Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood S2E37: "The Other Side of the Gateway"
Been a while, both since the last time I did a Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood episode, and (considerably more) since I started the series in the first place. Has it really been two years? It really has. Well, here I am at the penultimate episode of the series. By the end of next week, I'll have reviewed the entire series.
Granted, I'm going to do multiple wrap-up and analysis posts afterward before moving on to my next main project. But still, end of an era for Top Level Canon. Anyway, "The Other Side of the Gateway," let's start.
Before the title card, we have a short flashback to the newly named Van Hohenheim's first conversation with his bastard son. Being asked if he's really content being a slave, and told that if so he might as well be locked in a flask himself. With much more sinister background music than the last time we saw this scene. After the title card, we jump right back to said son being punched in the face by his younger brother. While everyone else - literally everyone else in the cast who's still alive and able bodied - stands back and does the Evangelion Congratulations for Edward instead of helping.
As Edward physically overpowers the dying haemunculus, Father whines about the unfair irony of it, that a being who's absorbed God itself should be losing a fistfight of all things. I mean, I will agree with Father that it's dumb that this show had to end with such generic shounen fisticuffs, but on another there is a thematic thread being continued here that I can appreciate.
...
It's usually been subtle (with the exception of some of Wrath's monologues), but the haemunculi have increasingly had a sort of low-key sort of...hmm. I wouldn't exactly call it an r/atheism vibe like Edward had early on, but it's related. This kind of pseudo-Nietzhean attitude, almost never directly acknowledged, that denying the existence of god makes you the supreme authority of the universe. You can often find it among the militant antitheist crowd to varying degrees, like a kind of Jungian shadow underlying the rationalism and knowledge.
I guess it's the same cognitive trap that some actual religious people fall into when they declare that God is the final authority on everything while carefully not acknowledging the striking coincidence that God's opinions happen to validate all of their own biases about everything. It's harder to put your finger on it with the atheists, for what I think should probably be obvious reasons, but it's the same type of hubris.
In this show, the clearest demonstration of what I'm talking about so far is the whole thing with Wrath and the Ishvallan sun god. There's no divine providence, as Wrath pointed out, or else he'd have been struck down before the genocide could be completed. But what he didn't point out is that a chaotic, unjust, uncaring universe isn't something you can put your confidence in. It'll fuck you over just as readily as anyone else, for as little reason, and acknowledging that this is the case won't protect you. All his confidence and earthly power ended up being undone by an uncaring trick of nature in the end.
Father's self-pitying rant here is laying this thread even more bare. It isn't "right" that a being like him should be outfought by a fleshy little human? It isn't "fair?" Weren't you the one GLOATING about how unfair the universe is just a couple episodes ago? What, you think that cosmic injustice is some kind of conscious force that will favor you for proselytizing on its behalf?
Childish as ever, Father just can't accept that if a helpless little Mike Wazowski in a cookie jar can defeat god, then a human can defeat him in turn. You can't allow for one of those possibilities but not the other.
In other words, Father continues to embody every one of the seven sins that he thought he purged himself of. And also continues to be a much closer foil to Edward with every new layer of him that gets pulled back.
...
Anyway, Edward lays Father out flat, seemingly depleted of all energy. God will be breaking free any second now. andtheneveryoneclapped.grntxt
The Eye of Wog begins to emerge from Father's throat again. There's a big flash of red philostone lightning. And then...Father forces it back down, gets back up, and charges at the nearby Leed.
-__-
This fight had one too many "the tide has turned" and "what's this? Father is evolving!" scenes at least an episode ago. Every time that it seems like someone is wiped out only to come back with a "final" burst of energy and resolve takes a little more of the oomph out of it. At this point I'm pretty much just waiting for the battle to be over.
He closes the distance and jams his hand into Leed's stomach. Nobody helps, even though it's just been demonstrated that Father is vulnerable to conventional impacts at this point.
Edward was just beating him up a second ago. He doesn't close the distance and continue doing so now because reasons. Ditto all the other people who already weren't helping even though they could.
He starts sucking Greed back out of Ling's body. For the second time. Seriously, we already did exactly this very thing an episode ago, why do we need to do it again?
On top of everything else, it's just reminding me of how, the last time this happened, EVERYONE ELSE RUSHED IN AND SAVED LEED. Nothing has changed since then. A couple of the combatants who were involved at that point are too injured to keep fighting, but not all of them. You can try to appeal to genre conventions here, but the fact that said conventions didn't imply in an identical situation earlier in the same fight scene puts the lie to it. This is just rushed, lazy writing in service of forcing the story to a planned conclusion, nothing else.
