Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood S2E16: “Signs of a Counteroffensive”

Interesting title. Could refer to a hell of a lot of different things. Counteroffensive by Central against the good guys? Counteroffensive by Mustang and/or Armstrong against Central? The war (or at least border skirmish) with Drachma that's been foreshadowed? Who knows.

I did watch ahead and see this episode. It's the last of the ones I binged after "Daydream." However, it's been a couple weeks since then, and there are a few moments I recall that could be the episode's namesake. As usual, I'll be keeping my knowledge compartmentalized as best I can except where I explicitly say otherwise.


Intro. I didn't start off as jarred by this OP's music as I initially was by the last couple, but I'm also not warming up to it over time as much. Still, it's a fine opening.

The episode begins in a house that Scar's party has hunkered down in, presumably in or near that Ishvalan expat village that Scar mentioned before. Winry has Alphonse disassembled, and is trying to figure out what she can do to get him active again. He still hasn't woken up, huh? That's not good. Edward is still in bad shape, but he's at least stabilized now, so Alphonse shouldn't be worse off than he's been any of the other times Ed got knocked out. His soul-bond is definitely starting to wear out.

My prediction is that he will resurface from this once Edward is awake and healthy-ish again, but that incidents like this will happen with less and less provocation as time goes on until they can give him a proper body (either his original one, or a perfect copy of it) or he just dies. Probably the former, but you never know; this story could very well end on a bittersweet note with Father defeated but Alphonse dead as well.

Meanwhile, the rest of the gang are clustered around Brothar's notebook as Scar, Marcoh, and May each contribute their relevant knowledge bases to the decoding. Given the multilingual writing and the code that depends on metaphors and connotations from three different cultures, this is a difficult task. Still, Dr. Marcoh has experience in this sort of cryptography from coding his own notes during his time in Amestrian Unit 731, and Scar is intimately familiar with the author of these notes and how is mind worked, so they're not totally fumbling in the dark. Still, they're not able to put anything together. Particularly baffling is the repeated mention of "gold" and its related "immortality" in various Xingese similes. It keeps showing up, even where seemingly irrelevant. They're pretty sure cracking the code will have something to do with that, but haven't figured out exactly what.

As they grind onward, Alphonse suddenly reawakens. As expected. He might be able to help them out with this as well, since he has experience decrypting the same notes that Marcoh (and probably a lot of other alchemists over the course of his and Edward's search before and during the first part of the series) coded. Still, first things first.~

As they start the process of putting Alphonse back together and making sure they put each piece in the right place, May has a revelation. She looks at the notes, and realizes that there might be a reason they aren't bound like a typical notebook, or even stapled. They're just tied together in a stack with string. Given how metaphor-heavy and multilingual they are, it's hard to follow the continuity of thought from one page to the next. So, if they were out of order, it would be very difficult to notice.

She unties them, and scatters them on the floor. This isn't a cipher, it's a jigsaw puzzle.

Well, it's probably a jigsaw puzzle AND a cipher. But they'll need to solve the former first.

They try overlapping the pages based on recurrence of specific "gold" idioms. And yeah, each page turns out to have at least two different variations of "gold" or "golden man" or "immortality" on it. It's a bit of a headscratcher to me that they immediately jump to overlapping the pages atop each other on the floor instead of trying to just reorder them first, but I can accept this as a time-saving narrative shorthand. Sure enough, arranging them in an overlapping sheet based on conjunctions of "gold" words creates a neat, orderly array of papers all lined up in the same direction.

Okay, now how the hell are you supposed to read this?

May thinks she sees another pattern emerging, after looking at the array for a while. Also, the arrangement of the papers is oddly...circular...in general outline. She connects some points that jump out at her, and makes...um...well:

So...I guess Brothar gave up on his universal assembler research and decided he'd rather melt Amestrians down into protostone and use it to fight back? Well, I suppose that's interesting in a darkly ironic way. I wonder if he had any idea that the Amestrians were already doing the exact same thing?

Or maybe he started down this path before the war ever broke out, and this is a case of one supervillain unknowingly stomping out another before he could get started. Lol.

Not terribly helpful, though. Both because they're not going to do this shit, and because - even if they were willing to - Marcoh already knows how, so this doesn't teach them anything. Marcoh starts to despair. Scar, on the other hand, has trouble believing this. Philosopher's stone research would just be so antithetical to everything he thinks he knows about his late brother. Then they get a lucky stroke when Yoki sneezes and flips some of the pages over, which gives Alphonse the idea of there perhaps being another, very simply step that they haven't tried.

