Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood S2E1: “Interlude Party”

On one hand, I'm excited at passing the halfway point of the series. And these last few episodes really HAVE been a major transitional point.

Season one was many things, but overall it tended toward conspiracy thriller. Edward, Mustang, and the others were investigating ominous mysteries in their homeland, and unraveling the web of corruption within their own organization. That's basically run its course now. The Elric brothers have found out more or less who and what the enemy is. Mustang has been all but officially stripped of his rank, and I doubt Edward will keep his state alchemist certification for long. From this point on, they're going to have to work toward defeating that enemy, and they're not going to be able to do so from within the system it hides behind. So, I expect major changes in not only the scope and feel of the story, but (in some ways) its entire genre.

But, I might not get to see that today after all. "Interlude Party" is an episode I've been warned about. In fact, I remember hearing people complain about it years ago, before I even knew what Fullmetal Alchemist was about. And, when I googled "worst Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood episode" after watching "Miracle at Rush Valley" to see if it was going to get any worse, well...this was the only episode title that appeared significantly more times on the search results than that one did. And, completely unprompted, at least two of my Discord members have independently asked me to please skip this one.

Sorry, Discord people. With the amount of buildup I've been given for this episode, I really don't have any choice.

What I gather is that this is a clipshow episode, and (as the title implies) every bit as filler-y as those tend to be. Why they started off the season with something like this, I won't pretend to have any idea. But regardless, let's see how embarrassing S2E1 really is.

As the episode does not start where either of the season one finale cliffhangers left off, it is definitely an interlude. The visuals confirm that there also is, in fact, a party. So, truth in advertising if nothing else! 

A whole village worth of Amestrian rural types celebrating around a big fire, while happy violin music plays. After watching them drink their beer and listen to their violins and just be ridiculously Central European in general for a while, we catch a familiar face watching from the outskirts. One of the Hohenheims is here, staring coldly at the scene from behind his creepy anime villain glasses. A moment later, the younger version of Pinako that we saw in that old photo of hers comes up and tries to get him to drink with her, which gives us an approximate time and place.

And also an approximate Hohenheim. I doubt more than one of them was living in Resembool in the decades leading up to the brothers' and Winry's births. 

He relents, shifts his head to rid his glasses of the spooky glare, and almost sort of smiles. I'm increasingly getting the impression that he and Pinako weren't just friends. Then, roll the new intro!

It, um. It has a nasally disco song playing over it. And the visuals are way, way less energetic and fluid than either of the previous intros as well. Half or so of the montage is barely even animated. I know it took me a long time to warm up to the "Hologram" intro, but with that one I acknowledged from the beginning that the visuals were fine, and that the song was just unfitting rather than bad. I don't think I can say either of those things about "Golden Time Lover." The song would be okay if the vocalist wasn't so nasally, and the visuals are passable by general anime standards, but compared to either of the previous FMA:B intros? Yeah, easily the weakest of the three. Hopefully it won't stick around too long.

As far as story relevant stuff goes, there's one moment where we suddenly cut between Father on his throne and Hohenheim sitting morosely at a campfire, with the camera zooming into Father's eye and then out of Hohenheim's. It's framed in a way that seems to be hinting at shared experience, on top of them being clones or whatever. Also, there's one bit where Kimblee is holding a philosopher's stone in his mouth. Bad idea, Kimb. The last thing that caught my attention was one bit of the montage that features a bunch of ruthless looking soldiers marching across a fortified wall in a snowy, alpine place. 

This is probably that northwesten border that Amestris shares with that unfriendly rival empire, Drachma. Guess we'll be going there in the next dozen episodes, and probably learning a little bit more about the world beyond Amestris.

After the so-so OP, we return to the Resembool bonfire party. Lol, they're waltzing now, I guess East Province really is the most German part of Amestris' mixed European fantasy counterpart millieu. Most of the villagers have gone home, and those that haven't are either dancing, playing music for the dancers, or just watching. Hohenheim and Pinako are among the third group. She's still trying to convince him that loosening up once in a while isn't the worst thing in the world, even if they have more important things they could be doing. Hmm. What important things are they doing, I wonder? If nothing else, she says, folk celebrations like this are a needed distraction from the constant string of wars Amestris has been getting itself into. She mentions Ishval as a particularly recent one; from the chronology, this must be the conflict that resulted in Ishval's annexation, and which set the stage for the rebellion and its genocidal repercussions some decades later.

...

