Fate/Zero S2E9: "All the Evil In the World"
Well, that sure is a title alright. No idea what to expect from this one.
Last time on What The Bloody Hell Does Gen Urobuchi Even Think He's Doing?, Kirei got Daisy to bring Iri to him and then played a le epic prank on him for his YouTube channel, Kiritsugu did some edgy pulp detective work, and Arturia laser-blasted Team Rider up a tree. That last bit being the best part of the episode - and probably the last five or six episodes for that matter - by far.
That's about it as I recall. Let's go!
An exhausted Waver drags himself back to the elderly couple he's been staying with's house, just as the sun begins rising. It was late evening or so when Arturia destroyed Alexander's chariot, so it looks like it took them a good five or six hours to get down from the tree and walk back into the city. Lol. Lmao, even.
Seriously, just look at this little dweeb's face as he stumbles up to the door:
Why did we never get that Pinkie and the Brain type show about Alexander and Waver, again? I know there must have been a reason, but I can't think of what it could have possibly been.
He reaches the door, and is startled by the old man calling out to him from the rooftop. Inviting him to climb up there and have a private chat. He won't explain why he needs them to be on the roof to have this conversation; he just repeats the invitation more insistently whenever Waver tries to ask him about it or explain that he's too tired. Hmm. Did the old man get free of the spell, maybe? Trying to lure him up there so he can push him off? Seems likely.
Alexander, standing invisibly by Waver's side, tells him to go up there; it seems like the old man has something very important to say. Alexander is less suspicious of this situation than I am, it seems; we'll see who ends up being right. He also opines that he and his wife really seem to care about Waver, even though Waver himself brushes this bitterly off as just being the work of his mind control spell. Alexander tells him not to worry, he'll be on hand immediately if anything whacky happens.
Waver looks down, and whispers that fear isn't the problem (and implicitly, tiredness isn't either. Or at least, not the whole problem).
Is that conscience Waver's been developing starting to kick in? Maybe it is. Anyway, roll OP. I was expecting to flash over to the Einzburns or something after this, but nope, we continue with Waver climbing out the attic window and sitting down next to the old man. He tells Waver that he'd like to watch the sunrise with him, just like he always used to do with him and his other grandchildren when they were younger, and pours him some coffee from a thermos. Waver, very uncomfortably, accepts it.
Okay, yeah, he's deliberately making Waver sweat. Not that he wasn't already sweating, what with his scrawny little bitch ass having to walk more than a kilometer at a time, but you know what I mean.
The old man talks about how they used to count the stars together, when he and his wife had just moved here from England and their children's families visited, and asks Waver if he remembers that. When Waver replies in the affirmative, the old man chuckles grimly, and says that he made that whole thing up.
It's the damndest thing. He and his wife Martha were just completely sure that this strange boy who neither of them had seen or heard of before was their grandson, and he has no idea why. It took a long time and a lot of cognitive dissonance for him to reason his way free, but now it's like waking up from a dream.
A few weeks ago, Waver would have probably grumbled about these mind control spells being so finnicky and promptly recast it with some extra precautions added this time. However, that isn't what he does now. Curling up to make himself smaller and not looking anywhere near the old man's face, he asks him why he doesn't seem angry or scared. The man shrugs, and says that he probably should be angry, but he can't bring himself to be, and he doesn't think it's a lingering effect of the mindrape. The fact is, he and Martha's children are estranged, their grandchildren have never had anything to do with them, and their twilight years have been far lonelier and less fulfilling than they expected. It's been years since he's seen Martha as happy as she is now that she thinks a nebulously defined grandchild of hers has come to spend time with them. He himself has also felt less lonely, thanks to Waver's presence.
I suspect that he's been finding Alexander better company than Waver, but still, it's because of Waver that he's here lol.