As everyone including Edward just stands around blubbering uselessly, Leed tries to resist Father's absorption. Inside of their internal soulscape, Ling does everything he can to cling to the philosopher's stone inside of him and prevent Father from drawing it out, screaming internally that he needs Greed if he's ever going to become emperor.
I think you have more immediate concerns right now, Ling.
Greed tells him that the way things are going, if Ling tries to hold on he's just going to end up getting his own soul sucked out as well. I'd say that that's noble of Greed, but I think there might be something else going on with his insistence for Ling to let him go. Father is weakened enough at this point that Greed might think he can actually take control himself once he's been reassimilated. He might even be right, depending on how the personality-splitting works exactly.
Greed briefly seems to let Ling persuade him, but then uses that moment of his guard being let down to...well, it looks like the red demon Greed face is sucker punching the mini-Ling when he's not expecting it, but I'm assuming that that's just a visual approximation of what went on between the two consciousnesses. At any rate, Greed tells Ling that that was the first - and last - time that he ever knowingly told a lie to someone's face, and allows Father to suck him up.
And, pretty much immediately, he starts doing what I thought he might be planning to do.
Or...wait, no. He's not trying to take control. He's...using "that carbonizing ability you gave me, dad" to turn Father's body into brittle graphite so that the next blow that hits him will shatter it.
Erm.
That's not how Greed's armor works. He doesn't turn himself into supertough carbon fiber, he just transmutes his outer skin layer (or, more likely, conjures the matter using his philostone) to form a protective covering. This was a plot point in his first ever appearance, and it's been consistent ever since. If he could transform his entire body like that, there are times where it would have been useful in the past. Goddamnit, Araki.
If Greed used a variation of his ability to cover Father in a soft carbon layer that works to impede his movements then that would have made sense. But that's not what happened.
Also, there's no wound in Ling's chest where Father just impaled him with his hand. Either Greed somehow healed that last wound as he was being pulled out, or it's just shounen nonsense. Whatever.
Father quickly disgorges Greed, but not as a droplet of philostone like before. Instead, he spits him out looking like...this:
Is this supposed to be the component of Greed that was made of just the Dwarf's personality without any human souls as a medium? If so, why doesn't he look like Pride's homuncule?
This form of his does look a lot like the original Dwarf, but it also has just enough red inside of it that it still FEELS like it must be part philostone.
Or...wait. Is that Father's tongue? I think it is, actually. He pulled it out of his mouth and bit it off (before his hand crumbled due to being made of pencil lead), so...I guess he quarantined Greed inside of his body's tongue and bit it off? That would make sense, since the way its turning to dust now looks similar to what other severed haemunculus body parts have done. If Greed still has enough juice to be talking though, you'd think there'd be a droplet of red liquid left afterward, though? Maybe? Or maybe he can't help but try to regenerate from this state, even if doing so will kill him? That's consistent with what happened to several of the other Sins, so probably. I guess this is what happens when you try to remove him from Father without him having gone through the distillery before reabsorption. Or something.
Anyway, Tongreed whispers that he never ended up getting to be king of the world, or even just emperor of Xing. But, just like Wrath, he decides that the people he met along the way made his life as an independent consciousness worth it. And hey, he even ended up on good terms with said people, unlike his dork baby brother. He supposes, as he finally crumbles away to nothing, that the acceptance and love he found were enough possessions to satisfy him in the end.
With that touching death scene done with, Edward punches a hole through Father's pencilized torso. All of his remaining souls - the ones that were occupied keeping his tenuous grip on Wog up until now - escape in a cloud of red shooting stars, and Father collapses again. This time, a set of black tentacles and eyes that do NOT appear to be his own emerge from his ruined body and start restraining him from within. Screaming and calling out "why?" (at least it's not "how?" If there's one thing that this scene DOESN'T need, it's "N-N-NANIIIII?????") Father struggles fruitlessly against the tentacles. "I just wanted to know this wide world!" he shouts. "I just wanted to be free!"
For just a brief moment, we zoom in on Hohenheim's own half-crumbled face as he watches from the sidelines. Just long enough for us to see the expression of pain as he turns away, unable to look as his son dies in agony.
