Fullmetal Alchemist S2E10: “Family Portrait”

Are we going to see more of Hohenheim? I kind of hope so, seeing as we're nearly two thirds of the way through the series and so far his role has consisted almost entirely of lurking mysteriously in the background. If I had less faith in the author, this is the point at which I'd start fearing he was being set up to deliver a deus ex machina at the end. The sooner he appears again, the less cheap any assistance he provides will feel.


First scene of the episode confirms my hunch. Hohenheim is standing at his mountaintop campsight, looking out at the night sky and reciting a litany of names. After reciting a long list of them, he apologizes for "having had to use them years ago." Presumably to make a philosopher's stone, or something along those lines. So he did make at least one of those at some point in the past. Or, if he and Father are identical twins as I suspected might be the case, he might be listing people who were used to create his own core who he's metabolized since his own birth.

Do the haemunculi have that much control over who they digest and when? Well, given by Father's ability to manipulate his own internal matrix to create, absorb, and recreate the Sins, it seems likely that the original Xerxian units at least can.

Then he tears his own chest open and lets a splatter of red liquid spill out onto the ground. Said fluid writhes and twists in a way that blood doesn't but a certain other red liquid has been seen to, and then vanishes. Maybe those specific droplets are the people he just listed, idk. When the camera shows us Hohenheim again, he's all healed.

I'll take that as confirmation that Hohenheim and Father are, in fact, twin haemunculi created by some Xerxian mad scientist.

Title card drops, and then we flash back to Resembool thirteen years ago. So Edward would be 3-4 years old at this time, and Alphonse 2-3. Is this when Hohenheim left home and never came back until after they burned it down? It's got to be around that time, or just a couple years earlier. However old they are, the boys are asleep in bed, and Trisha is trying to get Hohenheim to hug them. Right now, he's just sitting cross-legged in the door to their bedroom staring at them. Xerxian thing, haemunculus thing, or just Hohenheim thing? Who knows.

Erm...actually I guess the answer to that question is weirder than just personality ticks, considering what Hohenheim says when Trisha finally directly asks him why he doesn't just hug his damned sons already.

Ohhh? Say what now?

Trisha tells him that if it spread like that, she would have caught it a long time ago. "It" referring to either some kind of weird disease Hohenheim picked up somehow, or (more likely) the state of being a haemunculus. Though in that case, Hohenheim has got to be speaking metaphorically, since he's got to have learned quite a long time ago that it doesn't work like that.

It would also raise the question of how the boys were conceived without them and/or Trisha inheriting any philosopher's stone. Hmm.

Also, this is a pretty obvious parallel to Wrath and his pseudo-family. If Trisha knew about Hohenheim, then...well, I had already kind of figured that Queen Bradley must have known, if she had not one but TWO Sins posing as her husband and child.

Hohenheim starts monologuing about how much death and tragedy he's seen since he got his current body. Okaaaay then, he's something a little different. Maybe the opposite of Wrath and NeoGreed? A human consciousness transplanted into a haemunculus body? If so, then does that mean Father is the same way? The plot thickens. The plot of this story always thickens, I've never seen it not thicken lol. As "Lurking" plays, he explains that he made peace with all the death he saw, and with the moral ramifications of his haemunculus body existing and fueling itself the way that it does, by reminding himself of the philosophy of alchemy. There are no individual lives, or entities. Just matter and spirit flowing through the vortex of the world and changing states. In other words, taking the view that his dream version of Father encouraged him to back in "Interlude Party," and embracing the effective moral nihilism of alchemy that most of its philosophical proponents have been dancing around like cowards. However, he's having trouble continuing to hold that view. Marrying Trisha and having children was the turning point. Seeing his sons age before him while he remains static is making him fear that this worldview was always a monstrous one, and perhaps he only clung to it because he is, in fact, a monster.