So, the way he sees it, Waver could just as easily be some kind of angel come to comfort them in their loneliness as anything malevolent (though if he thought about it a little more and put it together with the recent random property detonations, massive child murder spree, and - oh yeah - the JSDF being called in to deal with a giant monster in the bay, he'd probably surmise the latter ). In fact, he asks if Waver would like to stay longer than his planned visit.
He tells them that he unfortunately can't make any promises. In fact, he can't even promise he'll come back to them after the next time he leaves the house. The man takes this as confirmation that Waver and his musclebound Macedonian friend have been doing something life-threatening, and Waver confirms it without elaboration. The old man tells him that in that case, he should really reconsider whatever it is he's doing. When you're old, you can look back on many years of life and realize what a waste it would have been to sacrifice them all before you could even experience them. So, if Waver is going to risk his life for something, it had better be something really, really important.
The sun rises. Waver makes this expression:
You know, it feels like Waver's story - along with its themes and central character arc - are totally orthogonal to the rest of the show. I've heard people say that Waver is the real protagonist of Fate/Zero, but I don't think that's true. It's more like he's the protagonist of another story altogether that's been forced to share screentime with Fate/Zero.
To be clear, this is aside from me wanting another show about him and Alexander blundering through a world domination attempt. Within the series as it exists, it already feels like Waver is the star of a show within a show.
And, as if to reinforce that point, we then unfortunately return to Kiritsugu. He's hanging out at a Shinto temple; one of the four locations in Fuyuki City (along with the church, the Tohsaka mansion, and the city hall building) with the ley line intersections required to perform the grail summoning ritual. He's been awake for forty hours moving from one location to the next, trying to catch Kirei.
-____-
Um. Bro.
The ritual requires six (or possibly seven, I'm still not totally clear which) Servants to have been dispatched before you can perform it. Why would Kirei already be prepping Iri at one of those sites when he knows that there are still two other teams besides his hoodwinked Berserker pal still active?
If you can start the ritual before the Grail War has concluded, why didn't he bring Iri to one of those four sites and start preparing, already?
Well, okay, that second question does have an obvious answer; bringing Iri to a summoning locus while the war is still being fought would make Team Sabre an easy target. Sure. But in that case, why the hell does he think Kirei - an experienced assassin and tactician much like himself - would do that either?
Also, Kirei and Gilgamesh were at the church for what seemed like a fairly extended period last night. Somehow Kiritsugu managed to completely miss them there. I guess that's what happens when you do this pointless, premature stakeout instead of sleeping two days straight. Fucking lol.
He wishes he still had Maiya so they could cover two locations at once.
Once again, he's operating completely alone.
I wasn't expecting any more concern for her than that, but that doesn't make it any less irritating. Seriously, show, can't we just pretend Maiya never existed? Pretty please?
While he's sitting on the temple steps and being extra broody to keep himself awake, Arturia approaches him. He still seems to think he's operating completely alone, despite having her, because for all that he talks a big talk about being willing to sacrifice anything and everything to get his Grail wish he apparently isn't willing to get over his stupid personal grudges for it.
If I had more faith in the narrative at this point, I'd think the audience was expected to pick up on this, but that's irrelevant to the show I'm actually watching.
Anyway, Arturia reports that she's got nothing to report. She searched the city all night, but found no sign of Team Berserker, Kirei Kotomine, or Iri. She doesn't explain the whole incident where she got the target confused for the actual Team Rider, because she knows that if she tried to put that into words everyone would realize just how fucking inane that plot point is.
Kiritsugu doesn't say anything, just looks haggard and miserable. Arturia tells her that if he doesn't have any more specific orders, she'll just continue her search. Kiritsugu still doesn't say anything, his expression still that of a man dying of really gloomy insomnia. Arturia turns and leaves, her own expression robotic.
Okay, I guess that was a scene or whatever. On to the next one, which features Kirei holding Iri in a location that is not any of the four Kiritsugu's been patrolling, because seriously why the hell would he have done that already?
Team Caster's old serial killer workshop. Kirei also notes that it seems Kiritsugu never ended up finding this place himself, so it's doubtful he'll find it now.
