Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood S2E21: “Emissary of Darkness”

Once again, no teaser. And, once again, a "last time on" after the OP that I assume exists because of some detail of the original air dates. Details like that really turn shows into a bit of a history puzzle when you're watching them long after the fact, don't they? Anyway, one thing that it does establish that wasn't clear to me in the previous episode is that Alphonse was in the trainyard near the mock-battlefield in Eastern when Gluttony and Pride attacked him. That confirms much more clearly that Hohenheim was wrong about Pride's reliance on the tunnels for survival, and that my thematic inferences about Pride based on this were therefore misinformed. Pride can move around just as well as the other Sins, the tunnels just extend his tentacle range and speed far beyond his normal limits.

Speaking of Pride, the title probably refers to him. Unless we're meeting a Nyarlathotep-analogue to go with ersatz Yog-Sothoth.

Also speaking of Pride, the episode proper starts with Alphonse awakening from his latest out-of-golem-experience to Pride's voice, and finding himself being physically held by him somewhere in Sin Inc HQ.

Well, apparently they have a use for him. The way he puts it make me think it's more than just interrogation.

Cut to some random shantytown village tucked into the forest just outside of Central. Is this a refugee camp or something? It looks like one, but it's in sort of an improbable location for that (it looks like easy driving distance from Central, but not easy walking distance) and the people don't look foreign. Wonder what the story is. Hohenheim is here blending in among the locals as "Mr. Ho" much like he did in Liore. Edward and his little group find him, and Edward keeps the promise he made to himself after their last meeting.

Yeah, Hohenheim does still need to explain the whole "disappeared on my family for a decade and left my sons totally abandoned after their mother died" thing. I assume he had a good reason of the "held prisoner by Father atop Orthanc until a friendly eagle happened by" persuasion, but we haven't heard it yet and neither has Edward.

Hohenheim is introduced to Leed and the furries, and thanks them for looking after Ed. Heh, sure, they looked after him, that is a way of putting it I suppose. He also recognizes Leed's ouroboros mark, prompting Greed to explain what he is and why he's on their side. As afternoon gives way to dusk, Hohenheim tells them about "The Dwarf In the Flask" just as he previously did to Alphonse. The furries are shocked speechless at the story. Leed looks grimly determined; presumably, Hohenheim's account filled in the blanks of whatever memory fragments Greed inherited from the events in question, and/or supplemented whatever version of the story Father tells his children. Edward looks...angry? Frustrated? There's something odd going on with his reaction.

Hohenheim takes Edward's reaction as disbelief, but I don't think that's it. He also asks Edward if he wants to use his philostone body to restore his limbs right here and now, and is proud of Edward when he refuses on account of those Xerxians potentially still being alive and not quite better off dead.

He then tells them a bit more about the Promised Day. Apparently, there's a solar eclipse tomorrow, which is the event that Father's ritual depends on. Whatever their plan is, it'll have to be tomorrow, and will presumably involve stalling Father until the eclipse has passed. Edward assures Hohenheim that he's willing to work with and fight alongside him for it, but only because he's a necessary ally; this doesn't mean forgiveness in any way, shape, or form. Good enough for now, I suppose. Just make sure you hear Hohenheim's full story sometime before he dies in a noble sacrifice in the last few episodes.

Before leaving Hohenheim to get dinner with his companions, Edward remembers to relay the message that Pinako got from Trisha. "I couldn't keep my promise. I died before you did. Sorry." He's surprised when he sees Hohenheim's reaction.

He doesn't have much to say after seeing it, and quickly removes himself from the situation.

Over dinner, the furries tell Edward that he should try to mend things with his dad at least a little bit, and at least hear his side of the "abandoned my family" story. Edward tells them to stfu. Leed shows up and tells Edward that it seems to him like he's having trouble sorting out his feelings. Edward's response is telling.

He's spent so long being mad at Hohenheim, blaming him for things, etc, that he's gotten invested in hating him. It's part of his emotional bedrock. A part of Edward was probably elated when he first met Father, and for a moment thought he had confirmation of Hohenheim being evil. It would be easier for him if his father really was just a villain who needs punching. I don’t know that it would be better for his emotional health or his development as a person, but it would certainly be easier.

Meanwhile, back at the campfire, Hohenheim is staring into the flames and thinking back on some old moments with Trisha. In particular, her desire for them to always be able to smile together as a family. Kinda dropped the ball on that one, Paracelsus. He also, of course, thinks back to her promise to outlive him. That’s kind of setting yourself up for failure, Trisha, but nice thought I guess. He tortures himself by thinking of how she died believing he’d be coming back to her any day now, and then looks skyward and promises that he’ll be joining her tomorrow.

