Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood S1E22: “Backs in the Distance.”

No teaser, but we do get a "last time on" right after the OP. Curious. It's been quite a long time since we had one of those, even after similar cliffhangers. Wonder what made them bring those back now? Maybe it has something to do with the original airdates.

Also, the "Hologram" song continues to grow on me. I still feel like it would be better matched with a more typical fantasy adventure sort of anime, but I'm not missing "Again" quite as badly as before.

The episode proper begins with the aftermath of Wrath's strike on Ninjette. He didn't use a sword blade, but that might be sort of academic considering how high up she was when she got punched in the face with haemonculus strength.

Also, check out the background. Wrath has already dashed over to the next roof to regroup with Gluttony, before her body has even finished bouncing. Father definitely burned some XP on this guy.

If the ninjas actually are low-grade alkahestrists as I suspected, she might be able to heal herself if she's still conscious. Otherwise, things aren't looking good for her.

Gluttony asks if he can eat her, and Wrath seems to have the same alkahestry-related musings that I do, because he orders him to do it as quickly as possible. Wrath's a solid tactician, but that's only to be expected given that he rose to power through his successful military leadership. Gluttony leaps, but it turns out that this is also Yao's time to prove himself; he seems to be only slightly (if at all) slower than his henchmen, and much stronger than he looks.

Why didn't he help try to capture Edward and Alphonse himself, again? Just too proud to fight alongside them when it's not an emergency? I thought the fate of his clan hung in the balance, though?

Yao grabs Ninjette, and tries to fend Wrath off while escaping with her. Well, he's not without redeeming qualities. He does actually care about his underlings, however poorly he appears to treat them on a day-to-day basis, and will risk his own life for at least some of them when push comes to shove. There are worse traits to have in an emperor for sure. He manages to evade Wrath for a little while by constantly dashing left into his blind spot. So, I guess Wrath can't actually see through the eyepatch? Maybe his "ultimate eye" (which he even mentions using here!) is actually the normal looking one, just to throw people off? That would be kinda funny. Anyway, Wrath wants to get this over with quickly so he can finally solve his Scar problem, so he has Gluttony come in for the flank, causing Yao to dash right into Gluttony's fist. Ow.

Also, there's a new music track for this scene. It's an almost primitive-sounding chorus of drumbeats that definitely sounds like hunting music. Fitting, for the way Wrath and Gluttony fight like a hunter and hound, and quite ominous.

Yao and Ninjette go flying backward through a nearby window, her unconscious body dropping to the floor as he crumples against the back wall. Rather than GTFOing, Yao picks her up again, which unfortunately gives the haemonculi follow, not that it probably would have made a difference in Wrath's case. Speaking of whom, once Wrath has them cornered he's more diplomatic than I would have expected.

In particular, he's interested to know how Yao and Ninjette know so much about haemonculi. There's an obvious answer to his question, of course, even given Wrath's incomplete view of the board ("Mustang was forced to hire some Xingite mercs to help Edward and Alphonse with his next gambit, due to most of his usual lackeys being in the hospital or having quit in disgust over the Ross thing." It's not even that far from the truth), but I can understand him wanting to make sure). When Yao tries to flee with Ninjette again, Wrath tells him that he miiiight just have a chance if he leaves her behind (hahaha doubt it). This infuriates Yao. He recognizes his opponent's uniform, and says that he's a pretty poor Chief Executive Administrative Authority if he has no expectation of leaders protecting their subjects. Why, Amestris might as well not have a Chief Executive Administrative Authority at all if that's how theirs sees things.

Wrath just shakes his head, and tells Yao - and his voice sounds actually resentful here, as if this is a reality that he himself finds unfortunate - that there has never been any such things as Chief Executive Administrative Authorities of the noble kind that Yao seems to expect. Hmm. He also seemed to get extra contemptuous of Greed when he showed attachment of his underlings (and unconvincingly tried to deny it). In fact, this is the closest to actually "wrathful" that I think we've seen him become. Is he just that earnestly contemptuous of selflessness, or is he envious or even threatened by it? The way he reacts feels more like the latter. As if he's invested in a cynical, hopeless worldview.