You know, maybe we've just been sheltered from it due to the narrative being focused on people in the military, but the show could be doing a better job of showing a country groaning under the weight of constant warfare. Whenever we've seen civilian life, there's been no sign of, say, food shortages or failing infrastructure caused by resources being diverted to the front lines. We've seen broken families from the most recent Ishval conflict, but seemingly only that conflict; the amount of attention it gets, and the lack of any other wars being talked about except in the most abstract and nonspecific way, gives the impression of this actually being a pretty peaceful part of the world most of the time. I think that may also be why the Amestrian junta seemed to lack much of a bite in the show's early episodes. Everything is supposedly militarized, but who are they fighting? What is it costing them? How much of the Amestrian population grew up missing one or more parents to wars other than the Ishval Revolt? Etc.

Maybe the situation with the country's war economy is just more complicated and deceptively nice-looking than it seems. But, I'm starting to lean toward "the story just doesn't do a very thorough job of presenting the warlike society it intends Amestris to be."

...

Pinako complains about the state of the country some more, while Hohenheim listens. Then we hear a voiceover of Lust and Envy's conversation from "Rain of Sorrows" about how easily humans are provoked to senseless violence, and rewatching that episode's Liore riot scene. Then Scar's monochrome home city being shelled again (okay, yeah, we're seeing other flashbacks in this episode, but they have normal coloration. Ishval is canonically a black-and-white supernatural fallout zone). Then Hughes in his office, when he was starting to notice the recent border skirmishes having something like a pattern to them. Then Edward's geopolitics lesson to Yao. Yeah, it's a clipshow ep.

Finally, we get back to some new material, with a little girl running up to Hohenheim at the party and asking him to dance. Pinako gently ribs him about this, and he doesn't respond. 

In fact, he hasn't moved since well before the clip montage interrupted the scene. One could understandably think he died sitting up.

Finally, he musters up the energy to move his lips again, and tells the girl to go dance with someone else. Or by herself. Whatever. Pinako gives her a more cheery sendoff, and then adresses Hohenheim again. First mocking his sourpuss-ness again, and then mentioning that "those boys" were about that age when they first started thinking about human transmutation.

Bwuuuuuuhh???

Unless Pinako had a run-in with the Witch of the Wastes after this point and aged forty years overnight, she couldn't possibly be talking about Edward and Alphonse. Who are we talking about now, then?

But, no...then there's more clipshow of Edward and Alphonse doing the thing, intercut with Hohenheim talking about how they have much to atone for and he can't really give them any encouragement. Pinako tells him he's being incredibly harsh on them.

But. Pinako is young. And Hohenheim is...well...here.

Are they talking about some other boys entirely, with the show just doing a confusing wannabe-artsy thing showing the other boys who attempted human transmutation while they do? Or is this all supposed to be in Hohenheim's mind, with young!Pinako being a representation of his empathy or something like that? IDK.

Flash ahead to freshly maimed Edward and Alphonse recovering in the months after the incident. We saw this clip of Edward reading some alchemy books while sitting in a wheelchair before, as he starts looking into the philosopher's stone. Then them finding out about philosopher's stone being made of people from Dr. Marcoh's notes. The show's go-to "scary" music plays, and then the villagers are dancing around a collapsing wooden pyre in a manner reminiscent of a sacrificial rite. 

As it collapses in the middle of their dance circle and the flames erupt upward, Hohenheim watches with an exceptionally villainous glasses-expression.

It is a pretty fitting bit of symbolism, however obtuse the episode's use of it might be. The people dancing to someone's tune in a perfect circle around a burning construction, until it collapses and the flames cover everything.

Pinako has left him alone, and is dancing around the fire with the others. That group seems to have become mostly children, in between cuts. Hohenheim keeps watching, until another instance of him wanders up out of the forest and makes conversation. 

He dismisses humans as weak, pathetic creatures, more valuable as a resource for their own kind to harvest and exploit than as free-living entities. Notably, jerk!Hohenheim doesn't have glasses, which is one of the visual differences between Hohenheim in his civvies and Father in his supervillain god robes outfit. So, this is Father. Or the "Father" part of some shared consciousness of theirs. Or whatever.

More clips, now of Edward and Alphonse doing the lab 5 raid. Actually, I take that back, it's just the Edward vs. Slicer fight, in nearly it's entirety. This was pretty exciting, back when I was actually watching that episode and it was relevant to the part of the story at hand. It's almost completely tangential to the framing narrative of this ep though, making it both longer AND more badly placed than the other clips so far. This runs for over two minutes, stopping after Lust and Envy crash the party and start babbling about the sacrifices. Then a bunch more clips of the Sins talking about the sacrificial plans.

Oh. The "relevance" of that fight scene was that it led to a few lines of Lust mentioning sacrifice. They really were desperate to fill those minutes, weren't they. :/

MacDougle making his big ice spell in Central, which...oh, huh, that's actually a clever thing from the pilot that I didn't notice. It looks like the layout of Central formed a half-finished glyph all on its own, and MacDougle's own additions just repurposed the existing infrastructure. Cool...though one wonders how Father is supposed to have managed to micromanage Central's urban planning over what must have been a long period of time without tipping his hand. Then Xerxes getting eaten by Wog-tentacles. Then back to the bonfire.