So, they replace all the sheets Yoki disturbed, and then carefully flip them all over while keeping them overlaid. Once again, a pattern jumps out at May, and she links a bunch of symbols using alkehestric pattern recognition to create something similar, but different.

This is the same transmutation array we saw Edward and Alphonse standing in during the OP, the one that I said looked similar to but different from the transmute humans to magical crystal meth glyph.

Assuming that this is related to the universal assembler research, that would mean that it works on somewhat similar principles to the souls > philostone transmutation process. Which actually makes a lot of sense, now that I think about it. Making philosopher's stone seems to be a two-part process, when we've seen it done: first the souls are shaken free of the bodies (sometimes disintegrating the bodies in the process, sometimes not. Seemingly dependent on the precision and skill of the caster), then they're turned into philosopher's stone. The universal assembler is supposed to work in tandem with the universal disintegrator that Brothar completed and gave to Scar. So, what we're looking at here might be a synthesis of the completed disintegrator, and the almost-completed constructor; a "transmute anything into anything" formula. And it necessarily looks a bit like the philosopher's stone array.

I wonder. If *everything* is worth some amount of value in the eyes of Wog, does that mean you could create an ethical philosopher's stone using this array to transform a huge amount of inert matter into philostone? Could you use it to transfer a marginally less huge amount of inert matter into a blank slate human soul?

If so, then Brothar is Benjamin Franklin, Gregor Mendel, and Alan Turing combined in terms of potential importance to human technological advancement, and even that is probably underselling it. If this research is viable, and ends up being able to do what I think it does, then this is a singularity point for the people of Wogosphere. At least on par with the agricultural revolution in the scope of its implications, and probably much greater.

...there's got to be a catch. Or a limitation. Probably both. Well, we'll see.

Cut to Kimblee, edgily licking the blood off his wounded hand as he follows their trail through the mines. Lol, won't it be hilarious if it snows again by the time he gets to the other side and leaves him with no footprints to work with? I suppose he might have happened to research local Ishvalan communities before following Scar up here, so he still might be able to zero in on that village, but given exhaustion and distance from his men with no way of contacting them...yeah, "lol" would be right. Anyway, as he's searching, he finds a locked door with a giant red X painted over it. Seeming to recognize what this means, he forces it open and looks in.

I'm guessing this leads down into the slothtunnels. I wonder how many mines etc along the Amestrian border have had incidents like this happen, where they intersected the tunnels and Central had to hush things up?

Although...hmm. Given how well made that stairway and reinforced walls are, it doesn't look like a case of people having dug too greedily and too deep. The slothtunnels have railroad tracks built into them, probably for the purpose of removing the rock and rubble after Sloth has dug onward (I wonder if moving the minecars full of displaced dirt and rock away and bringing them back is part of Pride's job, actually? That would make sense). Maybe they use old mines and/or cave complexes as convenient places to offload the stuff and/or take in new building materials? In that case, this could have been added after the mine was abandoned, with the red X and all that just being in case of anyone happening to wander in here. Yeah, that's a bit more likely.

And, yep! The staircase descends onto a platform built into the side of an extra wide section of slothtunnel, with a bunch of empty wooden boxes piled around the railway. This was definitely a resupply point for the macroglyph project.

There's also a half-disintegrated human skeleton at the foot of the stairs. Either that X'd-over door didn't deter every urban explorer, or one of the poor schlubs that they forced to bring the stuff up or down stairs got on Pride's nerves.

Just as Kimblee is coming to the same conclusions that I am, Pride extends one of his shadow-shoggoth appendages over to Kimblee, introduces himself as Pride, and asks for a mission report. Kimblee hasn't (knowingly, at least; he might have heedlessly met him in his Selim guise at some point) met this haemunculus before, it seems, but he's unsurprised enough by his entrance that I think he knew about him being down here. Kimblee reports that he's in pursuit of Scar's latest movement right now, and Pride tells him that if he hasn't got him yet he should abandon the hunt for now. First, he needs to head back to Fort Briggs and initiate the massacre there. Time sensitive.

