Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood S2E14: “The Dwarf In the Flask“

Now that's an evocative title. For at least two reasons.

First, "dwarf in a flask" is an expression used to describe haemunculi in several alchemical texts. I actually looked into this a little bit, and googling the term led me to discover what I think must be Arakawa's main inspiration. The surviving texts with the most detailed lore on this subject are the De Homunculus and De Natura Rerum treatises written by Swiss alchemist Paracelsus in the sixteenth century, and a medieval Arabic tome called The Book of the Cow whose author unconvincingly claims to be Plato. Both sources describe similar, animal cruelty filled, methods of creating haemunculi, with the parallels being such that Paracelsus almost certainly read The Book of the Cow at some point.

Paracelsus, who approached occultism from a pious Christian perspective, claimed that the creation of intelligent life was the greatest wisdom ever revealed by God to humanity. Thus, he wrote, a haemunculus should be educated with "the greatest care and zeal," and treated as one would a normal human child, if not better. Paracelsus also, as far as anyone can tell, actually believed all the pseudoscientific mysticism he wrote about. "Paracelsus" was a pen name. His real name was Theophrastus Phillipus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim.

The earlier writings of ““Plato”” differ in two important ways. For one thing, just the title "The Book of the Cow" is a hubristic pick for its most likely actual time and place of authorship. "The Cow" is, of course, the title of the first section of the Quran. "Scam designed to make gullible Muslims think this is some long lost holy book going back to the golden age of Greece" is the assessment that comes quickly to mind. Second, the haemunculus creation process described in it is even more grotesquely cruel to the animal test subjects, and - more importantly - the purpose of the created entity is to be tortured for the purpose of causing various magical effects, and eventually murdered and rendered down into potion ingredients to give its creator more powers. The entire thrust of "The Book of the Cow" is draining the world of its vitality in order to empower one's self, with its haemunculus creation and murder process being a brutal example of such.

Feels familiar, doesn't it? The weird, but mostly harmless and well intentioned, creation ethos taught by a weird, but mostly harmless and well intentioned, man, Hohenheim. The exploitative, commodifying, creation-for-the-purpose-of-consumption ethos peddled by an unknown author hiding behind fake and glorious names to appeal to the worst natures of their gullible marks. A close similarity in metaphysics between the two that indicates a strong connection despite that conflict in ethos.

On a more personal note, my own first thought when seeing the title was of a story I read as a preteen called "The Bottle Imp," by Robert Louis Stevenson. It terrified me as a kid, to the point where its own attempt at a happy ending didn't feel convincing to me at all. A hideous little man in a bottle grants its owners wealth and material success, but if they die with the bottle in their possession the imp will drag their soul to hell and feast on it for all eternity. The bottle is indestructible, will always find its way back if discarded, and can only be sold for less money than one paid for it, making its succession of customers a countdown to deferred damnation. The story ended "happily" with an old pirate buying the bottle for a tiny amount, claiming that he knew he was going to hell anyway so he might as well make the most of it for now. I guess this might be a happy ending if you're coming from a Christian background like the author's, but for a kid who lacked that background the assumption that sinners get tortured by demons forever anyway wasn't my default one. Also, the imp tended to make its owners rich as the result of tragedy or disaster striking other people, which didn't help.

"The Bottle Imp" was probably inspired by haemunculus myths, as well as the loosely related genie-in-a-lamp archetype from the same part of the world. Whether Arakawa was taking nods from that story as well I couldn't say, but the parallels with Fullmetal Alchemist are easy to draw. It's just that an entire country is the bottle's owner in this case.

Before I get started with the episode: because of the "Daydream" shitshow, this isn't going to be a blind watch. The stuff I wrote above is almost all things that I learned before that, though, and I'd already been planning to write about it as a preface to "The Dwarf in the Flask" before I saw it. As always in cases like this, I'll try to keep my knowledge compartmentalized as I go, and clearly demarcate passages where I'm making an exception.


Open on Fort Briggs, where the new commander is settling in and having the men he brought from Central comb the base and grill the stuff for any evidence about what happened to General Raven. Considering how little care Armstrong took to minimize witnesses, I doubt that will take them long. Her people are loyal, but I don't know if everyone in that room was loyal enough to stand up to hostile interrogation. Meanwhile, in Central, General Armstrong is being walked through the command center under guard. They happen to pass Mustang in the hall, who asks her what she's doing here. I can't remember if Flora Armstrong already relayed this news to him or not, so his question could be genuine.

She insults him a bit. He asks her out on a date. She warns him that she could eat him into bankrupcy, and he says "okay, maybe not dinner then," which leads her to contemptuously call him "a man short on funds and nerves." He then offers her flowers, saying that certainly there are many fine florists in Central. She answers it with a curt "are there, now?" before being led on away. Mustang retreats with a satisfied smile.