...erm. How does Kirei know that Kiritsugu never found out about this place? He himself knows about it because Hassan's ghost legions trailed Team Rider into these tunnels once, but does he know that no one told Kiritsugu since then?
I guess it's possible that he doesn't actually know if Kiritsugu knows, and is trying to trick Iri into giving it away for him. Yeah, that does seem like the sort of interrogation trick that a church inquisitor type might have been taught.
Anyway, she starts gushing about how Kiritsugu will find this lair and crush Kirei with the power of his incredible penis and so forth. Kirei is annoyed by this, which I find eminently relatable. Then this conversation happens that I tried watching the dubbed as well as subbed versions to try and understand, with no success. Iri and Kirei are arguing about how he and Kiritsugu are similar and not similar to each other, and which of the two men sees through the other, all without ever saying a single concrete detail about HOW they are similar or different or WHAT they see in each other. It's one of the vaguest, least informative conversations I've seen in anything, and the two translations being nearly identical to each other suggests that this isn't the localizers' fault. It has some mildly amusing "Snidley Whiplash ties Little Nell to the train tracks" energy, what with Kirei being all bombastically evil and cackling about how he's going to destroy Kiritsugu's dreams in front of him while she's restrained over the glyph, but other than that this scene is just boring and frustrating.
The dialogue in Kara no Kyoukai was often as impenetrable as this, sure, but in that it at least seemed like the characters were saying *something* to each other even if it didn't make any sense.
Then, he snaps Iri's neck. While musing to himself about how he thinks he should just destroy the Holy Grail so that nobody can have it. That's the evilest thing to do, right? The glyph stops glowing. End scene.
...I'm going to be really annoyed if Iri actually died here, with this little fanfare. She was one of THE main characters. Fucking Maiya's death scene got more gravitas than this. Well, here's hoping that Grail bullshit or homunculus bullshit or some combination of the two will prevent that from having been the end. Also, there are still three episodes left, and I don't think the story could keep up its momentum for that long after the Grail War has been so anticlimactically ended.
Back to the Alex and Waver Show! The old couple are asleep in their bedroom (curiously, they're in different beds), the husband evidently having gone back to bed to get some more sleep this morning. In the guestroom, Waver is laying in bed as well. Alexander, who doesn't need to sleep in general, is just squatting happily over the other cot and reading a book by candlelight. It's pretty kawaii.
It turns out that Waver slept clear through to the evening, which annoys him because he asked Alexander to wake him up before then. Alexander says that he was going to, but then decided that he should let him get as much rest as possible. He tired himself out last night, and something gives Alexander the feeling that tonight might be the last battle of the Grail War. He's not sure what gives him that sense, but something does, and this is the sort of instinct he's learned to trust. Waver muses that yeah, now that he mentions it the air in Fuyuki feels different than it has previously. Colder. Less alive. Like there's markedly less magic in the area than there's been since he arrived. They surmise that another Servant must have fallen, leaving only one or two active teams. Only the worthiest foes of the initial seven.
No other Servants have fallen since last night, of course, so it's probably Iri's death(?) that made the difference. If she's a nascent incarnation of the Akashic Record, then she'd definitely be the most powerfully magical thing in the area. Or, like. In any area.
Suddenly, a lightshow out the window gets both of their attentions. Weird blobs of color flying through the air like fireworks, somewhat reminiscent of the silly dogfight from the Mion River battle. Gilgamesh and Berserker deciding to have a rematch?
Well, nope, it turns out this is actually something much less dramatic. It's a kind of magical signal flare, apparently. Invisible to muggles. Waver, who learned wizard morse code in school, makes a dismayed report that it reads "success - victory." The signal that the war is over, and a winner has emerged.