Yeah, more and more I feel like there's a part of Wrath that wants out.

Ninjette recovers long enough to deploy a flashbang grenade, which seems to be as effective against haemonculi as it is against humans. Unfortunately, Wrath had one eye covered, so by taking off his eyepatch he's able to use his marked-but-not-ultimate eye to cut them off. And now they know that he's a haemonculus himself rather than just working with them, so any chance they had of negotiating for their lives is out the window.

Cut away from the battle, and to a black-and-white memory of Winry's as she sees her parents depart for the battlefields.

Not sure what's up with the monochrome. FMA:B hasn't done that for any previous flashback sequences. Anyway, mommy and daddy Rockbell kiss Pinako and Winry goodbye, and assure the latter that they'll be back soon. I...can see why Winry might have abandonment issues.

Catching up to Winry's present, she's visiting Hughes' grave with his widow and daughter. She muses to herself that Maes Hughes reminded her a bit of her father, so learning about his death hit her disproportionately hard for how briefly she had known him. Fair enough. She has a tender moment with the Hughes family after laying their flowers on the grave, and then Winry goes shopping. Well, that graveyard scene sure was brief; I was expecting more of a payoff. While at the market, she hears people talking about the running battle between the Elrics and Scar going on across the city, and then starts running there as fast as she can while more monochrome images of her parents flash in front of us.

...

Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood? I like you. I like you a lot. But for the love of god can you just CUT THIS SHIT OUT already?

We know Winry is afraid of losing people. Her last few appearances - some of them quite lengthy - have basically just been about how afraid of losing people she is, and why she is that way. We've seen her freak out when the Elrics, specifically, have been in danger several times before this.

Do you really think we have such goldfish memories that we'd need this heavyhanded, melodramatic visual reminder here? Granted, the "last time on" after the OP does make me suspect this episode aired after a hiatus, so some reminders of things might have been a good idea, but the graveyard scene itself was more than enough.

It's at least as bad as the thing with Hughes' family photo during his death scene. A little worse, since actually showing Winry's parents in flashback could have gotten the story a lot more mileage if it was saved for a more appropriate time and used to communicate more information about her and the brothers' childhoods or the like.

...

Edward and Alphonse had been waiting for Yao's signal that the haemonculi were engaged, but the signal isn't coming, and if they ever had a chance of actually beating Scar with their new powers that window of opportunity is now past. Scar is able to at least keep up with two spontaneous casters (even when Alphonse reveals himself to be no less of a clever imitator than his brother, and breaks out a counterfeit version of Armstrong's limb-duplicating power much like Edward has learned to copy Scar's own signature move). Alphonse is tireless, but Edward seems to tire much faster than Scar does, and it's getting to the point where Alphonse is having to keep Edward alive as he continues to wear out.

They're starting to regret having arranged for no soldiers to be able to back them up. A couple are already onsite, but Scar trivially kills them before they can find a good window to start shooting. Oops.

Desperate to buy time (and, to be fair, their plan COULD still work out. They haven't gotten Yao's signal yet, but they also haven't seen any Sins show up to gank Scar, so it's most likely that the other battle is still ongoing and that Yao and Ninjette may yet succeed), Alphonse tries to get Scar talking. He starts by using a break in the action to ask Scar what exactly his deal with alchemists in particular is, given that he uses a form of alchemy himself. Scar dodges that question the same way he's done in the past by rambling about how a world that suffers from creators like them needs destroyers like him to liberate it. Which, well. Is a dodge. Alphonse changes tac, and asks him why he murdered Alexina, and this actually gets more of a reaction from Scar. He turns to Alphonse, and tells him, as a distorted remix of "Lurking" starts playing, that if someone didn't mercykill her while her location was still known, the junta would have shipped her off to a lab to die a slow, torturous death after months or years of study.

And that hits both Edward and Alphonse pretty hard in turn. They both realize two things at this moment. One of those things is made explicit in the show, and the other is subtextual.

...

