Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood S2E36: “A Fierce Counterattack”
I could have sworn we already had an episode called that? Back during the Briggs arc, I think? Something very similar at least. Well, regardless!
Father is up on the surface, sucking the souls out of the crowd of soldiers who had been picking themselves up off the ground in the Command Center courtyard. I'm still not sure if he could do this before he absorbed Wog-Sothoth or not, but I'm leaning toward not. I do wish the show would be clearer about exactly how powerful he is right now relative to both his old self and his brief GodFather stint. At any rate, he's still being distracted by the struggle to keep his untenable grip on Wog for a little longer, so when the Elrics and Izumi hit him with an alchemical volley from behind he's forced to stop the soul-harvesting and deal with the new attackers.
He doesn't try to just use the same soul-sucking power against them, though. Either Hohenheim has a way of blocking it, or (more likely, now that I think about it) Father has decided that absorbing souls that have had too much contact with Hohenheim might be a really bad idea just on the surface. Yeah, it's probably the second one. Thinking about this from Father's perspective, if Hohenheim was able to teach his constituent Xerxians to act like a smart bomb, then wog only knows what he might have taught his alchemy-prodigy sons to do in that situation.
Surprisingly, instead of just trying to flee again, Father starts talking. Repeating, albeit less articulately due to the tense situation, what the phantom version of him said back in "Interlude Party." That humans are a resource like any other. Becoming philostone is their purpose, as much as anything can be said to have a purpose. Hohenheim has a counter to that now, though; sure, everything is just raw materials for everything else. But then what the hell is Father himself? Are he and his spawn just a black hole that remove value from the rest of existence without giving anything back? What have they ever created or produced that is remotely equivalent to what they consume and destroy?
Father turns around, looks Hohenheim dead in the eye, and tells him that he actually just made a very good point. If he wants to be a proper God, he should be creating things. Oh god what the fuck kinds of monsters is he about to throw at them? Father's chest splits open, and a mass of babbling philostone-faces flows forth from his body before separating and stabilizing into people. Complete, seemingly healthy, living human bodies.
And not just any people.
I wonder if he could have done this at any time, if he chose to? He probably wouldn't have *thought* of it as a possibility, given that he didn't seem to realize that individual souls could still be separated and kept coherent after being absorbed into a philosopher's stone, but after experiencing Hohenheim's soul-virus firsthand he learned that they can. He's also spent centuries experimenting with various forms of human transmutation, so...yeah, I think this is something Father always could have done if he'd thought about it, rather than something new he's pulling from the mind of Wog.
Obviously, Hohenheim is the only one who recognizes Peter Thiel, or understands him when he starts babbling about how it worked, he's still alive, he's immortal. Hohenheim basically goes blue screen of death when he sees and hears him. Meanwhile...okay, this is starting to make me suspicious...a little Xerxian baby crawls up to Izumi's foot and starts tugging at it.
And then, seconds later, a bunch of Xerxian children surround Alphonse and cheer happily about how great it is to have their bodies again.
...okay yeah no these are just remote controlled puppets. Father either knows or has read dossiers about these specific people, so he's aware of their emotional weak spots. In addition to Izumi, Alphonse, and Hohenheim all being approached by "Xerxians" who look and act just the right way to be effective psychological warfare, it's telling that May *isn't* getting harassed by a specific construct. Because Father doesn't know anything about her, so he doesn't know what weakness to target. These aren't actually people, they're this:
If they had more than a few seconds to think about it, the alchemists almost certainly would have come to the same conclusion I did and just told Father to either engage with the argument seriously or not at all. Unfortunately, this was only ever intended to put them off balance for a few seconds while Father charged up another superlaser blast.
"No such thing as cheating in a fight."
Back down in the lower levels, Alex is about to bring the noncasters and Mustang up to the surface and try to get them to safety when the ground shakes and the building around them partially collapses. The shockwave of Father's beam tearing through the building overhead. As they wonder what the fuck that even was, Leed brings Ninjette back from inspecting Wrath's corpse and tells them that the situation is sounding worse than they expected.
A boom like that could only mean that Father is going on a true rampage on the surface, which is exactly the thing they were hoping to avoid after dealing with the macroglyph. They might only have one non-spontaneous and one blind alchemist with them, but Leed insists that it seems like they can't be picky, everyone who can contribute to the fight even remotely needs to do so. Given his own durability and familiarity with the enemy, Leed nominates himself as leader of the B-team, and nobody argues. There's a brief, but heated, argument when he tells Olivier that a wounded muggle with only one usable arm doesn't count as "someone who can contribute to the fight even remotely" and she hotly disagrees. I might actually agree with her here; she and Alex don't seem to be any less durable than Greed in his armor . Her men are out there dying, and she's not going to hide in the background while that's going on.
