Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood S2E24: “Upheaval In Central”

Last time on Steel Magician: Sons of Paracelsus, everyone except Pride and Alphonse was inbound on Central, except for Mustang’s cell who are already in place there and firing the first shots. We left off on an unconvincing cliffhanger with Mustang, Hawkeye, and Co, along with their captive Queen Bradley, being cornered by a SWAT team and the camera panning away as a gun fires. Because, you know, there’s absolutely any chance whatsoever that that was the baddies firing and not whatever trap Mustang lured them into going off.


After the OP, we open on said baddies dead or wounded on the floor, and several more of Mustang’s brute squad pointing their still-smoking handguns down from the rafters where they’d been hiding.

Wouldn’t it have kinda sucked if the bad guys had just tossed a grenade in ahead of themselves? Or even just opened fire immediately after breaking through the windows instead of spending a minute repeating orders that they’d already received and giving Mustang’s guys time to aim? Eh, I guess Mustang figured out that his world follows the laws of anime drama and designed his tactics to exploit them, he’s a smart enough guy.

Well, the fact that the soldiers didn’t care about avoiding killing Queen but did care about not shooting Mustang seems to have gotten the nature of the situation to sink in through even Queen’s exceptionally thick skull.

You could say that the country has abandoned your husband, Queen. You could also say that your husband is a demonic flesh robot, your son is actually his three hundred year old big brother, and that you somehow lived in the same house with both these freaks for years without ever suspecting a thing oh my wog you are the stupidest person in Amestris.

Anyway, they’ve probably turned her now, whatever amount of good that’ll do them. The moment of truth is still going to be when Wrath makes it home and is forced to choose between his asshole father and his idiot wife. In other words, Wrath is now a sitcom protagonist. For now, more soldiers are inbound, so Mustang and Co need to haul ass. Before going, they tell the sergeant of the team they just took out to remember that they spared he and his men’s lives, which is not what the Briggs forces would have done. The sergeant looks confused. They kneecap him before leaving.

I guess none of those shots they took on the SWAT guys were lethal, then? It really is a good thing they gave them so much time to aim. Anyway, Mustang seems to be thinking ahead to the post-Father regime change, and trying to ensure that whatever remains of the Central garrison will support him over Oliviere. Grumman, I think, could be a wildcard here; he might end up being a third contender for the throne, or – being old – he might throw his support behind either of the others. Well, it’s good that Mustang is playing politics in a way that doesn’t sabotage their ability to work together in the short term. More than one coup has failed because of premature power plays among the participants.

As they exit the building, Mustang weaves some complicatedly long and curving gas flares that weave around the people trying to intercept them, causing burns and flashbang-like effects without roasting anything vital. I didn’t realize he could shape the air transmutations into twists and turns like that. Or that he could see through walls in order to carefully shape it around people who were taking up ambush positions outside. Apparently, he can do both of those things though. Back at HQ, the four star overseeing this counterterrorism op is told about the mounting – but persistently nonlethal – casualties. The soldiers in the field quickly realize that Mustang is taking pains to avoid killing. He and Hawkeye are both well known in the wake of their Ishvalan war careers, and each have triple digit bodycounts (possible quadruple digits, in Mustang’s case). Of course, there’s a veiled threat there alongside the show of mercy; Mustang and Hawkeye are powerful enough to defeat those first few waves while taking care to avoid killing, but if you push them too hard they might not be able to, and that wouldn’t be good for anyone. Granted, the show hasn’t really sold me on HOW Mustang is able to do this, but it’s clearly the intent.

The cultist general realizes this too, and loudly declares that Mustang is doing this just to mock them.