First, yes, Scar is almost certainly right. The brothers know at this point that the Amestrian military has a human chimera program, and that elements within it at the very least are not above using death camps and similar to fuel other forms of alchemical research. Even if there's nothing they could possibly learn from a hackjob like Alexina, they'd have probably studied her to see how her father was able to manage it without access to their own secret research, assess the probability of the state's enemies having similar programs, etc. Allowing her to fall into government hands would have been the worst possible outcome for her, and there was a part of the brothers that knew this was a possibility even before they learned about the protostone and state chimeras. Euthanizing Alexina may or may not have been the morally optimal solution, but on reflection it was clearly superior to what the brothers themselves did. They've only thought of Scar as an enemy who needs to be defeated so far, but now they're realizing that they could actually stand to learn from him in more regards than just plagiarizing his explodey-touch attack.

Second, what Alphonse seems to be starting to say, and what the rush of guilt-nightmare images that come back to Edward's mind point at, is that the brothers are both realizing that up until a few weeks ago, they would have been outraged at Scar for even suggesting this possibility. As State enforcers, and (probably to a lesser degree) as raised Amestrians who never really had an outside perspective on the country, they've identified themselves with the regime much more than they realized. Even after the Greed incident, when the dictator himself began arousing their suspicion, they've been discussing this conflict as a matter of rooting out infiltrators or rogue actors within the military. For any proclaimed cynicism and skepticism of Edward's, he's retained an unquestioned assumption that the state is good, and unthinkingly attributed evidence to the contrary to bad apples.

Before they met Greed's gang, and raided lab 5, they'd have been defending the reputations of the very creatures that they're trying to root out now because of that assumption. By allowing themselves to represent the state's authority, they're STILL defending those creatures even as they also fight against them. The bunch has already been spoiled. As state enforcers, the Elrics are bad apples. There's no such thing as a good apple in a place like Amestris. It's a contradiction in terms.

As long as they carry the badges, the Elric brothers are part of the problem. Finally, they're on the brink of realizing this. They're not quite there yet, but I feel like this is the moment where that process begins in earnest.

If only Yao could just get a message to them right now, somehow. If Scar and the Elrics found out about Wrath, I think this could turn into a team-up right then and there.

...

Unwilling to be completely paralyzed by introspection just yet, and probably also not wanting the conversation to lose momentum until he's caught his breath a little more, Edward asks Scar how he can explain his murder of the Rockbells. And, given how un-subtle battles involving the Elrics tend to be, Winry has managed to follow the smoke and explosions to the site, and comes within hearing range just in time to catch this.

I'm kind of bothered by the show asserting that Mustang and Hawkeye's prank calls can keep all but a handful of the city guards from finding the actual battle, but simultaneously Winry is able to easily find it by following the smoke and noise. I feel like this is a less-bad example of the same direction issues "Death of the Undying" suffered from. Oh well.

Did Winry always have those steel earring things, or only since Rush Valley? If the latter, that's a nice touch.

Edward doesn't see Winry's approach until after he's laid out his entire accusation in detail, so she hears everything. And, quite tellingly, Scar doesn't deny it, or (as I personally was expecting) ask Edward what the hell he's talking about.

Well, shit. It looks like I was wrong. Scar actually did it.

Winry enters by asking, dazedly, if she just heard that right. If the man in front of her right now murdered her parents after they broke the laws of their own country and risked their lives to save him. Scar remains completely silent, and completely still, as the three surround him in the classic "judgement" formation.

Winry asks him what her parents did. The way she asks it, I don't think it actually is purely rhetorical. She sounds terrified at the prospect of actually receiving an answer from Scar. Fortunately for her, she does not.

An eerie, droning chant forms the musical backdrop for this scene. It forms a sort of white noise that underscores Scar's silence, and its religious connotation are perfectly matched to the character this scene is focused on. Unless I've missed some of them before, that's three new tracks introduced in this episode. I've liked most of FMA:B's music so far, but the relatively short list of songs was starting to get repetitive, so this is a very welcome introduction.