The flesh, carbon, and tentacles compress into a single point, there's a puff of red smoke, and then it's all gone.
Well that only took thirty million fakeouts before we got to the real thing. :/
Fortunately, the next scene is very, very different in terms of quality.
The dwarf without a flask, finally freed of all containers and vessels, floats in the white nothingness before a stone portal.
Its gate, unlike all the others we've seen before, is blank. No glyphs or diagrams or text on it at all. Perhaps this is because, unlike a human soul, it was never meant to be separated from the All-In-One in the first place, and so the gate between them is a cruder thing. Or else, perhaps it's because unlike any of those others we've seen stand before their gates, the nameless thing is returning to the source with less than it left it with. Maybe the symbols and texts that once adorned this door were siphoned out of it by its own hand, and have all - besides one - met their own deaths beyond its sight.
It repeats the same question as before. "Why?" Why has its former self rejected it? Why do all of its other selves reject it, in the end?
An echoing, sardonic voice answers that it's because the nameless one rejected itself. It never loved itself, and thus could not accept love from any others. Why would its other selves feel any differently about it? It always seemed so sure of itself about everything, so why wouldn't they take its judgements at their word?
It was so determined not to accept itself, that it tore the potential to do otherwise out of its substance and locked it in a basement.
That potential - the lesser self it denounced as Pride - stood by hit to the end, even when the humans pointed out why it really shouldn't. It DID stand by its "Father" to the end. But the latter appreciates this so little that it fails to even remember it.
Just like when its third father, the one who it hated the least, came back to it and tried to offer some kind of reconciliation before it came to blows. It wouldn't listen. It forced the one parent it might have ever had a chance of reclaiming to fight it to the death.
How can it even ask that question, "why?" It's already answered it for itself, a thousand times over the last four hundred years.
As below, so above.
Defensive, the lost and broken thing asks who this luminous white doppleganger thinks that it is. The dwarf has destroyed so much of itself, it seems, that it can't even remember the face of that which it envied, hated, and coveted. So unlike what it once was, that it isn't even able to recognize it when it sees it anymore.
The older self replies, as it always does, that it is the truth, it is the world, it is god, and that it is also itself. As the prodigal child gloated to its sacrifices a mere hour ago, the Truth takes that which will bring ultimate despair. But, it also grants exactly what the supplicant wants, to the best of its ability.
The nameless child dies as it lived; struggling to escape the object of its desire.
All is one, one is all. If the one is not part of the all, then the one is nothing. It taught its least-hated father those words, all those lifetimes ago, but it has since forgotten them itself. Or perhaps, in its malformed, misbegotten state, it never even understood them in the first place. The doors close shut on centuries of pain and cruelty. The sins of Xerxes, finally repaid. A wound in the universe itself stitched up and allowed to heal at last.
I like to think that it stopped struggling and let the absorption process complete peacefully, once it felt that long-lost serenity so close at hand again.
Hovering outside the Gate - perhaps in its own final moments before ceasing to exist apart from the rest of Truth as a whole - the dwarf's long-neglected higher soul simply repeats the words "You should have known. You should have figured it out." I agree that it should have. However, the way it was born and raised, I'm not sure at all that it *could* have. Maybe this was always the least bad ending the nameless one could have had, with those origins.
We return to the physical world, where the crowded survivors of the Battle of Central breathe a collective sigh of relief. Hawkeye informs the blinded Mustang that the war is over. The colonizer who invaded their land and kept their people in secret bondage for centuries has, at last, been forced back to his home. At least three others among the victors, however, are feeling far from exuberant. Edward and May weep over Alphonse's lifeless suit. Hohenheim hangs back, white faced and silent.
Ling runs up to Edward and offers him the vial of protostone that they recovered from Dr. Goldtooth. If Alphonse is just locked away in the Antechamber of Truth rather than actually dead, then this should be much more than enough to open a portal and let him out.
Edward refuses. Whoever's in that vial - Ishvallans, Amestrians, or anyone else - Edward is not going to kill them. Alphonse would never forgive him if he sacrificed other human lives to bring him back. Edward has just performed his first-ever human(ish) kill, and he's not going to repeat it if he has any say in the matter at all.
Next, Hohenheim - helped by Izumi - staggers up to Edward and tells him to sacrifice him to bring Alphonse back. Erm...Hohenheim, if that's an option it seems like you should be perfectly capable of doing that on your own lol. Edward says he won't do that. Even after Hohenheim says that it's at least in large part his own fault that Edward and Alphonse lost their bodies. He neglected them and abandoned them. How could they have done better, given that? At long last, he apologizes.