It’s not clear if he actually believes that this is Mustang’s motive, or if he’s just desperately trying to prevent his own men from becoming sympathetic to the insurgents. I suspect the former; an appeal to human mercy and mutual goodwill doesn’t seem like the sort of thing Father’s lapdogs would be conditioned to recognize. Also, this guy in particular didn’t come across as very bright when we saw him interact with the others in the command center scenes. Anyway, he mobilizes two additional squads to chase down Mustang, one of which will be headed by Kimblee. Well, we knew he was back in Central. Time to…put him on a manhunt…for an elusive, elite combatant.

Because Kimblee is really good at that.

…I’ll just have the Yakety Sax ready to play.

Speaking of the command center, we flash over to there next. A couple of the generals including Olivierre are still sitting in the conference room, but most of them have gone. No sign of Father and Sloth either; wonder what they’re doing? Anyway, the couple of four stars still here are wringing their hands over the difficulty of capturing Mustang. This prompts Olivierre to tell them that its their own damned fault for not maintaining a more competent force here in Central. Sure, they’ve had plenty of experience reinforcing battle sites out in the provinces (read: escalating the existing conflicts to the point of massacre), but they’ve never had to really defend a position in living memory, and barely any of their combat experience has been here at this location. Sloppy. Complacent. And it’s not like this is even the first time in recent years that they’ve shown their inadequacy in this regard.

I guess the MacDougal incident did happen, this week. I actually do like that this event is being referenced now, though, despite the ongoing clumsiness of its insertion into the story. Mustang is now in the same position that MacDougal was in the pilot. The difference is that MacDougal, for all he regretted his past actions, didn’t seem to have been able to outgrow his state conditioning and be anything more than a killing machine. Which is why he failed. Why he was doomed to fail. Even if he’d crushed the command center and killed Wrath, Father would have reestablished control with another puppet. You can’t solve this problem by just killing the perceived bad guys and anyone else who gets in the way. Which, I suppose, is another psychological failsafe that Father’s been trying to instill in the start alchemists; if any do turn against him, they’ll only think to do so in fruitless, self-destructive ways.

Draw whatever political message you want from this, with regards to deeply rooted systemic evils versus the specific people who operate within those systems.

Olivierre asks to be given command of Operation: Fire Extinguisher, since she has much more experience in defensive operations. When she nags and insults the others enough, one of them finally snaps and tells her that no, they are NOT fucking falling for that, she’s only a provisional member of the inner circle who they’re not yet sure if they can trust. They have her here as a hostage in case the Briggs garrison was planning to join the rebels as much as anything else.

She laughs uproariously at that last bit. Stupid, self-important cultists. She trained her underlings to view everyone – including their commander – as ultimately replaceable in the event of failure. These guys really can’t understand hierarchies that don’t exist for the sole benefit of the dictators, can they?

Cue Hook and as many soldiers and armored vehicles as they could smuggle over emerging from the tunnels and into Central.

I’m guessing they either used whatever underground passages we saw Mustang’s group moving through earlier, or (more likely, for a force this size) got the memo about Pride being indisposed and just used the macroglyph to sneak in from somewhere closer to Armstrong Manor where she had them hidden. Though in that case, I hope they thought to at least collapse as much of it as they could behind themselves.

And, true to Mustang’s predictions, Olivierre’s men are nowhere near as killing-averse as his own cell.

Cut back to Mustang, who is watching the fighting as it spreads through the city. He confirms my suspicions about Olivierre’s use of her new property to rally her troops nearby in secret, though he doesn’t comment one way or the other about how they got from there to inside the city.

He also explains that she used the repairs to the manor as cover for all the people and equipment she was smuggling in and out. Interesting. Did she and her brother stage that over-the-top duel just for the purpose of setting this up? Has her mysterious antipathy for her little brother in the episodes leading up to that all been staged? I’m really looking forward to seeing them interact after the Father situation has been resolved and learning how they actually feel about each other.