Man. This angsty "am I a monster and will my affection just corrupt the people I show it to" spiel is so much more effective coming from a being whose every thought and action is powered by burning souls than it is from a vampire who only drinks cow blood.

The next morning, Trisha surprises Hohenheim by having invited a photographer over. Time for a surprise family picture, for whatever reason. She...oh, I get it now...she hands him Babby Edward, and picks up Babby Alphonse herself. Hohenheim holds Edward uncomfortably. Edward looks exhilarated at this rare display of physical affection from his father, reluctant and awkward as it is.

Holy...I was just joking before with the Twilight comparison, but, no I think this is actually it. The aftermath of it, at least. That most mythical thing. An angsty paranormal romance story that doesn't suck.

Now there's a mindblower for you.

They pose for the photo, and Trisha makes some heartwarming but not very convincing arguments in favor of Hohenheim's humanity as she gets him to do something along the lines of smiling for the camera. The result is the family photo that's showed up a few times in the past. For the first time, we zoom in close enough on his face to see the tears dripping from his eyes. Maybe the photo quality just never actually captured those enough to be seen after the fact, or maybe Edward and Alphonse just never looked closely enough.

The real question, of course, is whether his body produces tears on its own, or if he had to transmute that water up really quick to prevent himself from crying a mass of screaming crimson sludge in front of the photographer. 

Later, Hohenheim sits at his desk, working at some alchemy notes. Including a diagram that looks like a version of Father's philosopher's stone glyph. He thinks to himself that he'd been planning to just keep on living for however long this body lasted, but now he just wants to grow old and die with Trisha, and for their children to outlive them. Then, suddenly, he looks up from his notes, his face going from pained to shocked, and murmurs "That bastard!" We get one last look at his notes, and apparently he was copying that diagram across a map of Amestris. I guess he just figured out that he's not the only Xerxian creation to have taken up residence in this part of the world.

Early the next morning, he fixes a swing that they have hanging from the tree outside for the boys. He does it by hand, even when it means falling out of the tree in an undignified fashion due to his apparently not-all-that-remarkable agility. So he's not an all-around superhuman at least in his resting state, then. Trisha comes out and asks him what he's doing, and he explains that he just wants to do one actual thing for the boys before he leaves. He has to leave now, you see. He'll be back as soon as he can. In the meantime, he tells Trisha not to tell Edward and Alphonse what he is.

So he went off to confront Father, I'm guessing. Either violently, or to just try and talk him down. And I guess his failure to do so led to him spending a decade moping around the countryside and not coming back to or even warning his family. More charitably, Father might have been holding him prisoner during that time.

Trisha asks him if he's sure he doesn't want to say goodbye to the boys before he heads out. He tells her that if he sees their faces, he might not be able to go through with what he has to do. Then, as we've seen from their own perspective before, Edward and Alphonse wake up early and see him leave. His sorrowful expression turns to a resentful glare, as if angry at some combination of them and himself for this making things so much harder for him, and then the anime shine covers his glasses and he turns and walks out without a word.

Cut back to the present. He's sitting in front of yet another campfire and staring at the photograph. He looks up at the starry sky, and says "just a little longer." Either until its time to put a plan of his own into action, or until Father wipes away everything he made the mistake of trying to get attached to. Or, perhaps, he's hoping that Father's country-eating spell will kill him if he stays within the perimeter. There might not be much short of that that CAN kill him in a timeframe of less than years.

Then, five and a half minutes in, and at least five after the title card appeared, we roll intro. That's, um, an interesting choice for pacing this episode.

Cut thirteen years forward and a thousand or so miles northwest. Armstrong's team is still following Sloth's tunnel along the border, looking for intersections or entrances. They muse that there must be exits for Sloth to have thrown out the rubble through. I guess these railroad tracks he's apparently been laying might have been used to carry the rubble away to somewhere, but that seems really, really inefficient, so whatever he did do with the rubble it probably wasn't that either. They try to send a signal back to Fort Briggs, but they can't get through. Either too much rock and too little tunnel between them and it at this point, or something else is blocking the signal.