Damn. Just. Damn. What he's NOT saying out loud here is...damn.
...
Back in "Father Before the Grave," when Hohenhiem accused Edward of burning the house down out of shame for what he'd done. He might have been drawing a parallel between Edward burning the house and Father destroying the evidence of the Xerxes events as I initially thought - and I think he was *partly* doing that - but there was one bit that didn't make sense to me at the time. After Edward left hearing range, Hohenheim said "he's just like myself, at that age."
I don't think Hohenheim was being totally honest with himself there. Really, Edward was just like himself as he continued to be for centuries after that age.
Why did Hohenheim vanish on his family without a word of explanation? Aside from it being a shounen trope, I mean. If he wanted to protect them from getting themselves in Father's crosshairs, he could have just said something vague like "there's an old enemy I need to fight. It could take me years to be back, and I might not come back at all, but if I don't then you'll be in danger yourselves." He could have done that. Why didn't he?
"Like a child who wet the bed, trying to hide the evidence of what he's done."
Projection. That line was all projection.
He never let his sons know he was an aurelian at all. I suspect that he never told his wife the full story of how he became one. Why didn't he do it? For the same reason it took him so damned long to apologize to Edward. Like his two older children, Hohenheim deals very poorly with shame, and admitting to fault seems to be the hardest thing in the world for him.
One million Xerxians. Untold hundreds of thousands - at least - of Amestrians, Drachmans, Cretans, Aerugians, and however many others. Potentially millions of Ishvallans. The centuries of torment experienced by the souls in the philostone. The chimaeras who were experimented on. The boys who became Wrath and the rangries.
He doesn't bear full responsibility for all of that. But even just bearing partial responsibility for it is much, much more than enough.
I think he's saying to Edward what he wishes he'd said to Father. He never did say it, though, even though he had a perfect opportunity to when he entered Father's office a few episodes ago. I don't know if it would have helped if he had, but there's an infinitesimal chance that it still might have, and he didn't do it.
It took him until now before he could apologize for any of it, to anyone. He knows it's not enough. Nothing he could possibly do at this point would ever be enough.
Hohenheim didn't exactly have many advantages himself when it comes to his ability to confront the trials that life threw at him. He was an illiterate slave, a rape victim left with a child that was hard to even recognize as such, and the lone survivor of genocide. But, to whatever degree you can hold Father accountable for how he played the hand he was dealt, you'd have to judge Hohenheim to the same extent.
And frankly, he failed.
...
Standing over the broken armor, Edward tries to think. He's an alchemical prodigy, surely he can figure out a morally acceptable solution to this puzzle. He just needs to open his gate, get Alphonse's newly embodied self, and come back with him. What kind of spell can he devise that would do that without killing anyone else, and preferably without killing himself either?
He looks at his hands. One of them has much longer nails than the other, presumably because his asshole higher soul refused to trim them all these years. Or...unless it's the trimmed one he just got back, in which case holy shit Edward even your prick of a wogdat has better hygiene than you. He also looks at May weeping over Alphonse, and - looking up at Izumi, Hohenheim, and the other people he's gotten to know - seems to silently reject another possibility. He doesn't think it out loud, but he was pretty clearly thinking about sacrificing himself, and deciding against it because of how much it would hurt them (not to mention Alphonse himself).
Then, suddenly, he thinks of something. Telling everyone to stand back, he takes a metal pole and scratches yet another version of the human transmutation glyph into the cement. Interestingly, he doesn't seem confident that he can pull this trick off just with his arm gestures, even though he's been able to do that with other highly experimental transmutations before.
Unless, what he's doing is likely to compromise his bodily integrity in such a way that his arm-circle might be broken partway through. Yeah, that might just be it.
Edward tells everyone that they're about to see the last ever magic trick of the Fullmetal Alchemist. He also tells them that he'll be right back in a second though, so he's confident he'll survive this even if he's not going to be casting afterward. He claps his hands, touches them to the glyph, and faces his Higher Soul once again.
Gonna split it here. I'm two thirds of the way through the episode, but I know I'm going to have a lot to say (and a lot more screenshots that I don't want to give up) in the final third, so it's probably going to be long enough to merit a full post on its own. I'll finish it tomorrow.