Well, on a more immediate note, Mustang’s cell has done a good job of getting the Central forces out of position and distracted from Hook’s and (eventually) Grumman’s attacks. However, they’ve just about run out of ammo, and Mustang is the only combat alchemist they’ve got at the moment. If the supply shipment they’ve been counting on doesn’t arrive in time, Mustang says, the others should just go to ground and try to escape while he covers them. He’s a little chagrined when he gets no resistance from them at that proposal, but ultimately smiles over it. Knowing that they’re fighting for themselves and their families rather than for him is comforting, in light of his arc throughout the series.

Just then, an ice cream truck barrels down the street, nearly flattening a couple of the Central soldiers who were pinning Mustang and Co down. The truck reaches the buildings the rebels have holed up in, and the driver reveals herself to be Grumman’s sniper Rebecca. She’s offering a special regime change discount on popsicles and ice cream bars.

Guess that’s the shipment they were holding out for.

Also present in the truck is Second Lieutenant Ross, complete with the mole under her eye. I guess she came back from Xing at some point to help move the underground’s logistics chain. I’d raise my eyebrow at how badly secured the borders of this authoritarian military junta seem to be, but the desert-facing side of Amestris is Grumman’s jurisdiction, so that could explain it. Hell, he’s probably the one who made those munitions disappear in the first place.

Along with the guns, mortars, and ammunitions, the ice cream ladies brought some armored column scaled smoke bombs, which gives them cover to get the truck out of the neighborhood again after unloading. Hopefully without the enemy having gotten a good look at the vehicle, but that might be too much to count on. These smokebombs are Xingese, apparently. Makes sense, given their affinity for nonlethal munitions. I'm guessing the Yao clan donated those, at Graninja's urging. After rearming the cell and creating a tear gas cloud, Mustang hops aboard the truck so that he can start making trouble somewhere else in Central and further divide the enemy forces. On the way, they stop by some unsecured phone lines to patch him through to the guy who’s been fronting their supply movements through his food and home supplies company.

Right, he said he was going to take over his family’s grocery store or something, when he first got out of the hospital. So, he owns the trucks, and the girls have been using them to move the stuff from Grumman and Graninja’s stockpile out east to a storehouse in Central beneath the rest of the military’s notice. Makes sense.

Of course, this makes it harder for me to pretend that the timeskip was just a few days, but I’ve spent enough words being salty about that already, you already know what I have to say on the subject.

I also feel like this is supposed to be completing an arc of Havoc’s own, with him getting over his hypermasculine attachment to being a man of action and coming into his own in an equally important support role. He never got quite enough screentime for it to really land, though, which I’m guessing is a Brotherhood-specific failing since it was the same way with Hughes and the others.

The overdramatic inspiring music ends abruptly as we cut back to the outskirts, where the Elrics and Scar’s group are watching the smoke rise over Central.

They’ve apparently been waiting for Mustang and Hook to create enough chaos for them to make their own move, targeting Father himself. Killing a demigod with a philostone body isn’t going to be easy, but Hohenheim is determined to free the souls of his countrymen, as well as however many others Father might have shot up in recent years. Left unsaid, of course, is the fact that Hohenheim has at least as many souls imprisoned in his own body. He hasn’t decided to kill himself at any point in the last few centuries, despite this, but I think he may be deciding that it’s time to finally face the music that he’s spent hundreds of years trying to drown out.

Maybe. It kind of goes against the philosophy that FMA seems to have been pushing up until now, for suicide to be the best moral choice. We’ll see, I guess.

Also, Hohenheim then says something that made me do a spit take.

Wh…what do you…you did this fucking OFFSCREEN? No explanation? No subplot about preventing Father from detecting and counteracting the sabotage?

But…even if you’re not going to show that being done, why not at least let us know that it’s happened as soon as it’s happened? What possible purpose does it serve to keep the audience confused about the current strategic situation and why anyone is doing what they’re doing for the last five episodes?