So, that was "Mustang is low on material resources right now, Armstrong isn't. Mustang does have a better local communications network, but he should hold off on using it for the moment." Something like that, I think.

She's brought into Wrath's office. He's back in Central now, it seem. I wonder what he was doing when he disappeared on Hawkeye earlier? Maybe Father needed him downstairs for the better part of a day, for whatever reason. He gives her a much more overtly wrathful glare than we usually see from him, and cuts straight to the point, demanding to know what she did to Raven. She considers her response for a moment, before taking arguably the gutsiest possible approach.

She tells him that General Raven told her everything, including the stuff that she actually learned from Edward, with almost zero prompting from her. She reasoned that that certainly must make him a liability to the project, so she killed him before he could blab to someone less compliant than herself, and then answered Wrath's summon in the hopes of taking Raven's place having already demonstrated superior competence.

So, basically, she's just using the same trick that she did on Raven himself, just continuing up the chain of command. Like I said, bold, but I'd expect nothing else from Olivier Armstrong.

Wrath laughs. I don't think we've ever heard him do more than chuckle before, and his full-on laughter is kind of scary and unhinged. It almost sounds like it has a cathartic element to it. Hmmm. He accepts Armstrong's offer, but tells her that she'll understand why he'll need to keep her here and his own men in control of Briggs. She agrees.

Heh. Well played, both of you. Wrath knows that the Elric brothers were up there at the time of Raven's death, and he knows that they know most of the things that Armstrong just told him. He's systematically rigging booby traps to literally every part of daddy's organization that he can manage while maintaining plausible deniability.

Back at Fort Briggs, Armstrong's troops are chaffing under the new administration, but they remain compliant for now, awaiting the word.

Well, the show had all but explicitly stated that Armstrong was planning a coup from the beginning, so for at least the upper ranks of her garrison this is just a change in timetables. I've pointed out before that Amestris is basically organized like a feudal kingdom. One of the historical weaknesses of feudalism is...well, this.

Title card. I'm guessing that the bulk of this episode is going to be a lot more haemunculus-centric (or perhaps Hohenheim-centric, depending on what his actual relationship with them is) than the teaser. Which makes it really bad at being a teaser. I wish the show would stop doing this.

Back to Central. Hawkeye is sitting dejectedly in the command center cafeteria, the scratch on her face not yet healed. Mustang comes over and sits by her, and she tells him that her work is giving her a lot of things to remember, and she has trouble keeping it all down. She eyes the shadows under the table carefully, and taps her cup a couple times on the table to make sure Mustang gets what she's saying here. He happened to have a bunch of paperwork in hand when he sat down, and he keeps filling it out while he listens to her talk. She tells him that she heard Scar is in the north, as are the Elrics. She knows a lot of people in that neighborhood at the moment, given that her classmates Lucy and Ian are also up there. The northern forces used to do a lot of joint exercises with East, so of course she remembers Miles and Buccaneer as well. And so on and so forth. Jump ahead to Mustang in the bathroom, writing all the unusually many names she mentioned in a list.

I'm sure there's a gif out there where someone shopped "you just lost the game" or "ur mom" onto the paper.​

Mustang's first reaction is "IMPOSSIBLE!!!11" which I feel is kind of dumb, considering what he already knows about the situation, but then again he may have had enough personal interaction with Pride to be sold on his innocent kid act. He then muses "what the hell is about to happen in Central?" which is harder for me to follow. Why is Father keeping two haemunculi living undercover as the royalty more ominous than him keeping one? Come to think of it, as a child who's never supposed to leave Central and a VIP whose around a lot of important people, Selim is pretty well placed to covertly "hold down the fort" for Father while Wrath is away on other business.

That may not be the actual reason why Pride is undercover as the dictator's son, of course. If he's actually the first of the Sins chronologically rather than in terms of power/importance (which may or may not be the case), then there must be a reason that he's taking such a public guise now after all this time. But since Hawkeye didn't include the word "first" in her covert message, you'd think Mustang's mind would go to the most obvious answer instead of being stunned and mystified.

Down below, seated on his Giger throne, Father closes his eyes and muses on something. Then, his face in-frame is replaced by a much younger and scrawnier version of itself against a less imposing background.

Well huh. Looks like Father is another example of an aging haemunculus, then? Well...actually, we already knew that from his introductory scene, when Greed commented on how poorly he'd aged since they last met.