Kimblee, perhaps a bit peeved at having to give up the quarry that's so taunted him, tells Pride that he's not sure if he'll be able to pull that off on his own; the Briggs garrison is tough and well armed. Right, Kimblee might not have heard about recent events at Briggs yet. Pride's reply is...puzzling.

"Make use of their strength." As in, use the Fort Briggs troops to massacre someone else? Get them to fight among themselves? One of those two things, probably.

Also, how was this message expected to get to Kimblee? Maybe Wrath called Fort Briggs for him, and when informed he wasn't there he just told Pride to keep his many eyes peeled around the known northern tunnel access points in case he entered one? Could be.

...

Heh, well, I might have the chain of command backward there. As likely as not, it was Pride who ordered Wrath to send the telegram while also being watchful of opportunities to do it himself. Pride seems to be the highest ranking after Father, after all.

I wonder. Back when Lust was being the errand girl/troubleshooter, was she spending most of her time reporting to Pride? Instead of having to run back to Central all the time or send interceptable transmissions, maybe she usually just went to the nearest tunnel access point and reported to Pride? Quite possible.

...

Pride also informs Kimblee that Sloth is about to finish his labor of centuries, so he needs to get this final crest of blood carved out now. Kimblee might have mixed feelings about this, but he's not about to disobey, and at least he'll get to kill somebody already.

Cut to Fort Briggs. Miles and his team are returning sans Winry, Elrics, and Kimblee's group. Miles explains to Hook that they lost track of Kimblee after he chased the target into the mines, followed by an explosion that collapsed the tunnels too badly for mundane troops to follow. Two of Kimblee's special forces monsterboys also went missing after the blast, along with the Fullmetal Alchemist.

That's actually all true as far as Miles knows, I think. He's just omitting the part about Winry, Alphonse, and Team Scar; probably for opsec rather than because he distrusts Hook. It's best to minimize the number of people who can be successfully interrogated for the time being, after all. We then follow a string of telephone conversations between officers (mostly the Mustang loyalists who Wrath scattered) relaying this news around, and also exchanging other information. There's just been pair of costly border skirmishes on the western and southern fronts, with new officers from Central taking point in both cases.

Hahaha yeah, kick their asses Erina!

We also get a glimpse of some enemy soldiers being shelled by the Amestrians on the southern border. These would be...Aerugans, I think? Yeah, I think that's who they'd be fighting to the south. They're supposed to be sort of Italian-flavored, according to the author, unless I'm misremembering.

White uniforms, lots of equipment. I do appreciate these glimpses at the rest of the world, scant though they are. Has Arakawa ever revisited Wogosphere? Is she ever planning to? I'd really love to see more of the setting beyond Amestris fleshed out.

Between these border wars, and the recent renewal of bloodshet at Liore...yeah, the hammer is falling on Briggs for the final sequence now. How many soldiers are there at Fort Briggs, I wonder? Enough for one of these sacrifices? Well, if this plan is going to involve Kimblee performing a false flag attack on Drachma and provoking a big battle against them, the extra Drachman bodies could make up the difference.

Cut to Sloth, who has just broken through the wall of one of his previous tunnels along the northern border.

The macroglyph is complete. Sloth can finally rest.

In his throne room, Pride in his Selim Bradley form is standing at Father's side, relaying the news to him. Father confirms that this is it now; with the tunnels complete and the latest series of artificial conflicts in progress, he will be able to cast the spell within the next few days. Pride doesn't look particularly excited, but then neither does Father. I suspect that the recent complications up north and the precarious situation with their special alchemist sacrifices, they're both aware that success is a lot less certain than it looked a year ago.

I like that. The fact that the bad guys are taking the situation seriously instead of remaining overconfident is a humanizing touch. Father in particular might be thinking about the various sloppy mistakes he's made in recent days, perhaps due to overexcitement at the nearness of the Promised Day. There are no humans watching him right now, so that grave expression on his face as he mulls over the situation might be a touch of vulnerability that he wouldn't show in the presence of mortals.

Cut to a work crew working on rebuilding a bombed out city somewhere. Someone brings out food for the workers, and...oh, that's Rose dishing out the grub, isn't it? This is Liore then, cleaning up after the task force from Central bombed multiple neighborhoods flat. Rose generously lets the elderly grandmother of a pair of child volunteers eat, even if she's too old to help herself, while responsibly keeping the portions even. Suddenly, her attention is called away by a voice weakly begging for food from down on the ground, she looks down and...