Seems like it might be the latter. Ominous music starts playing, and they hear something rushing toward them from the tunnel up ahead. They raise their weapons, and a dark shadow comes speeding over the tunnel walls and floor extremely fast. Like something is just filling up the dark passageway with an even deeper darkness that their lamps can't push back...

The shadow has eyes and mouths opening up all over it now.

It's a shoggoth.

The soldier who was furthest back tries to outrun it on horseback, but this one isn't set to easy mode like the one that did this exact same scene in "At the Mountains of Madness." The black liquidy mass shoots across the tunnel surfaces ahead of the horse, and engulfs mount and rider with its mouths and eyes.

If I had any remaining doubts about this story having consciously imitated "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward," they're gone now.

Wait a minute, that...wow. Okay, this is taking a second for me to process, but if you don't mind me being extremely self indulgent for a bit:

...

That black-pseudopods-and-white-eyeballs aesthetic has appeared in this show before. It's the God (for want of a better word) that sits behind the Gates of Truth. And also the gluttonizer, which we know was an attempt to replicate the Gates. Now it seems like Father has made himself a not!shoggoth using similar principles.

In my own damned analysis of At the Mountains of Madness I hypothesized that the old ones might have created the shoggoths by cutting pieces off of the outer god Yog-Sothoth (he who is the Gate and knows the Gate, and in whom all are one) and experimenting on them.

It's kind of heartening, and also a little eerie, to realize that Hiromu Arakawa must have interpreted that story exactly the same way that I did, when most other readers (based on my web searches) did not. There's no way in hell that that isn't the thought process that led to this aspect of FMA.

I guess I should be proud of myself, if my analytical mind works the same way as an author like hers? Or maybe that's a much more common interpretation of AtMoM than I thought, and most of the people who hold it just don't post online much. That could also be.

...

Return to Generals Armstrong and Raven having their conversation while the others listen in. Armstrong expresses interest in his offer of immortal soldiers. I think there might have been a translation issue here, because now it seems like the offer he's supposed to have made her is turning HER into an immortal soldier rather than giving her a bunch to command. That also fits the bait she'd tossed out for him much more relevant. Anyway, she says that that's kind of a hard question to suddenly have thrown at you, and that she'll need time to think about it. For now, she asks him if her men can also have the honor of joining this immortal legion, when the process is ready, or if it'll just be her. He tells her that he'll only be able to answer that question when the day in question arrives, which she correctly interprets as "no." Also, he gets kinda creepy-handsy with her.

Hmm. If Hohenheim is a human consciousness transplanted into a synth body, it's possible that Father might actually be genuine in whatever offer he's making to his high priests. Giving them the same treatment as Hohenheim.

Does that mean that Hohenheim and Father used to look different? Maybe? Whose image were they remade in?

Or...hmm. Maybe they weren't actually created at the same time, then, if one or both of them only took on that form after the fact. The backstory looks like its getting more complicated again.

For now, Armstrong surmises that asking too many more questions about sharing the gift of immortality will result in Raven changing the subject and never mentioning this again, and her either falling victim to whatever bloody event is planned for the Briggs area along with her men, or (more likely) being reassigned elsewhere and a puppet of Father's put in her place to oversee the coming event. Just as she's trying to decide what answer would be most advantageous of her to give at this juncture, there's a knock at the door. A soldier comes in to report on the loss of the advance tunnel team. Armstrong says she'll be right over, and Raven invites himself along. The eavesdroppers get moving as well, Edward transmuting up some rope for Falman and Hook to bind him and Alphonse with to avoid suspicion.

As the listeners make their way to the boiler room by a different route, they run into Miles and Kimblee.

I don't think the Elrics have seen Kimblee before at this point, that I can recall. They've probably heard of each other, given Edward's fame and Kimblee's notoriety, but I don't think they'd recognize each other's faces.