However, a radio call from one of her field officers convinces her to stop being foolish. If she's injured and unable to move fast, she needs to stay the hell away from the thing that just leveled half the Command Center.
She turned the Briggs garrison into an army capable of fighting effectively even when the chain of command is broken. So, she needs to let them do what she trained them to do and hopefully be there for them when it's time to play Let's Conquer Northern Amestris after Father's been dealt with. She reluctantly agrees, and tells her brother that he'd better do his best to protect her soldiers.
Leed is also hesitant to let the blind Mustang and anemic Hawkeye come to the battle, but Mustang points out to him that his oxygen flares have a history of proven effectiveness against haemunculi that no other weapon in their arsenal does. And, though he lacks his eyes, Hawkeye has a couple of very good ones, with hand-eye coordination and nonverbal communication ability with himself to match. The two of them operating together could potentially land a really damaging shot or two on Father if the others can box him in for just a couple seconds.
It's now Leed's turn to reluctantly agree.
So, Armstrong expands the pillar they're standing on, raising himself, Mustang, Hawkeye, Leed, and the less injured soldiers and chimaeras toward the surface. Olivierre and Sig stay underground with the wounded, the latter telling them to take care of Izumi up there. He sounds miserable as he says it; you can tell that after feeling and hearing that blast, he's already preparing himself for news of his wife's death. Granted, with her medical situation, he might have been low-key preparing himself for that for some years at this point. Definitely puts the scene where he tried to defend her from Hohenheim into more touching perspective.
As the B team moves on upward, Olivierre walks over to Wrath's body. She kneels over it, noting the prematurely whitened hair and transmutation-crumbled skin. Olivierre asks Scar if it's true he was the one who finally put Wrath down. Scar says that he did, but that the only reason he even stood a chance was because Wrath was covered with wounds before their duel even began. Olivierre thinks back to the report she got earlier in the battle, about how Hook and Graninja crippled Wrath at the cost of their own lives.
She takes comfort in the knowledge that her officer and soldiers' sacrifices were worth something in the end, and asks Wrath's body how strong her army turned out to be after all. Sounding like she isn't sure what answer it would give, if it could, and whether she'd want to hear it.
I suspect Wrath would have just shrugged and said "Of course your soldiers were strong. You cared about making them so." And then thanked her for giving him proper opposition in a doubtlessly infuriating way.
Back up at what's left of the Command Center's main entry courtyard, Pandarat shakes May awake. She pries herself out of the dust, and sees a half-disintegrated Alphonse kneeling in front of her, seemingly having used her own energy-redirecting spell just like she did the last time Father used this attack.
I suspect Wrath would have just shrugged and said "Of course your soldiers were strong. You cared about making them so." And then thanked her for giving him proper opposition in a doubtlessly infuriating way.
Back up at what's left of the Command Center's main entry courtyard, Pandarat shakes May awake. She pries herself out of the dust, and sees a half-disintegrated Alphonse kneeling in front of her, seemingly having used her own energy-redirecting spell just like she did the last time Father used this attack.
His reserves are getting dangerously low, after repelling these huge energy blasts again and again, and unlike Father he doesn't have a pipe system full of protostone to fall back on.
Hohenheim is still up on his knees, but he doesn't seem to be entirely conscious. Edward tries to wake him up, only to see, looming up through the smoke and dust clouds behind him...damn, this shot is just amazing:
Obviously, Hohenheim and Edward are down on their knees, so Father's physical height in this frame is sort of an optical illusion. But that's just a small part of what makes the image so powerful, at least for me.
For one thing, it's extremely close to how I pictured Victor Frankenstein's second to last meeting with his creation looking. The doctor finally beaten down, bereft of his family and wealth, unable to keep up with the sheer relentlessness of the creature, and it finally standing over him rather than the reverse.
For another, and more importantly for Fullmetal Alchemist as a whole, this is really where Edward Elric's final battle is taking place. He wrestled with - and defeated - Pride in the previous episode. And sure, pride is a sin that you can very easily call Edward's, to at least the same degree that sloth was Alex's or wrath Scar's. But I don't think pride was really, exactly, Edward's biggest character flaw.
...