Guess he thinks he can use the Promised Day to de-philostonize himself? Man, if he only knew that Dr. Marcoh could do it any time he asked him, lol.

Back to Edward and Co. After eating, Edward buys some red fabric and transmutes it into a superheroic red cape just like the one he had to ditch up north when they went to ground. It’s ostentatious and unsubtle, but he insists that wearing it gives him a psychological boost. Looking like the Fullmetal Alchemist makes him confident, and gives him a standard to hold himself to in combat. Legit.

Then, Edward, Leed, and the furries are…going…somewhere? Walking away from the village in the middle of the night. Heading to Central to be in place for their part of the plan, I assume, but…why isn’t Hohenheim going with them? Does he have a way of helping from this little hamlet a few miles away? Anyway, for whatever reason the four of them are walking away through the woods and Hohenheim isn’t. Edward is telling the others that he might be parting ways with them here, depending on what they want to do. Leed tells him he can’t quit without permission. What the hell has Leed even had Edward doing all this time, serious? Edward brushes off Leed’s protests, and asks the furries if they want to join him and see if they can maybe restore their bodies. Unlike Bebop and Rocksteady, Captain Simian and Mayor Lionheart actually don’t especially want to return to their original state. After all, it’s not like being able to turn into a superhuman beastman or back into a normal human at will has any major downsides. Yeah, no shit. Can someone remind me why Bebop and Rocksteady even exist, again?

Edward also asks Leed why he’s coming back to Central himself, why he even still cares about fighting Father if he just wants to leave and live his own life. Leed is secretive about it. Wait, have they really not talked about this before now? How does…fuck, this is the worst-handled timeskip I’ve seen this side of Worm.

Suddenly, Alphonse’s armor comes slowly, jerkily plodding out of the forest in front of them, zombielike.

Either Pride has part of himself coiled up inside of the armor (it’s a nighttime forest, if there’s a shadow-tendril connecting it to his main body there’s no way they could spot it), or he has a telekinesis power we haven’t seen before now. Or else he actually has his Selim Bradley form hiding inside one of the legs like May did that one time, that would be a nice ironic callback.

Edward starts to step forward to greet the suspiciously silent and slow-moving Alphonse. Alphonse does respond, after a few moments, to Edward’s greeting, and he sounds like himself, but he’s speaking slower than usual. Is Pride somehow forcing him to speak? Or, maybe Pride is just good at imitating people’s voices, maybe that’s just a hobby he’s had centuries to get good at. “Alphonse” tries to lure Edward away, but Leed stops him. Greed recognizes his big brother’s presence.

Pride reacts to the jig being up by lashing out with razor-sharp tendrils from inside the armor and…somehow failing to hit anyone. Edward, Leed, Simian, and Lionheart all manage to dodge. Either Pride is toying with them, or his attacks really are a lot slower outside of the macroglyph. When Leed identifies Pride by name, Pride is shocked and disgusted to realizes that this is actually Greed working against him. He’d apparently been holding out hope that Greed had just lost control of the body to Ling, but now that he’s confirmed the truth he has very, very little sympathy for his serially traitorous younger brother.

Cut to the eastern province at the site of the railroad bridge that Grumman blew up. Miles and Grumman are standing over the cliff, musing on whether or not Wrath might have survived.

Um…I guess they must have thought the Elrics etc were exaggerating when they told them about haemunculus regeneration. You’d think Miles at least would be more credulous, since he fought Sloth in person? Then again, Sloth actually looks like an indestructible monster, and Wrath doesn’t. He may be having trouble reconciling that kind of durability with something that passes for human. And, to be fair, Grumman seems to be much more optimistic than Miles is about Wrath being dead, which fits with Grumman not having seen this stuff in person like Miles has. Anyway, they found the corpse of at least one of the four stars, so if nothing else they’ve killed a few of Father’s true believers along with stalling Wrath for however long it takes him to make it back to civilization on foot.

Grumman says that he plans to stay here and make sure Wrath is kept busy or confirmed dead instead of marching on Central with the rest of the rebellion. Miles suspects him of planning to betray them. Not to betray them to Father, but hoping to let them and the haemunculi kill each other so that his own forces can take over Amestris and let Grumman become dictator. He may be right, or this may just be an especially paranoid example of Miles being his cynical, bleak-minded self.

Cut back to the confrontation in the forest near Central, where something extremely stupid is happening. Specifically, Leed is telling Edward who Pride is, and Edward seems utterly unfamiliar with the character.

But…wasn’t the whole reason that Edward agreed to join Leed’s “gang” to get paid in information about Father’s operations? How could Leed have possibly failed to mention Pride in any way in the month since then?