Alexander points out that that can't possibly be, because they haven't just killed anyone and no one has just killed them. Waver also notes, on further reflection, that the signal isn't coming from the church like it's supposed to, but from somewhere else. It seems like someone is trying to confuse the other Grail Warriors and not doing a very good job of it. Or perhaps, Alexander muses further, they're just trying to taunt the others into making a reckless attack on that position; declaring victory before the war is over is definitely a "come at me bro" sort of gesture.
Well, Alexander isn't one to turn down a challenge, so he tells Waver that they should, indeed, come at them bro. The Gordian chariot is a total loss, but Alexander is still able to play the Rider role by summoning one of the warhorses from his pocket battlefield power. Erm...if he can do that, why did they need to walk back into the city the previous night? Eh, whatever. He climbs onto the ghostly steed and invites Waver to sit behind him, but Waver seems hesitant in a way that can't just be attributed to a lack of riding experience.
Waver just stands there. Then, he stretches out his hand and finally uses one of his Command Seals; I think he's the only Master to have not used a single one until now (Uwu obviously never counted). In fact, he uses all three of his Command Seals. First, he commands Alexander to be victorious in this battle, whatever it takes. Second, he commands him to claim the Holy Grail and use it for himself. Third, and finally, he commands Alexander to conquer the world once he's used the Grail to resurrect himself.
So, Alexander's own agenda, but with all of Waver's mana - amplified by whatever added buffs the Seals provide - now added to it. And, with that, Waver announces his withdrawal from the war. Alexander needs a source of mana, but if tonight is really going to be the final battle then just giving him everything he has right now via those Seals should be just as effective as Waver remaining linked with him. Alexander will be in trouble if he's still a Servant after tonight, but one way or another he won't be, so that's not an issue.
Stunned, Alexander asks why he's doing this. Waver just tells him that, as Alexander himself said a few minutes ago, this final battle is only for the strongests. He would just get in Alexander's way. So, good luck, and goodbye. Unless Alexander gets his wish and Waver sees him on the news, he doesn't want to see Alexander again. Waver turns, and begins walking away.
Alexander doesn't let him, though. He grabs him and hoists him up onto the horse with him, over Waver's protests. When asked why the hell he's doing this when he isn't his Master anymore, Alexander says that he IS still his friend, though, and he wants to fight and - if possible - conquer the world with him. Yes, Alexander realizes what a great show that would be, and he wants Waver to help him make it a reality! And then...
......
Okay, what the actual fuck?
Waver starts crying tears of joy when Alexander says he really, honestly likes and respects him now. And then does so even harder when Alexander points out that Waver has fought beside him as many times as anyone could expect of any soldier, and that he'd never want to pass up letting a warrior like that remain on his team. He considers Waver to be his own equal in courage and cunning. Waver looks like he's about to die of happiness. They both sit down on the horse, and begin eagerly flying off to meet the challenge that's been offered.
Okay, so. What was the point of the old man?
What was the point of Waver's entire arc up until this point, with him growing increasingly sceptical of the egomania that drove Alexander to conquer and himself to enter the Grail War, and learning to see the value of life for its own sake rather than as a proving ground? This scene isn't being framed as a backslide, or a fall to corruption, or any kind of failure at all. It's all uplifting and triumphant and "the real self-confidence was the friends we made along the way" and stuff. It's got the sappy music, the heroic angles, no traces of irony.
This would be a fine capstone to a different character arc, but not the one that Waver's been having.
Heck, if you just changed the framing a little bit and had Waver agree to participate in this one last fight with Alexander out of gratitude for helping him learn and also saving him all those times, that could probably work. But there's no indication of that being a major factor. It's written and directed as if being accepted as a strong dominant manly-man who can compete with other strong dominant manly-men really is the payoff that Waver's been working toward.
If we hadn't *just* had that scene with the old man, I'd probably shrug and conclude that I've been misreading Waver's story. But we got that scene, and I just cannot square it with this one. Maybe the other shoe is about to drop? If so, I think the direction of this scene made a major misstep by playing it as something earnestly triumphant and validating. A bait-and-switch like that might have worked earlier in Waver's arc, but not now.