I'll talk about this more in my series conclusion, but one angle you can look at Father from that I didn't touch on in my "Dwarf In the Flask" analysis - and that should have been obvious to me at the time - is Jungian psychology.
His original form was literally a shadow.
In the backstory episode, you could make an argument for him being the Shadow archetype to Hohenheim, with his desires being twisted versions of his blood donor's own. And yeah, even his pose in the screenshot above is vaguely "shadow" like, in its relationship to Hohenheim. But at this point in the story, he's not Hohenheim's dark side. He's his failure, his responsibility, his cross to bear, but he's not his dark side. He's Edward's.
Until very recently in the series, this is what Edward wanted. His father, beaten down and humbled, kneeling helpless before him, while he stands over him - tall, serene, to all appearances dispassionate. Having defeated Truth, shown up all the adults who acted like they were smarter and more important than him, broken beyond the limits of alchemy, he grinds his father beneath his heel. Finally showing Hohenheim that he never needed him. He never wanted him. That Hohenheim didn't really abandon him, but rather he just wasn't good enough for him.
The haemunculus has caused so much suffering for his younger brother. But then, so has Edward for his own.
...
When Father then bats Hohenheim aside and sends him skidding across the blasted courtyard, the low angled shot is also very reminiscent of when Edward punched him over back in "Emissary of Darkness."
With Hohenheim still recovering, Father raises his hand and starts drawing out Edward and Izumi's souls. Okay, it *was* Hohenheim that prevented him from just doing this to begin with then, if he's now attempting it as soon as Hohenheim is disabled. Noted. I wish this was communicated more clearly when it was relevant an episode ago, but that's true of a lot of things in this sequence. Fortunately, his soul-reaping is once again interrupted, this time by an anti-material round to the back of the head.
"No, the OTHER long-haired blond man...no no no, not that one either! The naked one! THE NAKED ONE!"
Father picks himself up off the ground, the back of his skull regenerating, but only just in time to detonate a volley of mortar shells before they can land on him.
Father retaliates, vaporizing the mortarmen with a crackle of red lightning, but while he's doing so a rain of autocannon rounds fall on him from the other direction. Which in turn draws his attention away from yet a third approach vector, where Hawkeye is lining up Mustang's arms for a maximum strength oxygen flare that engulfs the entire courtyard around Father.
No visible damage, but you just know he had to spend almost as much energy deflecting that firebomb as he would have regenerating the burn wounds.
...well, unless he was quick-thinking enough to figure out how Mustang's attack works and surround himself with a buffer of CO2 molecules or something. But aside from the rare breaks in the action where he has a chance to think, like when he made the fake Xerxians, Father is not doing a good job of using his brain in this fight. Understandably, perhaps, if he's still struggling to keep Wog-Sothoth contained, but still.
Father is ready for it when Mustang shoots another flare, and redirects it back at him and Hawkeye, but Mustang uses his new spontaneous casting powers to raise a stone wall and block it. There's some annoying time-dilation going on with the way this sequence is done, but not too bad by anime standards. More importantly, the attackers realize what I did at the end of last episode; in his current state, Father is limited to 5E spellcasting rules and can only concentrate on one transmutation at a time. That means that as long as they keep their attacks constant, he'll need to concentrate entirely on defense and won't have a chance to hit back. Bullets, shells, grenades, alchemical attacks, chimaeras shooting spikes and throwing heavy things, every weapon they've got.
Hopefully, they can force him to burn through the rest of his batteries before they run out of ammo. It's a long shot, but for now it's the best idea they have.
From a surviving rooftop on the least destroyed side of the courtyard, Leed watches. He was leading the reinforcements a moment ago, but seeing Father go all out with his power his making Greed reconsider his goals again. So much power. So much potential. Is there a way he could try to take all that from his creator, instead of just killing him and wasting it? Come on, there must be SOME way to do this.
Inside him, Ling tells him to kindly pull his head back out of his ass and take the damned fight seriously, how many fucking times do they have to repeat this. This time though, perhaps seeing that Father might actually be close to running out of juice, Greed isn't so easy to talk down.
Split for image limit.
The alchemists are getting creative with their attacks, using a combination of Izumi and Alex's earthbending with Mustang's flares to hit Father with concentrated shaped firebombs. Unfortunately, the muggles have run themselves out of ammo, and Father is still up and seemingly not significantly more depleted than he was before.
Next up, despite his questionable motives, is Leed. Under the cover of the most recent fire-earth blast, he closes the distance and...I'm not sure how this is going to be any more effective than just one more bullet, but he punches Father in the head.