Even without that agreement, Leed IS actively working against his siblings now, for whatever reasons, in whatever limited capacity. Why would it ever have been in his interests to NOT tell Edward and the others about each of the Sins’ powers, weaknesses, and personalities? I know that Greed has a compulsive need to leverage things even when sharing would be in his own best interest, but…what kind of payment would Edward have NOT been willing to offer in exchange for data like that?

The more I see of post-timeskip Leed and Edward, the less sense they make.

Well, regardless of my feelings on this entire situation, Edward tells Pride to stop impersonating Alphonse. Pride assures him that this is no impersonation, and lifts off Alphonse’s helmet to show the blood seal still in place on the inside of the armor.

It’s not clear if Alphonse is conscious and helpless right now, or if Pride is somehow keeping him in offmode despite him having woken up since his capture the night before.

Edward tells Simian and Lionheart that they should stand back and let him and Leed handle this one…and is comically disappointed to see that they’ve already retreated without telling him. Those animal instincts of theirs are telling them very strongly that they would not be much use in this fight. Which, to be fair, is what Edward was about to tell them. Leed is hard to kill, and Pride is going to avoid killing Edward if he can, while the two of them are free to fight their hardest back. The furries do not have the former benefit, nor do they have a weapon useful for the latter.

Pride replies that while it is true that he can’t kill Edward, there’s no rule against relieving him of his remaining organic limbs. So, just something to keep in mind there.

Pride manages to quickly wrap his tentacles around Leed, who at this point isn’t quite as quick as Edward, and then tells Edward to come peacefully or else Leed AND everyone in the nearby village will die. Then Edward does something that I cannot parse in my understanding of how the magic system supposedly works. He does his arm-circle thing, puts his hands to the ground, and causes all the power in the village to shut down. And ALSO all the cooking fires and torches to go out (which, as it’s a cloudy night, makes the environment totally dark now). With one transmutation. From quite a ways away.

Shorting out the wires from that distance alone seems like something you’d need alkahestry for, which Edward never got a chance to learn. And even if he did, what the hell kind of transmutation turns off electricity AND fire without effecting anything else?

We do see a closeup of Hohenheim as the fire he’s sitting at goes out as it’s happening. Maybe we’re meant to infer that Edward just shorted out the power, and Hohenheim somehow knew that it was Edward doing it and that he was doing it for the sake of getting rid of the light, and decided to help him by taking care of the fires? Maybe? I have no idea.

…

You know, if there had just been a generator or something for Edward to launch a projectile at, that would have made this make a hell of a lot more sense. It wouldn’t help with the fire aspect, but it would have helped with the rest.

Although…actually, come to think of it, how did Edward even know that Pride needs light? Is he supposed to have heard in detail about the encounters with him in the tunnels and put them together with the creature he’s facing now? I kind of have trouble buying that Edward was able to learn that offscreen, but not things like “Hohenheim’s entire backstory that he told to Al,” or that Grumman didn’t get such basic and tactically critical updates as “blowing them up won’t kill them.”

…

Also…wait…what the fucking…WHAT

That

How

When the power goes out, it doesn’t just blind Pride. It actually causes his tentacles to disintegrate. So, it’s not just that he’s blind in the darkness. He actually can’t exist in it at all.

So. Um. On top of the question of how Edward could possibly know this (oh man, wouldn’t THIS make so much more sense if it was established that Greed had told him about these details?), this also raises the issue of…how has Pride been guarding the macroglyph, then? It’s kinda dark down there, yeah? Sure, he only attacks when you bring light into the tunnels, but his appendages still need to get to that location, right?

And…wait, how was he puppeting Alphonse, then? It would be even darker than this inside of the fucking armor! What, was he holding a little flashlight in there?

This sequence just…I think I know where most of the problems stem from, but I’ll wait until I’ve seen more before committing to any theories.

Leed explains to the others that for Pride to be operating out here, he must have brought his central body to the area. If they comb the woods for what looks like a little boy, they might be able to do some real damage to Pride. Of course, they’re as blind as he is, so finding him is going to be a real bitch of a task.

Meanwhile, Pride decides to just stay in place for now and wait for either the sky to clear up or the village to get its lights running again.

Hey. Pride. Why did you attack at night?

Also, if you absolutely had to attack at night, why didn’t you bring your own light source? Or like, multiple light sources?

And…oh wow, this is hurting my head now. So, while Leed, Edward, and Simian regroup, Lionheart uses his kitty nightvision to track down Pride’s central body.

…

So, on one hand, I like this kind of submarine warfare-ish dynamic they’ve got going on now. On the other…fucking hell, are you seriously telling me they could foil Father’s plan just by sending Lionheart into the tunnels to plant explosives?

