her telling him how awesome he is for being able to kill his father at such a tender age, how most people need to work hard at it before they can just point and click like that, all phrased as glowing praise.

I can't tell if the story actually thinks that she's describing a positive trait or not.

Some more confusing, kind-of-touching dialogue ensues. Natalia wonders if maybe taking time off from bounty hunting to be a mother for Kiritsugu is what's caused her to lose her edge, or if perhaps it's just a result of her getting older. I don't see how this sequence of events could be attributed to either of those things, but she's under a lot of stress and sleep deprivation so I won't hold this bizarre train of thought against her.

Then this weird thing about gender and parenting happens.

On one hand, it's supposed to be the late 1970's or thereabouts, so even a gender nonconforming individual like Natalia might break into this sort of musing when under pressure. On the other hand...Natalia is pretty gender nonconforming especially by the standards of the time. Weird direction for the conversation to go.

Anyway, she regrets that the Way of the Gun Wizard was the only life she could raise him into. Though she also acknowledges that he insisted he wanted to stay with her and do what she did, when she'd have been at least as willing to find someone else to adopt him. I guess she regrets not refusing. Or maybe just not doing more to socialize him like a normal person in lieu of filling his time with gunmagic lessons. Or...did she? I don't know how much downtime they had, or what they did with it, or how many other people he got to spend time with. The opening montage suggests not much, training mostly, and not many, respectively, but I don't know for sure.

She mentions maybe retiring after this, although at this point it's pretty clear that they're talking around the fact that she's not expecting to survive. He asks her what she'd even do with herself if she retired, and she says...um...

What?

Kiritsugu is like, what, twenty now? Seventeen or eighteen at the youngest? What mothering does she have left to do that would take up most of her time?

Whenever this conversation comes in contact with gender, it just gets incomprehensible. Well, it's Joss Whedon, we just have to roll with it I guess.

Kiritsugu says that he considers her his true family, and his true mother. Melodramatic music plays. Gulls circle around him in an even more melodramatic formation. He picks up a rocket launcher as the plane comes into view.

They're not even going to *try* the water landing?

I guess not.

We see a brief flash of Natalia's face doing a quick smile as she feels the tremor of the impact, before the explosion reaches her in full and knocks her into Kiritsugu's refrigerator as was always her destiny. I guess she either knew he was going to do this, or was hoping he would. Okay I guess.

Kiritsugu manages to hold back his tears for a little while. Asking Shirley's spirit if she saw what he just did, and forgives him for his failure to kill her when she asked him to before the sun set on the island and she finished turning.

I guuuuuess this is sort of a reprise of that situation. Sort of. My main problem with it is that it seems like there were still other things he and Natalia could have tried before resorting to rokkit lawn-chair.

Is that supposed to be the takeaway? That Kiritsugu's life circumstances have conditioned him to think that sacrificing the people he loves is the only way to prevent worse things from happening, to the point where his mind goes to that option before looking for saner alternatives? If so, then the smile that the show made a point of letting us see on Natalia's face is sort of confusing, because it suggests that she sees things the same way he does, but she hasn't had those experiences as far as we know. So, once again, it's hard for me to tell if the show wants us to agree with Kiritsugu or not.

Also, it kinda weirds me out that both instances of potential "heroism" that this episode gave us involve Kiritsugu deciding whether or not he needs to make a decision for other people about whether their own lives are worth saving. The heroic action he didn't perform in the gunfight was "forcing the two idiots to not get themselves killed." The darker, more Renegade Option heroic action he performed at the end was "deciding unilaterally to kill Natalia along with the vampires." In both cases, it seems like he could have done a lot more to build consensus and consent instead of just imposing his own choice of life or death on people. He didn't exactly try to reason with the father and son in the gunfight. And - while I guess we might be meant to infer that Natalia knew what he was going to do and gave him tacit permission by not providing another suggestion - the fact that he didn't even ask explicitly to make sure was weird. It wouldn't have hurt the scene at all if they had talked about this explicitly before he pulled the trigger. It honestly would have made it more powerful.

So, once again, I don't know if the story realizes that it's been doing this. Maybe it does, and we're meant to pick up on how Kiritsugu's attempt at utilitarianism is really just leading him down a path of authoritarian egotism. Or maybe not. I don't know.

A moment later, the tears break through, and he screams "shut up, you bastard!" Presumably addressing his father, who he just imagined making a similar point to the one I just did. Which I guess is evidence for the story indeed NOT being on Kiritsugu's side here.

He sinks to the deck, sobbing and wailing.

I still don't understand why Arturia wasn't able to make a counterargument to Kiritsugu's philosophy if the story itself thinks it's wrong.

And...what did Kiritsugu learn from this, actually? That sacrificing other people and denying them their agency is the right thing to do after all? Maybe? It seems like the story wants us to think that he took the opposite approaches in these two cases, though. And also like he might regret doing what he did with the plane, or at least that he might have strongly reconsidered it after the fact.


So, what's the takeaway from these two flashback episodes, taken as a whole?

I don't know.

Do they provide us any insight into Kiritsugu's character that makes sense of his "modern" self, or cast his strained relationship with Arturia in a new light?

Not really.

Is there any reason for them to be part of Fate/Zero whatsoever?

No.

Do they work well as a self-contained story on their own merit, regardless of how well they serve the larger work?

Hahahahaha, no.

I might have been willing to call the plane adventure a decent self-contained short story if it hadn't done that stupid cockblock with the actual exciting parts. Seriously, Natalia does all this crazy action shit, holding the monsters off in the cargo bay, fighting her way to the cockpit, etc, and we don't get to see any of it? Not even to answer pressing dramatic questions like "what clever countermeasure is she going to use against the too-small-to-shoot vampire bees?" But no, just Kiritsugu pacing around a parking lot while she summarizes it for him.


If I hadn't already been losing patience with Fate/Zero, these two backstory episodes would have gotten me there on their own. This is just the author equating Kiritsugu with his own dick and jamming him into the audience's face.