It turns out it's a little bit worse than useless, actually. Father reshapes his flesh and absorbs and traps Leed's hand, pillarman style, and thanks his good and dependable son for bringing him back some philostone when he needs it.
So...how mutable is that body, then? Is it *not* supposed to be fully human-fleshed? If it's still shaped philosophers' stone, how was physical trauma able to cause any damage to it at all?
Father starts draining the Greed out of Leed, and the latter screams in horror and agony...but then stops, says "just kidding," and begins sucking back, cackling about how he's going to steal all of Father's Xerxians and hopefully Wog-Sothoth along with them. Um...I don't think that that's how it works, Greed, but go for it I guess. The music gets all triumphant, Father looks scared, and then...Father just concentrates a little harder and starts draining Leed again rather than the reverse.
-_-
What was even the point of that whole back-and-forth if Father was just going to (predictably) win without any adjustment of tactics or circumstances?
The alchemists (discluding Mustang and Alphonse, who are too blind and too immobilized respectively), seeing that Father is distracted by Leed, approach into close quarters and try to capitalize on it. Cue very silly-looking sequence of Father fending off Edward, Alex, and Izumi's attacks while Leed is literally dangling from his forehead.
Also, it didn't register until I took this screenshot, but Izumi is using swords. Didn't know she even did that.
...actually, her weapon choice and fighting style are fairly similar to Wrath's, so I wonder if she and the agoge kids studied the same martial art. That would make sense.
Father forces them to withdraw with one of his disintegration bursts. Leed loses his arm and change, but at least he's free now, and he can heal. Just after doing that though, Father has another spasm and flicker. Once again, his grip on Wog-Sothoth is failing. When Edward closes again and throws a kick, Father does something they've never seen him do before and blocks it with his arm instead of using magic.
He's that distracted. So preoccupied with keeping his grip on God that he can't concentrate on any transmutation effects at all.
...if he'd just let go of the damned pickles and pulled his hand out of the jar, he'd probably have won this battle already. It's not like he's even able to use much of that divine knowledge in this state, as far as I can tell. But that would mean taking the L on his apotheosis, which is something he simply cannot do.
The Eye of Wog starts forcing its way out of his mouth, and it looks like wisps of shadow-stuff are starting to escape through his skin. But then there's a flash of red lightning - yet ANOTHER one, this fight is really way too long and repetitive - and Edward gets hit by it. His automail arm is completely destroyed, and his organic one is impaled by shrapnel and pinned against a broken cement wall.
However, Father looks like he can barely stand up. Wog is no longer visibly escaping, but he looks parched, zombie-like, as he desperately whispers the word "stone" like a man in the desert seeking for water. He sees Edward, pinned by the shrapnel and helpless, and starts slowly shuffling toward him. Apparently, he can't even do his instant philostone transmutation anymore; he'll need to extract Edward's soul by touch.
And um...I guess everyone else was killed or disabled by that last blast too, because no one is shooting at Father as he limps sloooowly over toward Edward. It looks like one more hit from almost anything would be enough to do real damage to him now, but nobody seems able to attack.
A short distance away, Alphonse - still missing half of his armor, helpless screams for Edward to do something, and then for Father to stop. For all the good that can do.
Alphonse turns to May, still kneeling beside him and nursing wounds of her own that even her alkahestry seems to be taking a while to heal, and tells her that if Edward paid his arm to move Alphonse's soul into this construct, then the reverse should also be possible. May tells him that that's insane, no, don't do that, but Alphonse insists. He just needs her to create an alkahestric conduit for him so that he can reach Edward from here. She tearfully, reluctantly, agrees, and then...oh god this is the stupidest fucking scene in Fullmetal Alchemist.
First, May throws her pentagram-daggers into the cement next to Edward (and also, incidentally, next to Father, who has closed most of the distance by now).
Then, Alphonse raises his arms - which are seemingly still intact enough to perform these motions - and claps them together to transmute.
Edward and I both shout for Alphonse to not do this (Edward out of horror, me out of irritation), but he does it.
...
This scene would just be ignorably stupid were it not for the fact that THE ENTIRE EMOTIONAL CORE OF THE SERIES IS RESTING ON IT HOLY FUCK.
Let's go over this.
May is still able to throw her ranged-casting daggers with accuracy.
Alphonse can't walk, but he can still perform the arm motions to transmute.
Edward is missing his automail arm, but - and this is important - his other arm is also impaled by shrapnel and stuck to a wall.