Like, if they literally just do that now that they have all the pieces put together, then that’ll actually be really cool. Like, as a failsafe for if their current plan, just have Lionheart ready to plant explosives at an important macroglyph intersection to buy themselves more time for another plan.

I doubt the show is going to do that, though.

…

Anyway, Lionheart finds Pride’s true body, which is blind and helpless in the darkness. He starts beating and clawing him ruthlessly, and Pride just ragdolls and lets him do it. Seemingly confident that this isn’t going to take any measurable toll on his batteries in the time it takes the village to get the lights running again.

In fact, worryingly, Pride doesn’t even appear to be regenerating after Lionheart lands hits. No red lightning effect like it usually does when haemunculi heal themselves. It appears much more like he isn’t taking any damage in the first place, much like Sloth just shrugged off small arms fire without needing to heal any damage.

I wonder if Father has been refitting Pride with features that proved successful in the younger Sins? It’s pretty heavily implied by this point that they’ve all (with the exception of Wrath) had to be recharged/recreated at least once or twice since their original creations. If we’re on Pride’s second or third iteration, Father might have used the opportunity to upgrade him with the stuff he field tested with the newer Sins.

…in fact, those shadow-claws Pride uses to attack with look a hell of a lot like Lust’s extendo-nails now that I’m looking for similarities. Yeah, I think I’m on to something with this.

If I am, in fact, on to something with this, then I guess Father opted to give Pride’s nucleus the Sloth style of armor rather than the Greed model due to it not requiring conscious activation, even if it’s not quite as strong.

Meanwhile, Edward, Leed, and Simian are attacked by Gluttony, whose sense of smell – in addition to probably being what let Pride track them here in the first place – allows him to navigate and fight in the dark about as well as Lionheart can.

Simian tries to fend Gluttony off with his limited low light senses, but ends up hitting Edward by mistake. Fighting in this darkness is just useless. That’s when Ling tells Greed that he should let him step up to bat.

He might not be able to deploy the graphene carapace, but that wouldn’t help against Gluttony’s strongest attack anyway. Meanwhile, Ling has successfully fought Gluttony before, and – most importantly – his ki-sense will let him navigate in the pitch black forest. The trees are alive, and most importantly haemunculi light up extra bright due to having so much concentrated soul energy in them, so he’ll always know exactly where Gluttony is.

Greed agrees, and Ling takes control of Leed for now. The fight quickly turns against Gluttony, whose nose – while excellent at tracking and ambushing – is inferior to ki-sensing for combat purposes. Also, Ling is just plain faster and smarter than Gluttony, so outmaneuvering him when he has the sensory advantage is pretty easy. Eventually though, he drops Gluttony below the critical frustration threshold, and he stops trying to engage in close combat, backs away, and starts blind-firing the gluttonizer. This is really bad news, because Ling’s senses don’t tell him exactly what angle Gluttony is facing, and the others have no way of even telling where the attack is going to come from, let alone get out of a blast area that happens to include them.

Fortunately, a new combatant arrives on the scene just then. They’re too fast to see clearly. Hohenheim? He was able to outrun Pride in the tunnels, so he might be a speedster himself when he pushes his philostone body past the normal human limits. And he was just a little distance away back at the village, so he could have sensed the battle and come over to help.

Ah wait, no, it’s Ninjette!

Based on the moves she’s pulling, I suspect that she’s taken a recommendation from Edward and had her automail arm made from that lightweight alloy. She’s also recovered effing fast, but she may have had alkahestric help there. Or…actually, could she have? She didn’t go back to Xing, I don’t think? Well, we know that her grandfather returned from there himself quite a while ago, and he may well have brought reinforcements including a minor alkahest-medic or two.

Or maybe she met up with Doctor Marcoh and he helped. Also possible. That would justify the decision of the author’s to not kill him off in a heroic sacrifice against Envy when it would have made thematic sense and reminded us of the stakes.

Anyway, two ki-sensing ninjas together can flank Gluttony, and he can only shoot in one direction at a time. She gets in behind him, and just starts cutting off pieces as fast as he can regenerate. End episode. No stinger.


This fucking time skip, I swear.

Edward and Hohenheim? That was all great. The Grumman and Miles interlude was also good, especially with the tensions and faultlines being brought to light within the resistance; Amestris seems sure to fracture after Father's defeat, and I doubt it will be a peaceful process, which is a political peril of revolution that I'm glad the story is acknowledging. The aesthetics and broad strokes of the Pride fight were effectively tense and creepy.

But good god. Every other plot beat and character action is undermined by the stupid timeskip.