Winry collapses on her knees, sobbing. This was not the right moment to suddenly confront her with her parent's murderer. Or with the knowledge that they were *murdered* at all, as opposed to having been in a particular bunker when it randomly got hit by artillery or the like. As she sobs, the brothers stare in horror, and Scar remains statue-like, the camera flashes over to the handgun one of the intervening soldier's dropped when Scar took him out. The brothers try to stop her, but Winry ignores them. She picks the gun up, and aims it.

Then, finally, Scar's own composure breaks, as the words of his old abbot come back to him. Reprisal will invite further reprisal. The abbot was warning him not to provoke Amestris into another crackdown against the diminished Ishvalan population, but it's applicability in this situation hits him closer to the heart. This isn't his hated enemy just doing what his hated enemy does. This is him. This is the deadly revenge of someone whose family was killed for no good reason. In this scenario, Winry is Scar, and Scar is the Amestrian military.

It looks like the Elrics aren't the only ones getting their "are we the baddies?" moment in this episode. Scar DID have one of those before, of course, when the abbot actually gave him that advice and he shrugged it off, willing to be evil if that's what continuing his revenge requires. He forsook his own godly name as part of that acknowledgement, even before that meeting. But there's a difference between acknowledging that he's doing evil in general, and acknowledging that he's becoming the same flavor of evil as his hated enemy. This might actually have a chance at getting through to him.

Scar asks Winry if she is, in fact, the doctors' daughter. When her sobbing intensifies, he grits his teeth, cracks his knuckles, and tells her that she has his permission to shoot him.

...

Fuck.

Winry. Don't do it Winry.

Don't you FUCKING do it, Winry!

...

As all three of the others gasp in surprise, we go into an extended flashback. Again in black and white. Sort of. There's bits of it that are old school black-and-white video style, and others where the color is just sort of muted. I don't know if it's trying to do A Thing here or what, but if so it's not really coming across for me.

So, it's the beginning of the "outright genocide" phase of the war. Amestrian forces are inbound on an Ishvalan city, and the man who will someday be known as Scar is trying to evacuate his brother before they arrive. Notably, Scarless' arms are unmarked, while Brothar has eldritch tattoos printed all over both of his arms. I guess he tested his alchemy/alkahestry glyph research on himself first.

Said self-testing was apparently quite recent, as Scarless hasn't seen them on him before. Brothar, still reluctant to leave his research and flee before the invasion, explains that these markings are an early proof-of-concept for his invention. Through careful study and combination of eastern and western magical techniques, he's managed to create universal transmuters. The glyphs covering his right arm form a universal disintegrator, while the ones on his left form a universal reconstructor.

Does this mean he can create perfect copies of anything he disintegrates? Or...does it mean he can create any material after charging himself up by disintegrating an equivalent mass? Either way, that's a heck of a game changer.

Before Brothar can explain though, Unscared is ushered away by a crowd of his research assistants. They explain that Brothat is right on the brink of creating a weapon that can turn this conflict around. If he abandons his lab now, the research will be set back too far to make a difference, but if he's able to continue working he might just manage to complete it in time to use it in the city's defense.

Scarless is pretty pissed off about this. Apparently, Brothar was a pacifist the last time they met, and sort of an embodiment of the old "international scientific brotherhood" paradigm that the Amestrian alchemists were once a part of. It's not clear if Scarless is angrier at Brothar for abandoning his principles, at the other Ishvalans for encouraging him to, or at the Amestrians for both forcing his hand and doing a big part to erode the philanthropy that once defined alchemist culture, but he's angry at all of them.

Shelling begins. Civilians who weren't able to evacuate in time start fleeing. An Amestrian alchemist raises a stone wall (I think it's deliberate that we're seeing the exact same spell that Izumi once used to stop a flood being repurposed for genocide) to cut them off. It turns out that the initial mortar barrage was just to chase the residents out of the buildings, so that the alchemist could trap them against the wall for his rifleman companions.

The black and white does help drive the intended historical parallels home in shots like this. It would have seemed more natural and less hamfisted if the show used this effect for all the previous flashbacks though; as it is, this just sticks out too much.