Heh, little detail I never noticed before. The other characters have normal fotosteps, whereas Alphonse's steps across the steel floor are each given a resounding clang. Nice bit of soundwork there. The soldiers introduce Kimblee and the Elrics to each other, and Kimblee becomes the first character in quite a while to confuse Alphonse and Edward based on the "fullmetal" nickname.

It's kind of weird that we're getting an Edward superdeformed DON'T CALL ME SHORT gag while Kimblee's menacing theme music is playing and the cinematography before and after this shot is all super serious.

It's not as bad as Lust's tits and their cartoon sound effects hijacking the first scene of her battle with Mustang, but it's kind of on the same spectrum.

Why does the show keep doing this?

It's especially weird in this case because, with Kimblee's rather bumbling performance in the recent episodes, you *could* play him off as a joke villain for the moment. If so, this could have been fitting. You also *could* try and build him up as a serious threat who's learned from his recent mistakes, in which case the rest of the framing would be fitting. You can't really do both at once.

I'm starting to feel like Bones Studios is the Tom Hooper to Arakawa's Victor Hugo.

Cut from there to the boiler room, with a bird's eye shot that raises some questions. Questions like "holy crap I didn't realize that room was so big, why is the ceiling so pointlessly high?" Anyway, Armstrong and Raven approach the breach, where what's left of the exploration team came back. One panicked horse, and a severed arm. Was the horse carrying the arm, somehow? How is that supposed to have happened? Maybe it fell into a saddlebag or something when it got cut off. Odd that the notgoth would leave this horse totally unharmed. Is it trying to send a message, perhaps? Wonder what point it would be trying to make.

Raven asks Armstrong if she still has the bioweapon in captivity. I thought she told him they just drove Sloth off? Maybe I misinterpreted. She probably should have told him that, since that way she could keep him frozen while letting Sin Inc waste resources looking for him elsewhere, but given how little time she had to come up with a story I can't really blame her. When she confirms, he instructs her to throw it back into the tunnel and then seal it up. When a junior officer says that there might still be survivors of that scout team down there, Raven just shouts him down for interrupting a superior officer and repeats his order to Armstrong.

Raven's being awfully obvious about this, when we know he's pretty good at playing innocent when he wants to. There's something up.

Next scene is in the new cell Edward and Alphonse have been brought to (their invented excuse for moving around the base was that they had to relocate them to the backup prison area for maintenance). Raven tells them that he's pleased to finally meet them face to face, and that he has a message from the uberwunterfuhrer. Ed and Al left the command center in Mustang's company when Wrath let them out, so they know that Raven knows that Mustang probably told them he was in on it by now, so there's no need for either party to play at secrecy.

Raven assures them that he'll instruct Armstrong to release them soon. Implicitly, he's waiting until he's made sure that the Elric brothers didn't have anything to do with Sloth's navigational mishap and that they've been abiding by Wrath's terms. Edward takes the opportunity to ask him what Sloth's tunnel has to do with Father's plan, and Raven tells him that he has no reason to let Edward learn anything more about that, because Armstrong has agreed to throw Sloth back into the tunnel and roll with their cover story. The brothers act convincingly horrified at this "revelation," though I guess that's probably pretty easy for Alphonse at least.

Or...oh. They might be genuinely horrified, but for a different reason. I just commented on how Raven was being strangely blithe in front of all those soldiers. And, we know that there's a massacre planned for somewhere right around here (did all the other events coincide with Sloth digging underneath? Man, that's just Miltonian). Raven isn't worried about seeming suspicious, because he doesn't expect any member of this garrison except maybe Armstrong to survive the next couple of days. And maybe the brothers just figured that out as well.

Jump a couple days ahead. Sloth's been thawed out, and Raven goes down to oversee his release back into the tunnel. Kimblee and Miles watch from the scaffolding, where Kimblee is musing aloud that even a woman of Armstrong's reputation knows when to bend the knee. That's the wisest approach, is it not? Wink wink, nudge nudge, I helped exterminate part of your family. Kimblee really can't not push it, can he?