...there's even a brief cut to the old man laying in bed, smiling contentedly out the window as they fly off. Again, ironic? I really am not sure. I guess I could see both that conversation and this one being part of a "Waver realizes people accept him as a worthy human being in various capacities" thing, but the amount of focus that the first scene put on the old man talking about the value of life, and all the earlier scenes of Waver growing increasingly uncomfortable with the squandering of lives...yeah, again. I just don't know what it's trying to say.
Speaking of characters who make me feel things other than what the story intended, we now jump over to Kirei and his Snek. Arturia, Kiritsugu, and Daisy are all making their ways toward the source of the signal flares; a hilltop over what appears to be a city park. This may be close to where Kirei left Iri('s body?), or it may not be. As they watch the flares Gilgamesh launched drift lazily across the sky, the two of them talk strategy. Kirei apparently has some kind of ritual he wants to perform, which I'd normally assume was the "summon the Grail" spell, but him having just killed Iri makes that unlikely. So, he's planning something else now, I guess. Anyway, Kirei says that if Gilgamesh goes all out in battle, the collateral damage will likely ruin his ritual, so if he wants to take this fight seriously he'd best engage them farther away from the site. Gilgamesh agrees to that, but warns that in that case one of the other opponents might sneak up on Kirei's position while Gilgamesh is off fighting someone else. Kirei asks if his Snekiness would permit him to use a Command Seal to quickly summon him back if that happens, and he grants it, albeit with the warning that if he summons him mid-fight he can't hold him responsible for the collateral damage.
I like how the villainous duo have a more mutually respectful relationship than any other Master-Servant pair in this war, with the possible very recent exception of Alexander and Waver.
Oh, and it looks like they're still planning to summon the Grail; Gilgamesh and Kirei start discussing what Kirei might choose to wish for. This raises two questions.
1. Why isn't Gilgamesh afraid of being sacrificed with the other Servants? What changed? Kirei has a ton of Command Seals. Gilgamesh has no leverage over him in return. I'm still not really clear over whether you need six or seven sacrifices to get the Grail, honestly.
2. Does Iri not actually need to be alive in order to become the vessel? If not, why did the Einzburns bother sending a living homunculus to Japan in the first place?
Hmm. There's only three episodes left after this. Maybe I should just skip over the Grail magibabble and not try to engage with it for the rest of the run. I feel like I'm just wasting time trying to understand this, and also making the reviews more boring for most of the readers. Maybe this would all make perfect sense to me if I'd read F:S/N, but I haven't, and within Zero it's not getting any less opaque with exposure.
Well, to address the topic that got me started on this whole tangent, Kirei still doesn't know what he wants to wish for, and Snek muses that perhaps he should just wish for the Grail itself to tell him what he really wants out of life. I...thought he'd just come to terms with what he wants out of life being le epic prank channel? No? Is there a different existential question he wants answered other than the one he JUST made a big deal out of answering for himself? How many different things are supposed to be going on with Kirei's evil self-discovery, and why does the show insist on being equally vague with all of them?
...maybe I should just treat Kirei's motivations the same way I'll be treating the Grail rules. Just make like the TNG showrunners and leave "(insert technobabble here)" on the scripts for other people to fill in.
Anyway, before Snek leaves to interdict the arrivals, he tells Kirei that if Arturia happens to get passed him, Kirei should try and manoeuvre her and the Berserker into each other's paths before resorting to a Command Seal. That...would only be a viable option if Gilgamesh happened to intercept Alexander or Kiritsugu while both Arturia AND Team Berserker slipped by, which seems like a pretty slim chance, but okay.
Something about Gilgamesh's wording makes Kirei look concerned, though. Before he can leave, Kirei tells him that he doesn't think he'll be able to do that. When Gilgamesh asks why, Kirei says that he's not sure that there's anyone around here who can keep an audience entertained. Then they both throw their heads back and go "DOHHHOHOHOHOHO!!!"