Scarless fights his way back toward his brother's lab; it's obviously too late to defend the city at this rate, and he's not going to have time to put any finishing touches on any superweapon glyphs with the Amestrians raining death right on top of him. On the way, he runs into a small crowd of older Ishvalans that include his parents. A moment later, Brothar arrives as well; he's not too self-absorbed to realize he's out of time here, so he just compiled as many of his notes as he could before fleeing the lab. He hands the resulting binders to Scarless, and tells him to keep them until they get to somewhere safe enough for him to finish the project. Brothar might have the prototypes inscribed on his arms, but (despite being fairly beefy) he's never fought a day in his life. Scarless, as one of Ishval's premier martial artists who's spent most of his life in a monastery specializing in such, can do a better job keeping the notes safe.

Unfortunately, that's when Kimblee catches up to them.

It's not clear exactly what sort of transmutation he's using here, except that he seems to charge an expanding surface area of concrete until he has the entire crowd inside of it's boundaries before "releasing" it. Maybe it's an electrical thing? Changing the magnetic charge of material and then letting it equalize? Something like that, I guess.

Also, the lightning effect when he casts it (breaking the semi-monochrome of the rest of the scene) is red, rather than the usual blue. That's confirmation that protostone was in fact issued to at least some state alchemists during the war. I wonder what the users were told about what they were being given, that would have let them use it without realizing what it actually was? How many of the front-line combat alchemists were given it? Do Mustang and Armstrong actually have prior experience with philosopher's stone without ever having realized it?

Speaking of which...well, the story might be going somewhere with this, but for now I feel like it should have been one of those two instead of Kimblee who did the deed here. An unproblematically evil psycho-for-hire sort of goes against the theme here. Mustang, at least, has already admitted that he personally participated in mass killings, so...having the onscreen face of the genocide be someone like Kimblee instead of someone like Mustang feels like softballing.

Brothar does something with his arm-glyphs, and manages to survive the blast, though he's pretty battered. Unfortunately, he wasn't able to shield anyone else, and after he picks himself up it's just him and a bunch of corpses that used to be his family surrounded by smoke and rubble. Staggering through the carnage, he manages to find the only other survivor; Scar, who managed to dash to the periphery of the blast. There's an open X-shaped wound on his forehead, and one of his arms is missing. He's lost a lot of blood, and is in the process of losing more.

Brothar kneels over him, extending his own tattooed left arm over Scar's stump, and performs human transmutation.

When Scar regains consciousness, he's in a ragged field hospital, half-covered in bandages. He tries to move, and sees a tattooed arm moving into his field of vision. For a moment, he's relieved, literally to the point of tears, to see that Brothar survived too. Then he moves his arm a little more, and realizes what he's looking at.

If he hadn't been dazed, panicked, and half-delirious with blood loss, Scar probably would have noticed that the terrified Ishvalans suffering from a variety of horrible ones all packed into the room weren't restrained in any way. He might also have noticed that Brothar's notebook was still at his side, that there were no armed guards, and that the pair of Amestrian doctors standing over the scene holding bloody surgical tools looked exhausted and harried. But, he was dazed, panicked, and half-delirious with blood loss, so all he saw was a pair of Amestrian doctors with bloody scalpels standing over a bunch of wounded and terrified Ishvalans, and his brother's arm grafted onto his own body. I suspect there also might have already been rumors circulating about the junta practicing human experimentation at secret facilities.

Scar didn't know how to use his new disintegrator yet, so he grabbed a bonesaw as he lurched to his feet. By the time he realized his mistake, it was much too late. The flashback ends with him staggering out of the field hospital, trying to reconcile himself with the innocent blood on his hands, and seeing his birth city in the valley below reduced to lifeless rubble under the moonless night sky.

Back to the present.

Scar tells Winry to either shoot him, or get out of here. He also now says that if she shoots, she will have become his enemy; sounds like he's turning indecisive about whether or not he'll cooperate with being shot by Winry, so if she's going to do it she'd better do it fast. Winry raises the pistol to aim for the head, but then hesitates, still crying. Edward leaps forward, and Scar turns around to parry him, but he was just leaping over Scar to get to Winry and interpose himself so that neither she nor Scar can hit the other without getting through him.