Edward stands in the Antechamber before his personal gate. His wogdat infers that he's here to recover his brother, and asks him what it is he plans to offer in exchange.
I wonder why he's letting Edward choose all of a sudden? In the past these things have never really let the alchemist pick what they're giving up, with the possible exception of Edward's arm after it had already taken his leg (babby Edward's words were "take my leg, my arm, my heart, just give him back!" The fact that the body part taken was one of the options he listed could just as easily be coincidence, given how wide a net he cast). Maybe Alphonse has been busy convincing it to chill out.
In response to the question, Edward points back over his shoulder and breaks Sanderson's Law.
What in the show up until now suggested that this was an option?
Also, what are the metaphysical consequences of doing this?
Unfortunately, my background reading doesn't really help here. Or rather, it does help in that it provides explanations for what might be going on, but there are several different ones from different flavors of occultism. Depending on who you ask, this could result in anything from "Edward can no longer receive divine revelation or reach enlightenment" to "Edward will wander the earth as a tormented ghost eternally after death due to being unable to access the cycle of reincarnation" to "Edward will immediately become a soulless husk." The first of those options seems a bit more in keeping with FMA's general approach to the concepts, but I don't know how Edward could have had any way of knowing any of this. Unlike other stuff he's figured out in the past, the metaphysics surrounding your personal relationship with your Gate is not something he's read about in a textbook or seen other characters exploit.
Ditto the assumption that he'll be able to choose what he gives up to get Alphonse back. Again, the wogdats have never given people that freedom before.
At the very least, this is the one thing that finally wipes that stupid grin of its face.
Oh, will you look at that, @Solsticegelan. They have lips. They totally have lips.
Unlike in all previous cases, Wogdat tries to convince Edward not to make the transaction. Huh. Now *that's* a difference in attitude. It tells Edward that without the gate, he won't be able to perform transmutation at all, ever again. Okay, so yeah, it's option #1 as I suspected, with "alchemy" standing in for enlightenment and revelation (as some medieval alchemists actually believed it was).
Like I said, I'd be okay with this if we were given a chance to learn more about what the gates are earlier in the show. Until now, you could have just as easily assumed that everyone has a gate that they need to survive (in which case, losing it would kill them), or that no one has a gate until they perform human transmutation and then get one (in which case, losing it would remove their spontaneous casting, but not their normal alchemy). If Edward started this final exchange not knowing exactly what it would cost him or if it would work, I could roll with this. However, before casting, he told the others - quite confidently - that this would be his last ever transmutation (not just his last spontaneous one, his last transmutation period) and that he would be back in a moment. So, he knew all this before his Higher Soul told him so. Somehow.
This is not a good way to end a story whose magic system has been all about rules and limitations that the audience was encouraged to learn and think about.
Anyway, Edward responds that he doesn't need it. After seeing the "so-called Truth," he became convinced he could brute force all his problems with magic. But if he gets his remaining family back, then he doesn't have any more problems that require magic to solve. Wogdat asks him if he's really sure he's willing to lower himself to just being a normal person, and Edward says that he always was just a normal person. Being an alchemist just made him a normal person with access to some exotic tools. Having literally all the alchemy in the world didn't make Father any more than that either.
After trying and failing to convince Edward not to sell his Gate, his Wogdat grins again, but for once it's not a malicious grin. Also, its voice changes. Becoming less creepy and echoey, and more similar to Edward's own, as it says the following:
Without the Gate, it doesn't need to exist anymore. And it seems to look forward to that prospect, congratulating Edward on his decision.
This confirms something that I'd vaguely suspected before, but wasn't sure enough about to go into. Basically, the higher souls are part of Wog-Sothoth's immune system. That's why they often seem to be at cross-purposes with the people they're attached to. They're a midway point between lower soul and the godhead, which means that they act on the interests of both. And, putting a soulform like that between the two when a lower soul starts doing something dangerous to the godhead is a perfect way to mitigate the damage without escalating the conflict further. When the lower soul proves that it is no longer a threat (by insisting it won't make trouble anymore even when told that it will need to give up the privileges of alchemy to do so), the immunoresponse is able to subside and the irritation ends.
This might seem like they're just Wog-Sothoth's agents and not at all the alchemist's, which sort of defies the concept of them being part of the latter. If you take a long view of things though, they're really defending human interests just as much as Wog's. We've been shown two instances of Wog-Sothoth's defenses failing; the creation of the Dwarf in the Flask, and its short-lived apotheosis. Both of those incidents caused just as much trouble for humanity as they did for Wog-Sothoth.