They bring Sloth back in, and Raven walks up to him, addresses him as Sloth, and asks him if he remembers his new instructions from Pride. He says this all right in front of Armstrong's officers and a bunch of mook soldiers who are guarding the hole, not especially quietly. Okay yeah they're all dead.

Also, I wonder when Pride is supposed to have contacted Sloth. Before the breach incident? While he was frozen? I assumed his telepresence ability needed fire (or perhaps just light sources?) to work through, based on that lamp conversation with Wrath, but maybe not.

Anyway, Sloth grudgingly shuffles back toward the pit they've closed off, and drops into it, nearly crushing a couple of soldiers who happened to be in his way. As he moves, he seems to have already forgotten what he's supposed to be doing and why, but mumbles that trying to remember things is too much effort. A bother, just like everything else.

Was he always this amnesic, or has being forced to dig for centuries in near-total solitude destroyed whatever amount of sanity Father first created him with? I wonder if his "reward" for loyal service will be reconstitution without having to keep the memories of his centuries of self-annihilating drudgery. Or just being permanently reabsorbed so that he can finally "rest."

It makes sense that Father would shunt off the "slothful" parts of himself, the apathy and unmindfulness, and send them to do the dumb brute labor while the rest of him handles thinky things. Cruel in the most ironic possible way, but sensible. If that actually is how the Sins work, at least.

As Sloth gets back to work, Raven explains to all those present that the "Drachman bioweapon" is actually the bleeding edge of Amestrian chimaera research. They've been using these new super-laborer units to create some experimental underground infrastructure, and they want to get as much done with them as possible in secret before the other countries find out. Sloth's breach here was an unfortunate accident, but the garrison handled it very well, and thus can now consider themselves "in" on this secret project. It's men like them that make Amestris great.

Yep. He's not expecting a single person in this room to be alive 24 hours from now.

Cut to the cabin where May and Dr. Marcoh are apparently still sheltering. What have they been eating, all this time? Maybe Pandarat has been luring townsfolk into the woods for them to eat. Progress on deciphering Brothar's notes has stalled, because he wrote the most important bits of his own discoveries in an ancient Ishvalan dialect. Scar might be able to read it, since he was a monk and all, but most Ishvalans couldn't even if there were more of them to ask.

Fortunately, it's not long before Scar finds them, knocking out a couple of Fort Briggs garrison scouts who had been on the brink of doing the same. He still has Yoki with him, for some reason. Reunited, the four of them move to relocate.

Back in the Fort Briggs sub-basement, Raven and Armstrong are standing off to the side. Raven is jumping the gun quite a bit, by telling Armstrong as much as he is, but I guess we did jump a few days foreward so I guess the implication is supposed to be that she's been working on him for that whole time and doing a good job. It would have been nice to see a little more of this, though; as it is, we basically just see the before and after, so it feels like Raven is telling her way too much way too easily. He apologizes for what happened to the soldiers she sent into the tunnel, but it couldn't have been helped. He explains that the chosen ones - those who rose to the top of Amestris' strict and reliable meritocracy purely by personal merit, like himself and now Armstrong - will be given immortal, godlike bodies, and they will be able to rule the world as they see fit.

So, Father is offering them the same transformation that it seems like Hohenheim underwent. Probably using a version of the same spell Edward accidentally used when he moved Alphonse's soul from body to body, installing them in purpose-made haemunculi. Father may actually intend to keep this promise to at least some of them. Of course, that's a very big may. Raven makes it sound like previous generations of the military's secret cult all hoped the plan would reach fruition within their lifetimes, but now they're the lucky ones for whom it finally will. Which makes it seem more like Father's been stringing them all along this whole time, and not actually planning to turn any human into a haemunculus of the Hohenheim kind (as opposed to the Wrath and NeoGreed kind of course, which he's quite okay with).

