Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood S2E18: Revving at Full Throttle

I suppose this will have something to do with vehicles, and/or with the pace of the story as we reach the endgame. Fittingly, this is the beginning of my semi-binge watching of the rest of the show. Henceforth, these reviews will all be built around a skeleton of blind reaction, but will have most of their texts written after the fact. With the amount of subplots going on and old details coming back into importance, there's no other way I can avoid forgetting stuff.

So, let's start revving at full throttle!


Open right where the previous stinger left off in Liore, with Alphonse unexpectedly meeting Hohenheim much as Edward did half a series ago.

There's some long, silent staring at one another while Winry looks awkward and the chimeras are just confused. Then some other Liorans come and ask "Mr. Ho" for more rebuilding help. He follows them, leaving Alphonse without saying another word to him.

The Lioran shopkeeper that they met at the beginning of "City of Heresy" thanks Alphonse again for that radio he fixed. Alphonse apologizes for triggering the event that led to his city being destroyed. The guy says this would have happened no matter what, with the way Cornello had been leading them, so the Elrics didn't really do much except make it happen a little sooner. That's sanguine of him. Also, the sectarian divide is healed, and everyone is helping to rebuilt. Probably because the military killed all the Cornellites or hauled them off to make protostone, but lol details.

Alphonse is inspired to go off and help with the rebuilding himself, at least for a couple hours. Winry and the chimeras follow, dragging Yoki with them. I feel like they shouldn't be wasting time right now, but it's nice of them anyway, and I guess it gives Alphonse a chance to catch up to Hohenheim again and ask him some questions. Questions like "why are you immortal?" and "why does Father look exactly like you?" and "where the hell did you even go?" and so forth.

Mr. Ho is meanwhile being asked by the locals if Alphonse is his son, and if he's sure he doesn't want to talk to him. Hohenheim assures them that his sons are better off without him in their lives, and probably don't want to talk to him anyway.

Then Alphonse and Co catch up and offer to help, clearly following right after Hohenheim.

Oh hey I think I found A Theme u gais.

After the work day, Rose puts Winry up for the night. She has an intact house, or at least is sharing one. And they have hot water enough for Winry to take a warm bath, which she hasn't gotten in a long time. Rose seems to have been either very lucky or very proactive in having these accommodations in the wake of the shelling. Over tea, she tells Winry that she considers Edward to have saved her soul from Cornello, and possibly her town from suffering an even worse carpet bombing if Cornello had actually succeeded in staging an organized revolt. Since Winry's automail work was partly responsible for Edward's ability to crack the case, Rose feels in her debt as well.

Transitive materials, equivalent exchange, etc. Rose, be careful of where else that line of thinking might lead you. You've already fallen for a cult, so we know you're not especially resistant to crazy philosophical gravity.

Rose talks about the valuable lesson we all learned about letting authority figures foster dependence, and then we appropriately cut to Father's office. Or, not the office, but the maze of tunnels and gigerpipes leading to it. Gecko has infiltrated the complex, and is sneaking around looking for a prison that might have Greed in it.

Is he going to find other alchemists imprisoned a la Marcoh? Do they have any others locked up in that way? That could be interesting.

He finds his way into the clone warehouse. Maybe he'll overhear Olivierre getting her tour from rando cultist. Yep, he arrives just in time to eavesdrop. Also, this place really looks super Alien, doesn't it?

Lieutenant Cultist explains that these aren't actually organic clone bodies, but humanlike mechanical frames that souls can be bound to. Purpose-made bodies for entities like Alphonse, Barry, etc to be installed into. Judging by the pipes, I suspect Father is planning to pilot them all himself. Or more accurately, to split off a million very small pieces of himself to take them over as mostly-loyal autonomous entities, like the Sins writ small.

Lt. Cultist says that no, they're harvesting souls from various battlefields and massacre sites. Ah, okay, that's probably what the protostone research was ultimately for then. Mass-produced, low-density philostone to create "pilots" for these golems. Recharging Father is probably a secondary purpose, given that the pipes lead to his throne as well.

Gecko flees the horrifying conversation. While escaping through the gigertube labyrinth, he runs into Greed II, who it seems is on guard duty these days. Either Greed is going to have his memories jogged here, or we're going to find out explicitly that he was able to somehow keep them on his own and is playing a long con on Father. In the former case, Gecko may or may not survive, but in the latter he definitely will.