Cut to Castle Einzburn. Everything's all wavy and blurry though, so this might be a memory or a dying dream of Iri's or something. Cut to an internal shot, with Iri looking over what appears to be a giant pile of nonviable Einzburn homunculi.
This may or may not be literal. If it is, then I guess getting one that can actually serve as a Holy Grail - a literal vessel for the essence of the Root - takes a lot of trial and error. Either that, or Grandpa Einzburn just keeps forgetting them on the stovetop, he is pretty old after all.
Iri's eyes tear up, and there's an artsy cut in to her standing in Ilya's bedroom, comforting her daughter after she woke up from a bad dream. Yeah, this is a memory or a dying vision, alright. I'm thinking the latter, because the nightmate Ilya had is a little too spot on.
A cup with "seven lumps" wriggling inside of it, she goes on to explain. Weeping again, Iri hugs her tight and tells her not to worry; she won't ever let that happen to her daughter.
You know, if Fate/Zero hadn't so thoroughly trashed my ability to take anything in it seriously by now, this would be some really effective horror. Being raised so your own immediate family who are living in the same house and raising you can do the magic equivalent of ripping out your brain to use as a computer. The childish nightmare logic of literally rather than metaphorically "turning into a cup" somehow makes it more real, rather than less. This scene still managed to make me grimace a little bit even with all the self-sabotage; were it not for that, I'd probably be feeling it a hell of a lot stronger and probably going into a multi-paragraph analysis. So, I guess good for you Fate/Zero, for reminding me that you didn't have to suck.
Then, suddenly, blobs of black ash rain from the ceiling, and the vision shifts. Ilya's bedroom becomes a snowy white plane piled high with dead homunculi again, with Iri the only living creature. Somehow, she knows that this is the Holy Grail she is experiencing.
Hmm. Was snapping her neck actually PART of the ritual, then? Kill the homunculus at the right time in the right manner to trigger the final transformation? If so, it's really weird that doing it before the Grail War's conclusion rather than afterward wouldn't mess things up.
Also..."seven lumps inside of me." That makes it sound like the homunculus has to absorb the souls of the six (or seven? 6.5? We'll call it 6.5 and go home) heroic spirits, and then do an equivalent exchange thing to feed them into the Akashic Record and take in an equal volume of the Root. Maybe? I think that might be how this works. In which case, I still feel like killing her before all 6.5 are ready would HAVE to screw things up, right? I could see the logic of either having to kill the homunculus before any of the 6.5 are eliminated OR after all of them are, but not when we're at 4/7.
As Iri tries to make sense of this vision, the dead homunculi suddenly start fiendishly grinning, and black ichor begins erupting from all around. Creeping across the white plane with a will of its own and pressing in around Iri.
Actual clip from Fate/Zero.
She babbles some panicked words about "the contents of the Grail." I don't think that this stuff is the souls of the three eliminated Servants, though. It seems more like...hmm. Like there was something already in there.
The ichor presses in around Iri, and she abruptly stops struggling, calms down, and starts making this expression:
Well then. Maybe killing her when she only had half as many souls in her as she needed was an even worse idea than I thought. Something just crawled inside her mind, but I don't think it's the Root. Either Kirei knew what he was doing and this is part of his next prank vid, or he didn't and is probably about to really, really regret it.
That's how it seems, at least. Maybe? Or maybe this never actually was the Holy Grail at all, and the three wizard families were just tricked into creating a vessel for this demonic entity. Unsuccessfully, so far. Which would make this one of the most extreme cases of "failing at failing" that I've ever encountered.
There are other possibilities, but those are the first two that came to mind. I kind of hope it's the first one, though, just because "the treasure everyone was fighting over was actually evil and manipulating them all along" is such a cliche.
Well, hopefully whatever this thing is, hopefully it'll be amusing while wreaking havoc on its summoners. That's pretty much the best I can hope for at this point. End episode.