Speaking of Father, we haven't seen Raven mention any single mastermind being behind this all. I'm guessing that's a level of the conspiracy that Armstrong hasn't graduated to yet.

Cut to Kimblee, still being escorted by Miles. Kimblee talks to someone (Envy? Probably envy) on the phone, and makes his own side of the conversation as unincriminating and general as possible for Miles' benefit. After he hangs up, he tells Miles that he has some new orders that he needs to talk to General Raven about. Miles starts probing him on how he recovered so quickly; he wasn't even able to leave his hospital bed earlier the same day that Raven brought him up here. Kimblee tells him, for what's implied to be the ninth or tenth time over the last couple of days, that that's classified and also none of his business.

Cut back to Armstrong and Raven. She asks him how many of their underlings will be able to enjoy this alchemical transhumanism. He laughs, saying that the strong and worthy rise to the top. Isn't that her own mantra, here at Fort Briggs? Some of the least worthy, of course, must also be sacrificed for the good of the most worthy; pavement on which a new world can be built. I don't think he's told her about the entirety of Amestris getting sacrificed (if he even knows about that detail himself), just the massacres at the intersection points of the macroglyph, but I'm not sure. She asks him if Ishval was part of this project, and he confirms that it was. The Ishvalans, he notes, with their ultra-conservative culture, were a perfect example of lessers who must be sacrificed for more advanced societies like Amestris, just as the lowest grade of Amestrian must be sacrificed for the highest. She cuts his arm off.

As Raven goes into shock from the blood loss, Armstrong muses aloud that perhaps he too was once an earnest patriot who believed in Amestris' stated ideals, before age caught up with him and he was made vulnerable to temptation. That's one of the most charitable possible assumptions of how he might have ended up here, so I guess that's nice of her. Then she cuts him wide open and knocks him into the wet cement that they're covering over the Sloth hole with.

He bemoans how she's passing up immortality for herself as well as denying it to him. She calmly explains that the weak must be sacrificed to create the pavement the strong will walk upon, and that she's just demonstrated that she's stronger than him, so have fun being pavement.

Okay, I love a karmic villain death as much as anyone else, especially one delivered with such cold and unambiguous condemnation, but I don't think Armstrong made the best decision there. Raven would have been much more valuable to them alive. Granted, for all she knew he might be a secret alchemist with a protostone in his pocket, so maybe her decision was just the prudent one. Still, it's too bad; cracking Central would be much easier with someone like Raven to interrogate as needed. She got a lot of information out of him already, sure, but it doesn't appear to have been the tactically relevant kind, and he was almost certainly holding some details he knew about things like the Sins' locations, abilities, weaknesses, etc back. Ah well.

Cut back to Miles and Kimblee. Kimblee asks Miles why he dislikes him so much. Is it because of his prominent role in the Ishval campaign? Does he want him to tell him all about the atrocities he committed and just get this drama over with, or something? Just as Miles seems like he might be about to lose control, another officer takes him aside and whispers to him that Armstrong has done the thing, and there's no need to babysit Kimblee anymore. Miles is pleased to here this, and returns to tell Kimblee that General Raven just vanished after they returned Sloth to the tunnel, and no one is sure where the hell he went or why.

Kimblee surprises him by being pleased to hear this. If General Raven is gone, however or whyever that might be, then Kimblee is free to act on his previous orders from Sturmbannthurman as he sees fit again. In which case, he'll be needing a vehicle to drive down the mountainside back toward the town of Briggs. Apparently, his phone call told him to meet someone there.

Cut back to Armstrong, who's opening an extra tunnel entrance that Edward opened earlier so that they can search for any survivors of that expedition. Then to Edward and Alphonse, still in their cell. The doctor guy comes over and tells them that the plan worked, and Armstrong just killed Raven. They're both kind of shocked and dismayed to hear that, most likely for the reasons I already went into. I'll bet Edward had been really looking forward to smugly interrogating Raven.