Cut back to Liore. Alphonse and Hohenheim are talking in private-ish. Alphonse tells him he came here to try and sabotage the macroglyph, and asks him why Father looks just like him. Hohenheim tells him that he's being really stupid by blabbing about everything he knows to someone who might be allied with Father for all he knows.

Normally the appropriate response to this would be "lol we got their shapeshifter and mailed her to China," but given Hohenheim's obvious and mysterious connection to Father he's probably the one person Alphonse knows who this doesn't neccessarily work for. Hell, this could literally be Father impersonating Hohenheim for all Alphonse knows.

When Alphonse doesn't respond, Hohenheim is simultaneously disappointed, and glad that his son still trusts him to at least some degree.

He says he'll tell him the entire plot of The Dwarf in the Flask, but he'd like to tell Edward at the same time if possible. Al informs him that Edward's current whereabouts are unknown. I guess this is going to lead to Hohenheim tracking him down and fixing his blood vessels properly.

Cut to...some town in the northern province, wherever Lionheart and Simian have taken Edward to. Lionheart withdraws a big wad of cash from Edward's account, using his signature and a letter of attorney. One of the bank managers watches, and makes a phone call to say that someone is using a watched account. Naturally, the state would be monitoring Edward's account activity. In response to questioning from the person on the other end of the line, he confirms that the individual making the withdrawal is a large, muscular man. Either the military knows about Lionheart and Simian's defection, or they just think it's Scar who he's describing.

At a local clinic, the doctors are being paid cash for both medical fees and hush money to tend Edward's and (to a much lesser extent) Lionheart's wounds. I'm not sure what the hell a mundane doctor can do for Edward's reshaped abdominal blood vessels. Maybe one of these doctors is a medical alchemist who didn't go for state certification, that would make sense. Anyway, soldiers come knocking at the clinic due to the call from the bank.

They try to trick them into thinking that there's no one here but the disguised furries, but it's not working. Then Edward comes back to the clinic with groceries (he's up on his feet again! Yeah, this surgeon is definitely a bio-alchemist, there's no other explanation that could account for this). The soldier on guard in the hall makes the mistake of calling Edward "short" in the process of identifying him as the suspect.

Well, there was only one way that could have ended.

Edward proceeds to take out the remaining soldiers. But there's something really weird going on with how the scene is shot. It's all framed from their perspective, and given horror movie editing and cinematography, with Edward as this offscreen monster that picks them off one by one, all the way down to Edward's automail arm Night-Of-The-Living-Dead-ing through the wall to choke one of them. And creepy music too.

He doesn't kill any of them. He's not much more brutal than usual (maybe slightly, as we've never seen him use strangulation before, but only slightly). It's just shot differently.

Wonder what this is getting at? Is it just a really weirdly placed joke, or are we supposed to infer a darker side of Edward awakening? If the latter, well...he didn't *actually* fight all that differently than usual, so I don't know.

Simian tells him he shouldn't be fighting as he's still recovering. Edward retorts with a title drop.

Did burning part of his soul fuck with his head or something? If so, it doesn't seem to have changed his behavior as much as the camera angles and music surrounding it. Souls are mysterious things indeed.

There are more soldiers inbound though, so they have to make a fighting escape from the clinic before stealing a car to try and hightail it out of this town. They lose the pursuing vehicles by getting momentarily out of their sight, and then Edward transmuting the outside of their car into a ridiculous death metal themed parade float as he tends to do. With their car disguised, and able to disguise itself again as needed, they lose them easily.

The chimeras aren't impressed with his stylistic choices, but it worked.

And...I'm taking this as a sign that Edward *isn't* going hyper violent in the wake of his experience. Just the same old dork. Seriously, what was up with the horror movie sequence?

They stop in some podunk little hamlet in the middle of snowy nowhere and try to decide what to do next. Edward, while admonishing himself for dropping his guard around a tricksy opponent like Kimblee, is also trying to figure out how he can rendezvous with the others. Or at least with Alphonse, in the event that he wasn't able to warn the rest in time.

Simian and Lionheart are both waiting on him for ideas. The way both pairs of chimeras are falling into line as obedient soldiers who take their cues from other party members speaks a lot to how they were indoctrinated, I think.