What even ARE the countermeasures? I’m guessing it has something to do with that invention of Brothar’s that May and the Elrics decoded, but…we still don’t even know what the hell that reverse glyph does! Is it just a scaled up version of Marcoh’s philostone-deconstruction spell? If so, that would actually explain why Marcoh never used that until so recently; maybe he hadn’t managed to quite figure it out until he saw Brothar’s work on the subject. Okay, that would make sense. But if that IS what Hohenheim is talking about here, then how the hell did he manage to add these huge modifications to the macroglyph in just a few months when it took Father years if not decades to do the same amount of digging? And how could he have done this without being noticed? Even if the new lines don’t have to intercept the old ones and alert Pride, that’s still a pretty fucking big project to hide in a very short period of time.

So, maybe it’s not the reverse glyph. But then what is it? I can’t think of a good reason for the audience to not know.

Also, Hohenheim adds that while their mysterious anti-macroglyph measures are in place, it’s still better to prevent it from being activated in the first place. Hmm. It’s probably not a philostone-uncreator then. Or if it is, they’re not totally confident that Father won’t notice and undo it in time. I guess if whatever Hohenheim did was doable in a short timespan, Father could theoretically undo it with similar speed.

…I still don’t get why they didn’t start running around collapsing tunnels as soon as they had Pride contained, if they considered preventing the macroglyph’s activation in the first place preferable to their other countermeasures.

Sigh.

Well. Anyway. Moving on.

They’re planning to walk into Central while the soldiers are distracted with the coup, and use the passageways that Scar, May, and Alphonse discovered at various times to access Father’s bunker. If experience is anything to go by, they’ll have to fight their way through a lot of chimeras, but between Edward, Hohenheim, and Scar that shouldn’t be an issue. They’re not planning to bring Dr. Marcoh, surprisingly. I guess he might have taught his haemuncubuster spell to Edward and Hohenheim (assuming the latter didn’t already have his own version of it) already, so there’s no need to bring an inexperienced combatant like him along anymore.

Before they go, Edward taps on the Prison of Pride and has one last pre-battle conversation with Alphonse. Al wishes him luck, and they share a fistbump through the rocky shell.

Meanwhile, Pride is playing with Alphonse’s helmet, tapping it over and over again against with a stick as it sits on the prison floor. It’s starting to seem purposeful. Either an attempt to drive Alphonse crazy, or some kind of spell or signal he’s trying to cast. I don’t think the Amestrians have the sort of ground penetrating sonar you’d need to pick up something like Morse tapping, but Father’s powers have been heavily associated with the ground and things hidden under it, so maybe there’s something down there his tapping can interact with.

The tapping continues playing over a panning shot back to Central. Soldiers are scrambling, smoke is rising. The camera then lowers itself into an alley, where…

She’s…only just now reaching Central?

But…that would…

…

THIS FUCKING TIMESKIP.

…

Pan back away from where May and Envy have escaped from the warp bubble that they spent the last two months in, and back to the command center. It looks like Mustang’s done a good job of keeping the garrison off-balance for Hook, and now they’ve pulled back from most of the city and are setting up defensive positions around HQ. Inside the building, Olivierre has now had one of those two cultists she’s sharing the meeting room with pull a gun on her. He seems to have taken her answers to his questions as an admission of having been involved in at least the Briggs contingent’s involvement in the coup.

Olivierre makes one final attempt to convince these guys that Father is just going to use and discard them the same way that they do to the men under their own command. No dice; they’ve drunk too much of the philostone Kool-Aid. They insist that the bloody evolution of Amestris from a country of humans into a small tribe of worthy immortal transhumans will usher in a new age for the entire world. She sighs, tells them they’re hopeless, and also explains how much it annoys her when people talk up the virtues of social Darwinism without ever putting themselves in the thick of the competition. That’s her schtick, and she earned the right to it with blood, sweat, and the worst border post in the damned country, unlike some people.

Then she kills them. Not particularly surprising. I guess she’s got to find a way of regrouping with Mustang, Hook, or her brother now; I wouldn’t stick around in the command center and wait for Father to catch me if I were her.