If there was any lingering doubt about the Great Western Sage having been Hohenheim, it's now long gone. He definitely spent a good portion of his life in Xing.

Anyway, Liore. Hohenheim was already in the eastern province, camping in those mountains seemingly not too far from Resembool. I guess Liore was the closest active/recent flashpoint to his location, so he came here first. As I've mused before, he probably already tried going to Central to confront Father directly when Edward and Alphonse were kids, and didn't achieve much in doing so, so he's not going to bother trying that again.

She serves him. He gleefully wolfs it down. Kind of a dick move, Hohenheim. I get the usefulness of the Ben Franklin effect, but knowing that you could probably rebuild half of this city with a clap of your hands if you wanted to and are mooching food from the volunteers regardless kind of makes this a dick move. After eating and letting the workers get back to their rebuilding, he continues charming Rose with a debonair man of mystery act that...well, he IS a genuine man of mystery, of course, but the way he's playing it here is very obviously cultivated. I wonder how much of this is just centuries of social experience at work, and how much harkens back to how he and Father learned to manipulate their master? I'm thinking 60/40 or so.

...

Man, he really is a non-stupid version of the young adult supernatural romance love interest, isn't he?

...

After winning Rose over, he asks to be taken to what's left of the great temple of Leto. She and her unnamed fellow breadline worker are surprised, but comply. The cathedral is mostly bombed to rubble, with only a few walls and buttresses remaining. He asks if there would happen to be an underground tunnel in the mostly-intact basement. Hohenheim's been doing his research on this building, it seems. They bring him there, and he inquires about one stretch of tunnel that's half-filled with highly toxic groundwater that percolated in a long time ago and that they never bothered to drain out and seal away since they never used that old tunnel anway.

I wonder. How old is this church? Did Father's henchmen have a hand in its design when Sloth passed under the site decades or centuries ago? How old even is this place, actually? I don't think they ever established for sure if it predated Father Cornello or not. If it predates Sloth's passage, then it presumably was just a convenient preexisting underground structure to use for a supply/rubble exchange site, once the local sect had been corrupted or replaced by the new brand of "Letoists." I guess the Sins were probably coming and going through here then, all the times that we saw them in the now-ruined temple overhead.

Also...with that and everything else in mind, who was Lust talking to on the phone during her and Gluttony's very first appearance in the pilot? For most of the series I've been assuming it was Wrath or Father on the other end, but given the security risks of having those types of conversation over longdistance phone lines, and the way that Sin Inc seems to operate in general, it's more likely that she just had a closed phoneline to right downstairs. That's...sort of comical, honestly.

Anyway.

Hohenheim recognizes the poisoned water as the artificial measure that it is, and raises a stone bridge for himself to walk over it, cautioning the humans to not follow him beyond this point. I doubt that poison would actually do a thing to him, given his philostone body. It probably has more to do with him not wanting to get his clothes wet than anything else.

As he leaves, Rose and the other guy ask each other if this is a miracle, or just alchemy. It's funny because at this point we know that there's actually not much of a difference between the two. Alchemy is just shell software built around a system of sacrificial divine magic.

Hohenheim reaches the other side of the half-flooded passage, and blasts his way through the wall into the slothtunnel. He marvels a little at the sheer scale of what he knows he must be looking at, but he isn't given time to keep looking. Pride has started paying a lot more attention since the Briggs incident, and his reaction time - as we already saw with Kimblee - is a tiny fraction of what it was before.

I'm sort of curious about how much of a threat he actually poses to Hohenheim. Can he even meaningfully hurt a solid philostone body like Hohenheim's? I guess there's no reason for Hohenheim to take the chance, so running still makes sense.

He tries collapsing the tunnel behind him, but that barely even slows Pride down. Since he's not putting any more distance between them either, Hohenheim finally decides to turn and fight. As he's backing away from the advancing mass, seemingly trying to think of what he should try using against it, he trips over a weird opening in one of the tunnel walls and falls into it. Pride's tentacles follow him to the entrance, and...stop.

It's as if there's an invisible wall he can't pass through, but that Hohenheim can.

Odd.

What is that opening anyway? The texture of its interior looks like transmutation, but the size and shape make me think of a gluttonizer crater.

...

Hah. Speaking of Gluttony, I wonder if they've been using him to make a lot of the displaced dirt and rock disappear?