A strange, sort of distant-sounding voice wakes Father up, addressing him as "young man." He snaps awake in a panic, apologizing for his indolence and clutching a broom that he'd left leaning against the wall beside him. Sweeping floors? Did Father start out as a mere janitor-bot? That's kind of hard for me to believe. Maybe this is actually young Hohenheim, before he became what he became? Anyway, it looks like he took a nap while sweeping a laboratory. One that looks much more like a traditional 1500's European-ish alchemy lab than anything we've seen in Amestris. The strange voice is coming from a spherical glass flask with two stoppered openings and a floating sphere of solid darkness inside of it. The sphere of darkness is disappointed by his reveal not getting much reaction.

Very similar to Barry being assmad about Alphonse and Riza not being freaked out by him. Curious. Just an Arakawan tic, or is the story trying to hint at something with that commonality?

Well, the little black cloud-thing has got to be a haemunculus. And is closer to the traditional depictions of them, in terms of being tiny and jar-bound, though not in being a cloud of dark matter or whatever.

Its voice, and its way of talking...the voice actor makes it sound like I'd always imagined a drug apparition from Naked Lunch sounding. This distant, unreadable floatiness, with emotions in it, but not identifiable ones. If that makes any sense. Anyway, the VA and sound manipulation people did really good work here, if this was the effect they'd intended.

The young man - Father or Hohenheim, but at this point more likely Hohenheim - sarcastically asks the little vortex how much it'll pay him to act surprised for its amusement. Impressed by his courage, the bottled one asks for his name, and the young man tells it "number 23." Slaves apparently don't have names, in Xerxes.

Now this really feels familiar. Almost...hmm. Hold that thought for now.

The haemunculus responds to his answer by reciting a dictionary definition of the word "slave," which involves some words that #23 doesn't know. This thing is starting to remind me of the caterpillar, from Alice in Wonderland, with its distance, condescension, and placid alienness. It despairs at #23's ignorance, and expresses disbelief that it could have been born from the blood of such a simpleminded being. #23 reacts in confusion, and then looks down at his bandaged arm. His master did tell him he needed his blood for an experiment. Presumably, he's suffering anemia in the wake of this, which is why he fell asleep on the job. It also tells us enough about his master for us to understand why he was panicked when he thought he'd been caught napping.

Also, #23's reaction when the haemunculus calls him stupid confirms that Edward is definitely a descendant of his.

Nonetheless, the little vortex says, if #23 is effectively his parent, then he really ought to have a name, and out of gratitude for donating his blood to create it it decides to gift him with one. Something noble and impressive, worthy of having such a being sired from him. He proposes Theophrastus Bombastus (hardy har har), before deciding that the kid would never be able to remember (let alone spell) that, so he goes with Van Hohenheim.

Something to note here: I watched both the sub and the dub of this episode, and while FMA:B's English dub might be pretty great in general, the English voice for proto-Father here doesn't nearly measure up to his Japanese counterpart. The English voice goes for the whimsical, playful imp vibe when he names Hohenheim. The Japanese one sounds like a drug-addled old man who may or may not also be a serial killer going through his scattered memories trying to find something fitting. I find the latter much more effective, for a number of reasons that I'll address at the end.

Anyway, this answers my Father/Hohenheim questions that I've had since "Father Before the Grave." Father is the only real haemunculus in this story, mythologically speaking; he was grown in a flask from a recipe that included human blood, and he eventually grew into a physical replica of the donor. That's what one is. The others, the Sins, are just offshoots from him, part of him in a possibly literal way, even if they have wills of their own. The surprise for me here, though, is that Hohenheim is neither a flask-mate of Father's (as per my leading theory up until now), nor is he the wizard who created him (my leading theory before that one). He was a lowly, nameless slave of that wizard, whose blood was used without his knowledge of what it was being used for.

Proto-Father starts to spell the name he's just given him, before realizing that he's illiterate. Hohenheim confirms that he doesn't need to read or write in order to perform his labor, so he wasn't taught how. Proto-Father asks him if he's actually content with this, and wonders if possessing more knowledge could make him more than a slave. Otherwise, he might as well be locked in a little flask himself. Hohenheim looks nervous and furtive for a moment, before letting his guard down and enthusiastically telling it that yes, he'd like that more than anything.

...

This is another place where the English voice falls short. In the Japanese version, it sounds like Proto-Father is thinking out loud as he asks Hohenheim these questions. In the English version, he sounds like a used car salesman trying to tempt him. Keep reading, and I'll explain why I dislike the latter interpretation.

...

Hohenheim asks what he should call his new teacher. The black vortex in the flask finally forms itself into a face, and makes its identity clear: Mike Wazowsky.

The resemblance to Pride's shoggoth form is pretty obvious. A form which itself closely resembles the entity behind the Gates of Truth. Mike resembles Wog-Sothoth much more than Pride does, actually, with his large central eye.

...