The boys ask if they can come out of their cell now, in that case, and the doctor guy says he'll do that as soon as he receives an order to that effect. Wow what a prick. I'm guessing that's not going to come back to bite them all in the ass when Kimblee comes back in ten minutes with Envy or whoever and starts obliterating the place. :/

Almost immediately after that guy leaves, Kimblee comes in. Is this supposed to be a little while later, with him having already descended the mountain and come back up? Or did he never actually leave? Not sure. He says he has a visitor for them, and it's...oh yeah the fuck right lol

He stands aside and lets  “Winry” grin at them stupidly, not seeming at all perturbed by them being in a prison cell.

Ed, Al, you two aren't actually falling for this shit, are you?

They seem to be falling for this shit. The entity that looks and sounds like Winry explains that someone from the military told her that Edward needed automail replacement for cold weather conditions, and that she needed to come up here ASAP. Hmm. There was a conversation to that effect a few episodes ago, but I'm not sure if a call ever actually went out. Also, Definitely The Real Winry only now, after being challenged on why she's up here, starts freaking out at them for being in a jail cell. And then doesn't seem to react much when Kimblee creepily puts his hands on her shoulders while reminding the brothers of Central's interest in their situation, and their friend here.

Not sure what Kimblee and Envy are trying to get out of them here. Guess we'll find out next episode, because that's the end. The end credits have their Winry-focused imagery, which suggest that Winry actually IS going to be significant to the Briggs arc, but there's just too many things that don't add up for that to have actually been her with Kimblee. Like, did Kimblee go down to Briggs to pick her up and then bring her back? And no one noticed him bringing this new outside party into the fortress? They didn't immediately alert Armstrong that Kimblee was back with someone new? And, with Kimblee seeming to enter the jail just a minute after the doctor guy left, are we supposed to believe that Armstrong forgot about them for that long, despite mentioning Edward by name in the interim when she looked at the extra entrance he nicely made for her?

Yeah, no way in hell did Kimblee have time to leave, pick up Winry, and come back in the time between General Raven's death and the brothers learning about it. Especially not without getting stopped again at the entrance. Kimblee used the car excuse to get away from Miles for a minutes, and met Envy when she came up the hill by herself. She probably called from the town before heading out.

My prediction is that the real Winry is going to arrive soon, and there'll be a "The Thing" pastiche as they try to figure out which one of her is real while the snow batters against the bunker around them. The show even set up a memory test for them to use, back when they were checking to make sure Alphonse had independent memories by verifying things with Winry. That Chekhov's gun is about to fire, I think.

After the credits, Mustang is in central, receiving intel from his secret hooker army. He just heard about Kimblee's surprise recovery and departure from the hospital, and is now receiving an underground message from General Armstrong.

And that's that.


Thrilling episode all the way through, though also a major sufferer of Bones' complete inability to adapt the story into 22 minute episodes without leaving all these weird breaks and jumps everywhere. The title of this episode was only actually the title of the first 8 minutes of it, and there wasn't much to tie the Hohenheim stuff in thematically with what followed it as far as I can tell. Like with Wrath's backstory in "Reunion," I feel like the stuff about Hohenheim and Trisha should have been expanded into a full episode, called "Family Portrait," and everything else that happened in this ep should have been a different one. This isn't the first time FMA:B episodes have felt Frankensteined together in the middle like that. It's not even the third.

So, I liked pretty much everything that happened in this one, but it comes in a poorly made package. Aside from the whiplash, I think the Briggs sequence could have really benefited from having a few more minutes to spend on Armstrong and Raven, to better sell her winning of his trust, and perhaps to actually SHOW Edward proposing and enacting his workaround to continue the search for the missing team.

Well, next ep promises to be a hectic one, and I suspect that this might just be the final round against Envy.