That would actually explain why Edward was able to transmute that well/shaft thing inside of his pocket dimension. You have to know what material you're working with in order to transmute it. If the thousands of tons of loose dirt and gravel gradually settled to the bottom, that would...wait, no, the Xerxian ruin bits should still have been at the bottom in that case.

Okay, yeah, I guess not. I'm not sure WHY not, though. It seems like Gluttony could have helped speed this construction project up by a lot if Father were to assign him to it. Wonder if there's a reason for this, or if Arakawa just didn't think of it.

...

Anyway, I'm not sure what that opening Hohenheim just stumbled into is supposed to be. But regardless, Pride can't seem to follow him into it.

Realizing that things aren't going to escalate from here, Hohenheim muses aloud at how his opponent seems to be contained within the macroglyph. Unable to reach beyond those specific tunnels. Pride's many eyes narrow, betraying his frustration with this reality. Interesting. I wonder if that's a built-in handicap that Father designed him with to keep him from getting too powerful, or if its a matter of Pride actually not having that much reach on his own and relying on the macroglyph to propagate it. Father seems to use it (or at least, the philostone he's seeded at key points throughout it) to control alchemy use by others. MacDougle seemed to use the middle part of it for his ice thing. So, if the incomplete glyph has secondary uses, maybe extending Pride's reach is one of them. Hohenheim then taunts him, saying that this is just like when he was stuck in the flask back in Xerxes.

Oh, hah. Reasonable mistake for Hohenheim to have made there, given Pride's appearance in this form. He thinks that's Father himself guarding the macroglyph.

When Hohenheim asks him how angry this makes him, Pride unconvincingly tells him that he's not capable of experiencing anger; he left all such unnecessary emotions behind in Father. Lol, sure, right. Because the Sins don't experience wide emotional spectrums regardless of their necessity, of course, we've seen that demonstrated clearly. Regardless of this bald-faced lie, Hohenheim is still able to glean that this isn't Father he's talking to, but one of his offspring.

Ah. Hohenheim already knew that Pride was the oldest. Wonder how and where he learned that part? Maybe when he confronted Father a decade or so ago he got part of the picture.

Hohenheim lists off the seven deadly sins as a philosophical concept rather than a bunch of idiosyncratic monster names, making him the first character in the story thus far to have done so. None of the others inferred that there would be seven of these things after learning the names of the first few. It's pretty clear that the Christian virtues and vices are a specifically Xerxian thing in this setting. Father had this in mind when he made the Sins, and Hohenheim is able to recognize it, but the Amestrian and Xingese characters have never heard of the "seven deadly sins." I guess Xerxes had some Catholic flavor to it alongside the Iranian and Greek stuff. Hohenheim also confirms two of my earlier hypotheses: Father is 1) trying to rid himself of perceived imperfections by shunting certain traits off into his saliently named offspring, and 2) doing an absolutely terrible job of it. In allegedly purging himself of pride, Hohenheim points out, he created a being that resembles his old weak and helpless self and put it in an enclosed environment just like himself back then. Creating a being that reminds you of your own weaknesses and sealing it away isn't purging yourself of pride. It's absolutely wallowing in pride of the pettiest and most fragile sort.

Iiiinteresting.

I'm guessing that Father decided to remove his "inferior human vices" or whatever, and so shunted off a few, mostly shallow and insubstantial, personality quirks of his that superficially conformed to the most surface level reading of the seven sins and what they mean. Pride just got...what? His snarkiness? That's the personality equivalent of changing which makeup and deodorant you're using when you're allegedly trying to rebuild your whole body. And meanwhile, he's not only continued to be proud and arrogant to a self-sabotaging degree since then, but he committed an act of pride and egotism just in how he decided to use Pride.

I wonder if Hohenheim will be pointing out another hypocrisy with each Sin he encounters, illuminating more about Father's neurotic and self-loathing personality as he goes? That would be pretty enjoyable, so I hope so. A pity Lust died before we got to this, I'd have liked to hear Hohenheim's assessment of her.

Also, this revelation is making me wonder if maybe Father's biggest problem, moreso than any of the other stuff I've gone into until now, is that he just never got any proper parenting. Under all the intellect and grandiosity, he still thinks like a little kid.

...