Father is gone now, and Pinako has come back over to angrily ask Hohenheim why he didn't warn anyone about the big threat. He replies that it simply wouldn't have helped. 

Humans make the same mistakes over and over again. Civilizations bring themselves and each other down. He's seen it enough times, already. Why even bother trying to help them against superior life forms like haemonculi? Pinako tells him that there's always hope; humans will never just give up and accept their fate. Cue Mustang killing Lust, Edward and Yao capturing Gluttony, Edward fighting Greed to a draw, Scar's brother turning him into an anti-Father weapon, Alphonse overcoming his doubts about himself (that...doesn't really fit the other clips here), etc.

The framing definitely makes it seem like Hohenheim is himself a haemonculus with divided sympathies. This really is turning out to be a robot uprising story, isn't it?

The fire burns itself out, and it's just Pinako and Hohenheim arguing about human worthiness.

She asks him if he'd really be okay with everyone he knows in Amestris, including his own sons (if they actually are his biological sons after all...), being wiped out in an instant. Interestingly, she doesn't ask him if he's okay with them being preserved as a suffering, seething mass of tortured imprisoned souls rather than dying natural deaths. Which indicates that either being used to make a philosopher's stone isn't QUITE as bad as Envy's appearance suggested, the Amestrians are not going to be used to make philosopher's stone, or the "normal" afterlife in this setting is no better than that anyway.

Envy already implied the second of those three things. And more and more it seems like a philosopher's stone was used to destroy Xerxes, rather than having been made from the destruction of Xerxes. Though I suppose you could use a philosopher's stone to melt down a country's worth of people and make even more philosopher's stone, so those aren't mutually exclusive.

Yeah, not enough context to really be sure what's at stake for the Amestrians. And for the rest of the world, depending on the specifics of Father's ambitions.

Speaking of Father, Hohenheim responds to Pinako's question by disappearing, and then Father is standing in the ashes of the expired bonfire. Well, "Father." He's missing the glasses and acting like a jerk, but he's not wearing the white robes, so I assume its Father or Hohenheim's Fatherific half or whatever. He tells her that even if "she" does take action to protect these humans, every one of them will be dead in a few decades anyway and it won't have made a difference. Why not let Father do his thing, and let them at least be of use to somebody? Once again, no indication of what's going to happen to the Amestrians being a fate worse than death, at least.

Father tells Pinako that she really should do as she was told previously; grab everyone and everything that she particularly cares about, and get out of the Amestrian border. Then he mocks her for being full of worthless sentiment and vestigial regrets, and pulls off her mask to reveal Hohenheim's face underneath. Which, well. This is Hohenheim's dream or meditation or whatever, so all the characters are him. Father tells him that nobody is going to accept him as a human "now" anyway. Hohenheim's face starts boiling with trapped souls, just like Envy's true form. 

Hohenheim IS a haemonculus then, or at least thinks of himself as being the equivalent of one in terms of his existence's consequences and moral weight.

The way that Father says that he won't be seen as human now suggests he might not have always been this way, though. Is he something along the lines of Wrath? Father seemed awfully triumphant when he managed to create Wrath, as if it was a successful experiment, so if that's the case the making of that style of haemonculus must be a lost technique he recently rediscovered.

The way that Father had been talking to Pinako!Hohenheim a second ago was making me lean toward one of them having created the other. Thinking about it more, though...nah, brothers still seems more likely (though I guess it's possible that Hohenheim both created Father and also turned himself into a Wrath-type haemonculus without ever teaching Father how to do that as well, but...I'll need more evidence for something that intricate). Both in terms of the hows and whys of what Father knew how to create at what era, and in light of the series' title. There's a recurring motif of brothers with weird alchemy-twisted relationships, with Edward and Alphonse, the Slicers, Scar and Brothar, etc all being examples. So, Hohenheim and Father being another example of this would fit best.

Should Edward and Alphonse call him Uncle, then? I'll bet that would piss him off lol. This also would make the sins their cousins. Unless my spitballed "Hohenheim created Father" hypothesis above is actually true, in which case Father is their older brother, and the sins are their nieces and nephews.

...hmm. If I'm musing about the Hohenheims' origins now, though, I wonder. Is "Father" actually that one's original, given name, rather than just what his creations call him? If so, and thinking about this story in the context of robot uprising conventions, maybe the purpose he was created for was in fact to reproduce? Created by a crazy Xerxian transhumanist cabal, who thought a race of self-replicating haemonculi made puréed human souls would be a step up from humanity in its baseline state? Maybe. That doesn't feel quite right, even if it could be on the right track. His attempt to create his own universe with Gluttony suggests a much bigger and weirder ambition.