Scar reaches far them, and then realizes he's standing in almost the exact same pose as Kimblee before he used his big lightning blast or whatever it was. He stops, and hesitates again, giving Alphonse time to punch him clear across the alley. Rather than fight back, Scar just blasts his way through a nearby wall and escapes. He also accidentally kills some poor kitty cat who happened to be on the other side of said wall. :(

With Scar gone, Winry collapses in tears again. She whispers that she couldn't kill him, and it's not clear if she's ashamed of herself for having tried to, ashamed of herself for not having managed to go through with it, or both. As Alphonse runs off (either to chase Scar or, more likely, to see what's going on with Yao and Ninjette), Edward kneels in front of Winry and tells her that she should be proud rather than ashamed. After all, what's Winry's legacy so far been? Medical prosthetics. Delivering a baby. Creating and restoring life, not destroying it.

I'd feel like their respective genders would make this kinda skeevy, if not for the facts that 1) the flashback we just saw showed a male example of someone like Winry; like her, Brothar could only use his powers to heal rather than kill, even if circumstances sometimes forced him to make weapons for more violent friends and relations to use, 2) Edward has never killed anyone either, and probably wouldn't have tried to discourage Winry from anything short of lethal violence, and 3) women like Hawkeye and Ross who the narrative does not look down on for being able and willing to shoot exist. The close juxtaposition of that first one in particular seems like it might even be deliberate, to avoid the appearance of sexism. So, that's nice.

Winry drops the gun, and wails. It's not clear if Edward's words have made her feel better, or worse. End episode.


That was definitely the heaviest episode since at least "Those Who Lurk Underground," if not the entire show. Not the best, necessarily, but it's not too far short of that superlative either.

My appreciation for it is also heightened by how many other shows try to have an episode (or arc) like this and do it badly (there's a particular episode of A:tLA I'm thinking of here, among other examples). Often, such attempts either draw an insulting false equivalence between the genocidal monsters and the people fighting to resist the genocidal monsters, make some limp attempt at pacifist window-dressing before going right back to enthusiastic and glamorous violence the following week, or both. "Backs in the Distance" doesn't draw any false equivalences, and it doesn't pretend to be pacifistic. Instead, it reinforces one of this show's strongest overarching themes: that the only neccessary thing for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

There's a repeating pattern of the Father's plans requiring everyone to behave at their worst. His plans usually succeed, because everyone usually does. He's able to prepare the board for his big ritual because the Amestrians are willing to follow a loud and proud strongman named Emperor Tyrant Rex. He's able to procure as many experimental victims and protostone live-fire tests as he can use because even the state alchemists who aren't like Kimblee were willing to murder the Ishvalans when ordered to (and the fact that someone like Kimblee was ever tolerated within the ranks is illustrative in itself). Sin is his instrument, after all. When something goes wrong for him, it's often because someone cooperates when they were expected to defect. Scar backing down here and sewing the seeds for possible cooperation between himself and the Elrics in the future is very bad news for Sin Inc. Mustang hit him right in his blind spot by pretending to be a more violent, proud, and impulsive person than he actually was. So often in fiction, it's kindness and restraint that are made out to be the liabilities. Looking at the world that's actually outside my window, at the tools that the biggest exploiters who cause the most damage seem to employ, I'm pretty sure that that's just what they want us to think.

No wonder Wrath was so irritated by Yao's little bit of genuine selflessness. Every time he sees something like that, it's got to erode his faith in everything he's been raised with and instructed to expect and make use of. And, perhaps, strengthening the internal voice that's telling him Greed was right.

The importance of self-awareness is also a big deal in this episode, and I feel like that ties in with my reading of the misotheistic/misonaturalistic themes of "All Is One" and "Those Who Lurk." The first step to NOT letting evil triumph is being aware of what's wrong with the world, and - more importantly - how you yourself might be part of the problem. Maybe if enough of us do that, we can find another option besides letting the worst of human nature take its course or recusing ourselves from it. Maybe there's a way to pry ourselves off of the wall and kick the douchebag's ass before he can drink us.