...fuck. I just realized. With his whole "aspire to the things he never had while trapped in his flask" thing...he chose the identity of "Father." And...did he HAVE to make his new body look just like Hohenheim? Could he have made it look different if he'd chosen to? At the very least, he could have changed the beard and hairstyle, right?

Was that what he actually wanted from the boy known as Slave #23, when he reached out to him the day after his creation? Not a friend, not a brother, but a father? Hohenheim is the closest thing to a biological parent that the haemunculus had. Maybe he needed him to act in that role for him, and what damaged him more than anything else was Hohenheim's inability to be that.

When Hohenheim told him that he wanted more than anything else to get married and have children...fuck.

Fuck.

He took that as a rejection. THAT'S why he got so prickly and defensive after Hohenheim said that, going on that little spiel about how wanting children is a stupid human thing that he'll never understand. He'd just been told that he didn't count as a child, and that Hohenheim wanted human children instead of him.

...and that's why Envy hates humans so much. It's not just Father having envied humans for their freedom of mobility while he was stuck in the jar. It's that he envied humans for getting Hohenheim's (planned) paternal attention. Well, I guess Envy at least actually embodies a deep-seated flaw of Father's more than Pride does...though I'm not sure if it really helped rid Father of that trait so much as just spread it around a little.

It also strengthens Father's role as a foil to the main characters. Edward and Alphonse's abandonment by Hohenheim is (for Edward especially) a major part of what made them who and what they are. It's perhaps fitting that Father was the cause of Hohenheim failing to be a proper father for his later children. He didn't do that intentionally, of course, but in a thematic sense it works as an "if I can't have it, nobody can."

When Father met Hohenheim after the destruction of Xerxes, I had trouble reading Father's tone and phrasing. It seemed like he wanted Hohenheim to be pleased with this outcome, but also like he was sort of gleefully tormenting him. I get it now. "I got rid of my potential rivals for your affection, AND I gave you a nice gift. You have to love me now, right?" Hohenheim's presumable final rejection of him, resulting in them departing in opposite directions across the desert, probably hardened any remaining soft bits of Father's heart.

Going back to those first few fucking seconds of "Again" before the title drop, now. Now I have the context that I think I need to glean the true meaning behind that little montage. Young Hohenheim reaching out for something offscreen, accompanied by grass blowing in the wind. Trisha, also accompanied by grass blowing in the wind. Those two images WERE connected, but I was taking it too literally at first (back when I was wondering if Hohenheim created Trisha), and too metaphorically afterward. That was just showing the two times that Van Hohenheim aspired to starting a family, first as a young man in Xerxes and then as an immortal in eastern Amestris. Then the sinister-looking closeup of Hohenheim hiding his eyes behind his glasses, accompanied by the door closing in Edward and Alphonse's faces. Him not being there for his children, being cold, distant, or absent. Then, for just a second before we see the house burn down, there's philosopher's stone imagery, the screaming faces in the red gel seeming to become the flames of the burning house. The consequences of his two failures at parenting; the fall of Xerxes and rise of Father as a monstrous threat to the world, and Edward and Alphonse's maiming and the eventual burning of their house. Human transmutation of one kind or another, in both cases.

Thing is, Hohenheim isn't the bad guy in any of this. He wasn't ready to be a father for the haemunculus, or anything else for that matter. He was, essentially, a teenaged rape victim who had the baby forced on him. He could have done much better if he'd been a little smarter or more sensitive, but it's not his fault that he wasn't up for a job he never volunteered for or even realized he'd been given. And the consequences of that first failure, unjust though it is for them to fall on him, have forced him to repeat it with the Elrics.

So, that's the real "brotherhood" of the title. Edward, Alphonse, and the miserable, half-feral thing huddled in its bunker under Central. Struggling with their abandonment by the same parent. That was one of my early guesses of what the title meant, once I learned that Hohenheim and Father weren't the same person, but then I took Father's addressing Hohenheim as "my brother in blood" and their sort of mutual creation thing at face value and sort of disregarded it. My bad.

Heh, I probably should have saved this for the conclusion. Well, it's not TOO long, so I'll keep it here. Anyway, a lot of this could have been avoided if Father had just found himself a good demigod child therapist after leaving Xerxes. Was there really not a single one of those west of the desert at that time? He should have gone to Xing instead, I'll be they were just packed with good demigod child therapists.

...