Father is so weak that he's limited to shuffling slowly forward and looks like he might be about to collapse on his own any minute.
May and Alphonse could just as easily land an attack on Father right now, and it would probably take him out. Meanwhile, Edward's OTHER ARM, the one that Alphonse's sacrifice DOESN'T have anything to do with, is badly injured, pinned, and might be completely unusable for all they can tell.
Trying literally anything besides this would have a higher chance of saving Edward.
It's easy to imagine another way this scene could have gone that would make it make a lot more sense. Maybe instead of his organic arm being impaled, Edward has a broken leg (hell maybe its even his automail leg, just for that thematic emphasis). He's trying to crawl away from Father, but with just one arm and one leg even Father's slow zombie-shuffle is quickly gaining on him. May is unconscious, but Alphonse notices that five of her daggers that she used earlier in the fight are still in formation on the ground coincidentally near Edward. Alphonse is too far away to do any fine-tuned attacks and see what he's doing, so using the daggers to make an attack would likely hit Edward by mistake.
There. That would justify Alphonse's decision there. It's not a major change at all. In fact, you could very easily pretend that that actually IS what happened and keep watching from this point without missing a beat.
I'm not going to do that, though. Because, if it was that easy for me to imagine a version of the scene that actually justifies Alphonse's actions, then it would have also been that easy for the creators to actually make it. And they didn't. That so little care and thought were put into a scene this meaningful, this important to the story and characters, with this much buildup and dramatic weight, is nothing short of a slap in the face to the audience. This is NOT just some random filler fight that you can cut corners with and hope that the readers/watchers will make sense of or gloss over on their own. This is the final battle. This is the main characters sacrificing their lives for each other. This is the one segment OF the one battle where you absolutely DO NOT want to phone it in.
...
Alphonse stands in the Antechamber of Truth (which technically might be inside of Father right now, come to think of it...) and tells his body that he's ready, but only in exchange for Edward's arm being restored. His body smiles, and accepts, proving conclusively that that's his Higher Soul who can make bargains with him piloting said body. He takes its hand, and the armor (or at least, this representation of it) vaporizes.
Across the white nothingness, Edward's Higher Soul loses its organic arm and gets its glowy white one back, keeping just the leg now. It asks Alphonse what he thinks Edward will sacrifice when he comes to get him back, assuming he survives this battle. Alphonse isn't sure, but notably his voice has taken on a spookier, echoier tone than it had before. Also he's still sitting in that same posture.
So, Alphonse is in a sort of Buddha-like state right now, completely one with his own Higher Soul? Did he accidentally enlightenment just now? It kind of looks that way.
Well, wogdat-Edward and buddha-Alphonse will just have to play checkers or something for a while until the battle is over, I guess. Returning to the physical world now!
...where Edward has to tear the shrapnel out of his other arm in a fountain of blood.
-_-
HOW DID ALPHONSE KNOW THAT WASN'T STUCK THROUGH THE BONE?
HOW COULD HE HAVE KNOWN THAT THE OTHER ARM COULD EVEN MOVE ANYMORE?
Fucking...
Well, anyway, Edward hits Father with an earthbending attack, and then pulls the thing out of his arm, stands up, and starts hitting him with more. Real wounds are opened, and he starts bleeding wog.
On the sidelines, everyone - including Alex, Izumi, and the chimaeras, who all look like they should still be capable of fighting - just starts cheering for Edward and telling him how awesome he is and that they know he can do it.
...they could have interfered earlier.
Alex, Izumi, the spike-throwing chimaera. They're all up. They could have shot at Father while he was stumbling toward Edward. Screw sacrificing his life, there was no need for Alphonse in particular to have done anything just now. Where the hell was everyone a minute ago?
They didn't exist for that sequence. Because fuck you audience, we're ignoring all of our own themes about the importance of every individual, reliance on others, and the dangers of personality cultism, and being just another bottom-of-the-barrel wad of shonen brain rot right now.
Actual clip from Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood
Inside of Leed, Ling tells Greed that this is what he really wanted all along. To be arbitrarily designated protagonist and have everyone clap and cheer for you even though it makes no goddamned sense for them to do that. That's what would really fill the emptiness of his heart.
Well, technically what he says is "having friends like these." But we can clearly see what's actually going on in front of them, so clearly Ling just misspoke and actually meant what I said before.
End episode.
Ruining the emotional climax of your story just with bad fight choreography. That is something you can do, apparently. I didn't know you could do that. I have learned a thing.