Back outside, the other Armstrong and some soldiers/police are herding civilians away from the hot spots. We haven’t seen much of Alex Louis for a while, have we? Not since the (possibly phony) duel with Olivierre, I don’t think. Wonder what he’s been up to and what role he’s been given in the plan? It would surprise me if neither Olivierre nor Mustang bothered to give him one. He’s approached by Brosh, that other dummy who used to be partnered with Ross, who doesn’t seem to have been let in on anything. Probably for the best, really. After shooing him away while making noncommittal responses to Brosh’s condemnations of Mustang’s treachery, Alex gets a memo from someone smarter about the developing situation in the command center. He immediately starts running, presumably to help his sister fight her way out. I’m looking forward to seeing an honest interaction between them after all this subterfuge; I really have no clue what their ACTUAL relationship is like at this point.

Graninja is hiding in the crowd nearby, listening in on Alex’s briefing. He’s apparently looking for Leed, and hoping to recover Ling before anything really weird and supernatural happens.

Best of luck to you, Gran. I’m not sure what Greed is plotting, exactly, but I can already hear Ling ranting at him about what a stupid idea it is and Greed ignoring him.

Graninja isn’t able to use his chi sense to track Leed because of how much philostone there is moving around in Central right now. Hmm. That’s…worrying, actually. It should just be Father, Sloth, and probably Hohenheim in the city at this point, shouldn’t it? He realizes a moment later that he’s feeling a massive chi signature redistributing itself and moving around beneath the ground.

Father is doing something. Either starting the ritual, or - if he’s still waiting on the sacrifices for that – doing something else with those philostone caches he’s implied to have seeded all around the glyph tunnels. Maybe activating that golem army, since he doesn’t seem to have already done it?

The camera pans slowly down through the pavement and into the Sin Inc executive office. Father is plugged into his space jockey chair, and philosopher’s stone is flowing through the pipes connected to it, though seemingly in the opposite direction from usual. The echo of gunshots and explosions comes up to him through the pipes. All across the city, animals look down at the pavement and start panicking, barking and hissing and raising their hackles. Then, above the distant explosions, the sound of rhythmic tapping, and the camera pans over to the earthen prison where Pride is still banging away on that helmet.

I guess Father has ground penetrating sonar after all, albeit not of the electromechanical sort. Sending tendrils of his substance out into the pipes seems to have let him extend some kind of “tremorsense” that he has far enough to pick up Pride’s morse code.

It’s starting to look like Father’s become less of a humanoid construct and more of a fungal mycelium that happens to have a humanoid fruiting body. Well, if he can pinpoint the origins of the tapping, releasing Pride will be all too easy. The prison extends above the tree tops, and its close enough to Central to easily hit it with an artillery shell or some such. So much for Alphonse's shoggoth babysitting career.

Edward's party has meanwhile infiltrated Central amid the chaos, and crept up on lab 3. That's the place where zombie!Barry led Mustang's party too, in the escapade that ended with them killing Lust. They've already tried to move on at least one other access point, only to find it inaccessible due to the fighting, so this is their next best option. One of the chimaeras suggests forcing a frontal assault on the guarded facility, since they have plenty of firepower at their disposal, but Edward says that he has a better idea that's less likely to bring down immediate reinforcements on them. He runs out of the bushes alone and approaches the guards, waving his badge and identifying himself as a state alchemist.

Erm...isn't he supposed to be a wanted man in Central, branded a traitor and so forth? He said that explicitly a couple episode ago, when he was talking to Winry. Maybe he just meant that the secret police or whatever will be looking for him, rather than the entire public having been told about some trumped-up crimes of his and there being an official warrant out for his arrest. I'm not sure WHY the haemunculi wouldn't have done that, though. Arakaway, did you forget your coffee that morning?