Hohenheim covers his bubbling, fractal face, and Father vanishes, leaving him staring at his own hands. We saw some version of him staring at those in the "Again" intro, too. Father's voice continues from nowhere, insisting that humans are best treated as a renewable resource to be harvested periodically and left to regrow in the meantime. 

Hohenheim is then approached by that little girl who tried to dance with him before. She's a decade or two older now, and recognizable as Trisha. So, he knows what she looked like as a kid, then. That's a little bit creepy, but I suppose it's a level of creepiness that you can't really avoid when it comes to immortals having relationships with humans. More importantly though, I'll take this as a sign that she actually was a normal human.

She gives him a more lib-left sales pitch, reminding him that even if an individual human doesn't last long, humans acting together can create something much better than the sum of its parts, without needing to destroy the individual humans to do so. Wasn't the time they spent together in Resembool, and the family they built there, an example of that? Wasn't that shared familial entity something better and bigger than just one human life, with qualities that using those same people to make a haemonculus would have eliminated? Maybe, with enough time, after enough failures, human interactions can produce something truly great; something that can change the world in a way that makes up for the relentless, banal wastefulness and folly of man's existence. Without needing to be puréed. 

Okay then. It's starting to seem like Hohenheim's rural husband/father/statealchemist career was an experiment of sorts. An attempt to find reasons to care about humans, by reimmersing himself in humanity at the ground level. I think? If that was the intent, he kinda sabotaged his own experiment by not spending more time with his wife and kids. Those kinds of methodological errors will really fuck with your results.

There's another clipshow of various heartwarming bits from throughout the series of characters helping and taking risks for each other, culminating in a slightly-too-sappy scene of Hohenheim having cherry blossom petals rain down on him while being surrounded by smiling villagers, including young, pre-mutilation versions of Edward and Alphonse. Then he wakes up, alone in the mountain wilderness, with the ashes of his small campfire before his feet. 

He looks at an empty bottle - the same brand of whisky that Pinako offered him in his dream - and thanks her for helping him figure things out. Then, he picks up his briefcase and exits stage right. End episode.

I didn't hate this as much as I was expecting to, but it certainly wasn't good.

My summary is probably making the episode sound a lot better than it is, since I mostly focused on the Hohenheim stuff and breezed past the clipshow montages that fill most of the runtime. But, those clips ARE most of the runtime, and a lot of them are both very extended and only barely relevant to the framing narrative. It definitely feels like it was thrown together by an editor without the usual writer(s) having much to do with it.

I suspect that one of the reasons this episode is so disliked is because of its placement. A clipshow episode (and a flawed one at that) is going to try the audience's patience at the best of times. Injecting it in the middle of a cliffhanger, and making it a season pilot? God, what were they even thinking? If they needed to do a clipshow to save money or time or whatever, they could have injected this one almost anywhere in the last few episodes of s1, or (likely) the first few of s2 (well, maybe the next episode is going to start with Hohenheim rescuing Alphonse from Father or something, but otherwise yeah). If they just wanted to drag out the tension of the cliffhangers, well...remember what I said about how Wrath's backstory made "Reunion" too overfull and intellectually taxing, and that they should have just blown it up into its own full episode? Yeah. That would have been a fine interlude episode to drag out the season 2 pilot. Certainly better than this.

As a character study, it kiiiiind of works. The fact that Hohenheim didn't actually SEE the events of most of the clips makes it a little hard to tell what they in particular could be saying about him. Still, we did learn some things, both about him and about Father (or at least, about his perception of Father). Disillusioned, worn out, trying to find reasons to care about either humans OR haemonculi, and only occasionally succeeding. His role in the fall of Xerxes, if he had one, is still unknown, as is the exact nature of he and his villainous doppleganger's relationship. Though it seems like Father has been trying to convince him to take his own view of things and frustrated at his indecisiveness, at some point in the past if not up until the present.

The glasses are a neat symbol. On one hand they obscure Hohenheim's identity (in the usual anime baddie way) to emphasize that he doesn't really know who or what he is; he's unreadable, because he's undetermined. On the other, him wearing those glasses while Father does not shows that Hohenheim still has a foot in the door in terms of human identity. He's at least pretending to have physical impediments like nearsightedness, whereas Father doesn't bother.

So, yeah. Framing device was okay, just badly placed. Clipshow aspect itself was...well, it's a clipshow, those are always bad and this one is no exception. This episode didn't particularly anger or offend me, but probably only because I'd been warned.