Paracelsus, the historical Theophrastus Bombastus Van Hohenheim, wrote that haemunculus creation is "the greatest piece of wisdom delivered to man from God." Other alchemists from that era also rambled about haemunculi having the power of prophecy, or of communicating with the divine, to the point that some contemporary art depicted them as tiny angels with little feathery wings.

This is a piece of Wog-Sothoth that's been summoned from beyond the Gate and bound to the physical world using Hohenheim's blood. In fact, looking at that huge toothy white grin of his, I think that this might actually be Hohenheim's own Higher Soul dragged from heaven's antechamber and locked in a jar. A Wogdat forced to take shape in realspace.

I might be off about that last bit. Maybe this used to just be an undifferentiated piece of Wog-Sothoth, rather than the specific part of it that acts as an umbilicum for Hohenheim and that would appear as a snarky white ghostchild if met in its natural environment. Either way, this maniac Xerxian alchemist broke off a piece of the setting's monotheistic God and is keeping it in a terrarium.

Hmm. This could also mean that Pride might not be an attempt at creating a synthetic Wog-Sothoth so much as just him happening to bear the closest family resemblance.

...

There's a montage of time passing and lab work being done. When it ends, we see a slightly older Hohenheim so impressing his master with his "autodidactic" literacy, eloquence, and understanding of alchemy, that he inducts him into the Xerxian alchemist order.

Hohenheim is careful to remain unctuous and sycophantic to his master all throughout, making sure not to seem like a threat or potential rival; merely as someone who'd be more useful as a lab assistant than as a janitor. His master seems to buy it. From inside his flask, Mike - who the old wizard seems to have brought along for Hohenheim's interview - kind of chuckles.

In the last scene, Mike mused that Hohenheim "might as well be stuck in a flask himself" if he didn't rise beyond being an abused house-slave. Mike was born from Hohenheim's blood, which seems to mean a lot to Mike if not to Hohenheim. It's like he's trying to live through him, vicariously rising beyond his own imprisoned, helpless state. Because that's the only kind of advancement he can get, and he might still remember being God or something close to it.

Skip some more time ahead. Hohenheim is watching the sunset from his master's windowsill, with Mike's flask beside him. Hohenheim is thanking Mike for teaching him everything that he's taught him. Now, he might be able to earn his freedom some day, and be granted the rights of a Xerxian citizen, which means he can marry and have children. Where do the Xerxians get their slaves from, I wonder? Hohenheim's master has similar broad features and brass-blonde hair (he's bald, but look at the eyebrows) to himself, so if Hohenheim is a captured foreign child or something he must not be from very far away.

Well, anyway. Mike is bemused when Hohenheim talks about wanting a family. He starts going off about how humans are such pitiful creatures, being reliant on families, communities, and reproduction to keep themselves going. But he notable paused for a moment before doing this, and when he starts his condescending rant he sounds just slightly too emotional about it.

Hohenheim replies that it might seem silly to Mike, but for a human being able to have a family is one of the foundations of happiness.

He then asks Mike what would make him happy. And his answer just...damn. It's totally obvious, but it still hits you so hard.

Really, just think about this. Hohenheim didn't know what his blood was being used for, and he almost certainly didn't give it by choice. He hasn't really done anything for Mike. Now, Mike has turned him from a miserable, put-upon slave into a respected and well cared for apprentice, and set him on the road for freedom, wealth, and influence, while he himself remains stuck in his jar. Less than even a mistreated house slave. Closer to furniture than anything else. He's certainly getting a vicarious thrill in letting Hohenheim advance in the world using what's actually Mike's knowledge and cunning, but even so, here he is stuck in his tiny prison while someone else thanks him for freeing them.

"Well, I don't want to ask for too much, but..."

Damn. Just damn.

Hohenheim isn't the only one who's moving up in the world thanks to Mike's existence, though. Hohenheim's master and Mike's creator/summoner has gotten the attention of the King of Xerxes, and has been summoned before him with Mike in hand. It seems that the aging monarch has an interest in immortality, and wants to know if the haemunculus has any knowledge that could help him attain it.

I'm digging the appropriately Iranian architecture for "Xerxes," heh.

Mike is, once again, bemused when he hears what the king is asking for. Why, he muses aloud, would a man who already has so much wealth, power, and respect not be content with those things and seek immortality on top of that. His creator simply silences him, afraid of letting his creation insult the monarch, though the king lets it slide in the interest of getting Mike to talk.

...

The pattern has been clearly established at this point.

"Are you content being a slave? No? Interesting."

"Part of being a free man is having a family? Interesting."

"You already have so much power, but you're not content with it? Interesting."

...

When sufficiently prodded, Mike gets that Wogdat-ish grin again, and tells the king that he does know of a way of attaining immortality, but it'll take some doing. Next thing we know...

Gonna split it here due to length and image count. Next part should be up soon.