Well, for whatever reason, identifying himself as the Fullmetal Alchemist gets these soldiers to trust him rather than attack him.

He tells them that the insurgents have Scar on their side, and that Edward ran here to escape him. The soldiers quickly turn about face to give Edward covering fire in the coming battle, which lets him attack them from behind and knock the lot of them out.

It's too bad about the random dropping of the "wanted man" plot point dragging this sequence down, because it's otherwise really clever. Edward knows that everyone in Central knows that Scar has tried to kill him in the past, and thus would be eager to try again. He also suspects that the soldiers already know that Mustang and Hook's insurgents have Ishvallan guerillas assisting them, so Scar's presence would make sense (he actually IS here, after all). Furthermore, as far as anyone around here knows, Scar is strong enough to beat Edward in single combat, but has been successfully driven off by Edward with backup, thanks to the way the "capture Gluttony" mission played out. And, finally, Edward used all these mirror neurons here in order to prevent his less merciful and/or surgical companions from killing rather than stunning the guards, though he gave them a more pragmatic-sounding justification for it.

Great character moment for Edward, in other words, showing how he's learned to put his cunning to work in the furthering of his ideals. It's just too bad about them forgetting that he's a (suspected or "confirmed") traitor who disappeared months ago.

With the guards down, Edward opens the gates and hurries everyone through before other troops can react. Hohenheim is displeased to see Edward show that kind of deceitfulness, probably because it reminds him of himself.

Edward tells him to shut the fuck up and do his job.

They force their way through the hallways, and find the spot where the door Barry and the others used to access the tunnels was transmuted shut. Edward conjures a new door there (with demon skulls all over it, because he and Father both seem to have inherited Hohenheim's suppressed affinity for middle school edgelord aesthetics), and they make their entry. Then, Hohenheim tells them that they should split up into teams to try and find the way to Father's office.

Erm...do they have any way of communicating with each other while split up? If not, how do they plan to regroup after finding the route? Or do they think that a group that doesn't include Hohenheim can beat Father in a conventional assault on his lair, despite many of these same actors having failed to do just that a few months ago? I'm guessing they have some kind of regrouping plan worked out ahead of time, because that's the only interpretation of what they're doing that isn't completely insane.

So, they form teams. Edward and Scar will be one team, Hohenheim on his own will be another, and the chimaeras and Ninjette will be a third. So, one team with super senses that can hopefully avoid danger, one team with diverse firepower that can hopefully overcome it even in the event of Father using his alchemy-suppression power, and one "team" with near-infinite health and mana points. Reasonable.

Then Edwards whines about being stuck with Scar.

Are we seriously doing this again? Seriously?

Then, after reminding Edward that he'll need Scar if Father has local alchemy shut down again, Hohenheim abruptly makes a bizarre decision of his own and asks Ninjette to come with him instead of the chimaeras. Um...okay? That's leaving one of the three teams pretty damned underpowered. He claims that he could use someone to watch his back, while acting like he's secretly thirsty for her and coming up with excuses to be alone with her. Hmm. What's he doing, here? The chimaeras buy the dirty old man act. Edward's expression makes it clear that he doesn't, but he chooses not to say anything. So, they split up and get moving.

As soon as they're out of earshot from each other, Hohenheim tells Ninjette that she can go look for Leed. He can tell that her heart really isn't in this mission, and she really wants to be working toward Ling's rescue. I'm guessing he was just afraid that she'd be too ashamed to abandon the others and pursue her own mission, if the others were watching? IDK. I feel like if Hohenheim really thinks that they can spare a ninja's worth of power in this operation, he should have been able to convince the others of that to their faces. Well, anyway, she thanks him, and runs back up to the surface to regroup with her grandfather and track down Leed. On the other hand, Hohenheim is implied to have spent quite a long time in Xing as the Western Sage, and so he might have an understanding of their warriors' honor code that the audience lacks. So, yeah, in light of that I guess it can just be inferred that he knew she would never let him dismiss her in the others' presence.