Hohenheim ends the conversation by telling Pride to tell Father that Slave #23 is coming for him. The phrasing is pretty clear; he's rejecting all of Father's gifts, not accepting any sort of peace offerings, and willing to give up his power and his immortal life along with his name if necessary. Pride relays this to Father, who we briefly see in his throne room. Father just coldly says that he can't wait for their reunion either, and plays with his stupid skull-chess pieces. The feeling, it seems, is mutual. Whatever semblance of a family connection they had until recently, it's irretrievable now.

Hohenheim manages to find his way back to the temple basement, where he advises Rose and the other guy to seal off that passageway and never poke at it again. When Rose asks him what he did down there, he simply replies "I issued a declaration of war."

Cut back to Fort Briggs. There's another snowstorm happening, which blinds the guards taking up their new shifts on the wall. When the snow clears, they see that Hohenheim isn't the only one declaring war on someone today.

A sizable army of Drachman infantry, tanks, and artillery have slipped along the mountain pass under the cover of the storm, and are moving into attacking formation just outside the fortress. The guards don't even have time to raise the alarm before it's raised for them from inside the base; Drachma has, just within the last sixty seconds, issued a formal declaration of war against Amestris. Well, I guess that's how you do it when you want to preserve the element of surprise while still following the laws of warfare; the Japanese did exactly that when opening the Pacific War (transmitted the declaration when their planes were mere minutes from Pearl Harbor), and I think I've heard of other examples as well.

Cut to the Drachman commander, standing before his massed artillery alongside Kimblee. It looks like rather than suffering a false flag attack per se, the Drachmans were contacted some time ago by a "fifth column" in northern Amestris that holds Drachman sympathies. They've been told that the cell has infiltrated the northern garrison, and will sabotage the defenses enough to assure a Drachman victory in the conquest of the southern Briggs Mountains region. Fifth columnist Solf J. Kimblee has been sent over to meet them and help coordinate the attack.

Drachma looks to be Fantasy Russia after all, going by the uniforms. Late Czarist era, specifically.

Hmm. Kimblee's placement is going to make this a lot harder than it otherwise could have been. If I were Miles and/or Hook in this situation, I'd rally the Armstrong loyalists, kill/capture the new commander and entourage that Central sent up, and surrender. The Drachmans would probably be happy to take that, and proceed southward with only minimal (if any) bloodshed at the macroglyph locus. There'll be bloodshed once they move further south and meet other Amestrian forces, of course, but bloodshed in the wrong spot will be useless at best and actively detrimental at worst for Father's spell. It doesn't matter who wins after that point; life under Drachman rule is not going to be worse than eternal damnation as a philosopher's stone (well, unless they coincidentally are also ruled by an evil wizard who hungers for souls, but that's unlikely. )

But, with Kimblee knowing what they know and advising the invading commander, that probably wouldn't work. He'd just tell him that the fifth columnists have learned about a perfidious new Amestrian protocol that involves tricking invaders into accepting a surrender and then betraying them. No dice.

Kimblee's definitely come into his own as a villain in these last couple of episodes. He's no match for the heroes in a no-holds-barred fight, and he can't outmaneuver them politically either, but when he can get himself into position to use a dirty trick he's a real threat. He's playing to his strengths now, and that's allowed him to beat Edward and probably force the final Crest of Blood. Cool. I can respect him as a baddy now.

The Drachmans fire their opening salvo, and the end credits roll. Two counteroffensives at once, as it turns out! More than just "signs" of them though, they're both formal openings of hostilities.

We also have a stinger. One of the monsterboys who joined Scar and Winry's party uses a payphone in that heavily Ishvalan town they're staying in or near, and uses the special military line to call Wrath's office and report their location.

I was about to say "well played, show" and take back part of my complaint about those two chimaeras' defection, but watching closely I don't think that would be deserved. The delivery doesn't have a "just as planned" or "just following protocol" vibe. The guy looks all sweaty and trembly as he makes the call, and he's begging Wrath and Envy (who happens to be in the office with him) for clemency. So, yeah, it looks like he and his partner actually did defect, but then this guy got cold feet and changed his mind. Still stupid, then, oh well. At least the author is trying to do something interesting and plot-accelerating with it after the fact, so that's something.


Three data points make a pattern. This was a great episode, with its few weaknesses mostly being a lingering consequence of previous ones. FMA:B is officially back on track after that clumsy arc.