Back in Liore, Hohenheim has finished reciting the script of "The Dwarf in the Flask" for Alphonse. Hohenheim is afraid Alphonse won't believe it, but after all the crazy shit that he and his brother have seen in the last few months Alphonse is probably ready to believe just about anything. There's no such thing as no such thing and so forth. Hohenheim also explains that he ensured that his sons were both genetically normal humans made of normal materials, no philostone or Xerxian psychic echoes or anything. His philostone body still has his old genetics informing its appearance, after all, so he was able to copy that.

He doesn't say whether they were test tube babies or if he somehow created normal sperm inside of his own body, but Al probably doesn't want to know those details anyway.

Alphonse shows him the reverse transmutation circle they got from Brothar's notes, and says he wants to destroy the macroglyph and possibly repurpose it into this other thing that does...um...something? I'm sort of confused as to why they want to build Brothar's thing as opposed to just ruining Father's. Anyway, Hohenheim compliments Alphonse and his brother on having figured out as much as they have, and warns him against entering the macroglyph tunnels and facing Pride.

Also, Hohenheim informs us, he knows exactly how long they have. Father can only perform his ritual when the stars are right, it seems. Well, that explains all the celestial imagery in the glyph! There's a stellar conjunction that he needs to have everything ready by. He likely has everything ready now, but he's waiting for the Promised Day. The story probably should have emphasized the importance of stars and astrology in previous episodes, just so that this feels more grounded in what we already know about alchemy, but it does answer some plot questions.

...

The King of Xerxes didn't seem to be waiting on a stellar conjunction, though. Father's doing something slightly different, and not just bigger scale, after all.

...

Meanwhile in Central, Gecko is being pursued by Greed II, and has already taken multiple minor injuries. When Greed finally corners him and then stops to chat before striking as he's wont to do, Gecko recognizes his catchphrases and mannerisms. Greed is given pause when Gecko identifies him and asks why he looks different and why he's attacking him.

Greed has flashes of old memory, but only flashes. Not enough to stay his graphene-clawed hand.

He apologizes to Gecko as he dies, and seems sincere about it. But, he has to do his job.

The memory fragments continue to plague him after the murder, however. And he also starts hearing from Ling, who as we know has strong feelings about noblesse oblige that makes killing a man loyal to you unthinkably evil for him.

Greed resists Ling's arguments, but eventually Ling figures out how he needs to phrase this to make it stick. He tells Greed that he had something back in Dublith. He had the loyalty and admiration of people like Gecko. He had a gang, a lifestyle, a set of experiences with value that he won't easily be able to get again. And now he's throwing away those things that he should still own.

That works.

So Greed wasn't conspiring with Ling until this point. Ling's been working on him though, and Father's memory purge wasn't quite thorough enough. Putting Greed into a non-loyal human host was a big mistake on Father's part, but I guess he was just desperate for manpower and didn't have the time or energy to regrow a new Greed-body just then. Although, he did regrow Gluttony (or is still doing so?), so...yeah, I dunno.

Makes me wonder about whether Wrath's host body still has any sort of independent existence. Probably not at this point, but who knows. Either way, he was raised to have little to no sense of self, so I doubt he can be relevant even if he still is conscious in there as something other than Wrath himself.

Credits roll. In the stinger, Pride, Wrath, and Queen are sitting around their living room in the Palace of Pride and Prejudice when suddenly Greed bursts in and attacks Wrath, screaming maniacally.

End episode.


Good episode, but not one with much for me to talk about. This was mostly a series of getting from point A to Point B for various characters and subplots, with most of the beats being fairly predictable (aside from Edward's miraculous blood vessel reconstruction. WAS that guy supposed to be a medical alchemist?). Ling figuring out how Greed thinks and using it to turn him again was probably the high point of the episode, though the stuff with Hohenheim and Alphonse was all good as well.

I do wish we'd heard more about alchemy being effected by stellar conjunctions and the like before now, though. Really, just a tiny bit of prior establishment would have helped Hohenheim's information about the Promised Day land with the audience much better. Still, it's not a *huge* stretch going off of hints we've seen in the alchemical iconography in Xerxes and Central, and astrology was quite connected to real life alchemical lore, so it's only a minor annoyance.