Cut to one of the last surviving four stars hurrying through the Command Center's basement levels. Snarling and ranting about his colleagues' incompetence at putting down this insurgency, he bursts into the golem storage bay that Olivierre got a glimpse of a while ago. A scientist tells him that the golem troops haven't been combat-tested yet and that activating them now would be dangerous, but he brushes the man off with the insistence that now is exactly the time for longshot desperate measures.

Oooh, another new song! I'm guessing this is the golem troops' theme music, or something? It's pretty good. Simultaneously patriotic and military-like, and disturbing and horror movie like. Perfect for an army of state-produced ghost monsters.

The general throws some levers, and lets the big storage tank of protostone flow into the pipes feeding the golems' IVs. This pipe system is definitely the same mass that feeds down into Father's office, so it looks like I was right about those being feeding tubes as well as an interface for him to control his other underground magitech. They can turn the valves as needed to feed protostone to Father, to let Father slip his own philostone tendrils up into the command center, or to inject protostone into constructs like these golem troopers.

I'm surprised Father didn't already activate these things himself, but if that researcher says that they're not quite ready yet then it may just be that Father respects his underlings' advice more than General Panic up there does. Ironic, given Father's performative contempt for humanity. Needing the help of human alchemists to develop new spells and technologies must really chap his asshole.

There's a crackle of red soul-lightning across each of the constructs' heads, and then...a giant, Wogish eyeball appears in the middle of each of their foreheads. Which is notably NOT what happened when Alphonse, Chopper, Slicer, etc were animated. Okay, these things have something much weirder going on than just souls infused into synth bodies. Then, as soon as they've opened their new cyclops-like eyes, they all open their mouths and scream.

At a guess, these things each have mixed and matched parts of many human souls in them, rather than having a single "pilot" for each synth. The thing with the eyeballs appearing though...that looks like something else at work too. Something Gates of Truth related, built into their bodies a la Gluttony's chest-vacuum gun.

If these things each have a scaled-down gluttonizer mounted on their heads, then that's going to massively raise their threat level.

Edward, Hohenheim, Scar, May, and the chimaeras all look up in alarm at the sudden chorus of horrible screams echoeing through the tunnels. Roll outro.


That was certainly an episode. A ton of different things going on, some of them much better set up and executed than others.

Like with my Pride-related frustrations, a few of these issues feel like the result of rushing. Like this part of the story needed just slightly more time to cook before publishing deadlines caught up with the creative process. I also feel that the studio bears responsibility for some things (especially the stuff with Mustang's former underlings) not landing nearly as well as I suspect the manga versions did, due to insufficient screentime being given to those characters. Mustang's mastery of remarkably nonlethal pyromancy also feels kind of cheap. Like the story is making it too easy for him to be a "good guy," given the situation.

Still, lots of good action sequences. Olivierre was awesome as always. The tensions between the Briggs and Eastern wings of the insurgency are also coming out more strongly, which is a bit of realism that helps make up for other things. Like I said an episode or two ago, Olivierre and her underlings are very much not "good guys," and Mustang and Grumman are probably both well aware of the likelihood that they'll be fighting them after the haemunculi are dealt with. The interactions between the main cast were great. I'm very excited to see how the situation with Alphonse and Pride develops, now that it seems like Father will be breaking them out in the very near future.

No idea what's going on with the cyclops-synths, especially now that it turns out they're not ready in time for use on the Promised Day. Maybe they actually ARE ready for some secret purpose of Father's, but he won't be able to control them until he's done the thing? That actually makes sense. If he becomes more powerful by eating Amestris, he might be able to actually infuse parts of himself into the synths and retain remote control in a way he couldn't with the Sins before. He could then use them to expand his presence or something for the second stage of the plan that involves killing God or creating his own universe or whatever crazy-ass thing he's ultimately trying to do.