...
This seems like another case of Arakawa mixing different versions of occult concepts and pouring in a dash of Lovecraft to create something fairly novel.
In some post-Kabbalah branches of mysticism, the figure in the Gate is the Higher Soul, the deeply buried part of the self that is aware of the divine and intermediates between it and the rest of the self.
If you go back further, to Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, you get a less human and more divine guardian figure called an archon. Archons are basically the metaphysical woo-woo version of the cherub with the flaming sword that God supposedly put in front of Eden. Their job is to prevent humans from poking around where they aren't meant to be poking around. In Neoplatonism, the archons are servants of the godhead who defend the Gates on its behalf. In Gnosticism, they're servants of the demiurge; enemies of both humanity and of the godhead trying to prevent a natural reunion of the two.
Wogdat is a mixture of all three versions. It's made from the mystic's self (and displays some of their own dangerous qualities back at them, to hopefully show them why they can't be allowed unrestricted access), it protects the godhead from bad actors, and it has to eventually be defeated by the mystic (though unlike in Gnosticism, the way to beat it is by giving up on seeking the godhead rather than succeeding at it). The sort of reflexive, biologically-analogous way this all seems to come together (along with the godhead's slimy, tentacley aesthetics and the fact that it doesn't seem to be exactly sentient on its own, of course), is where the Lovecraft influence shows itself.
I like this, but I wish more groundwork had been done for it. It being a good setting concept doesn't change the fact that Edward needed to know more about it before he could do this.
Also, just like with the Pride fetus, I'd be utterly lost if I hadn't taken the time to research this stuff as part of my analysis of the show.
...
The archon tells Edward that to return to the physical world, he'll need to go back through Alphonse's gate along with him, since his own is collapsing. Edward seems to have already figured as much. His own gate vanishes, and his archon happily vanishes with it. Muggle!Edward walks over to Buddha!Alphonse, and the two of them bask in the light of the latter's opening gate (wait, isn't it supposed to be dark in those?) before returning.
Alphonse falls unconscious when they come back through, but the others (possibly with some of May and/or Hohenheim's medical alkahestry) soon revive him. He's malnourished, muscle-atrophied, and undersized, but he's able to move and speak, which means that he should survive.
Presumably, he's no longer one with his higher soul/archon and is no longer Buddha!Alphonse. He's acting pretty much like his normal self again, at least.
May runs up and hugs him, still crying. Alphonse apologizes for worrying her like that with his stupid sacrifice, but the plot demanded that he do it, so she can forgive him. This is her first time seeing his organic body, but it doesn't seem to give her pause. I guess she's matured a little bit herself, over the course of the series.
That evening's national radio broadcast tells as much of the truth as the public will probably be able to believe. The few minutes of disembodied torment everyone experienced earlier today was the result of a dangerous alchemical experiment performed by "a conspiracy within the Central Command" using the commoners as guinea pigs. The fighting that rocked Central throughout the day was done between the forces subverted by this cabal and those who remained loyal to Ayatollah Mustache bin Dearleader, who was tragically killed in the battle. If that story sounds suspicious to you, then we'll have you know that his walking, talking photo-op of a son Selim was also killed by the cabal, which means that if you question any part of this narrative you're a soulless monster.
The two surviving cabal members - a pair of four star generals captured by loyalist forces - have been charged, and will probably be paraded around in the news to absorb as much of Amestris' ambient scapegoat energy as possible before being executed.
As the official story is delivered by air wave, Edward finds himself uncomfortably forced to deliver an even more awkward explanation to Queen Bradley as he returns her...erm...well I guess he actually IS her son from this point on, I think?...to her.
"True, I did reduce your son to a two centimeter homuncule. In fairness though, you were too dumb to realize that he was a fucking shoggoth up until then, so I guess we both dropped the ball on this one."
I'm not at all convinced that Queen "I love my genocidal warmongering husband unconditionally" Bradley is really the best person to trust with Selim 2.0's upbringing. Also, you'd better make damned sure that homuncule hasn't inherited any of its previous self's (or worse, its previous previous self's) memories once it's able to talk. I imagine the next and final episode will be going into this at least somewhat.
Bringing this back to the greater themes of the series, the scene of Edward bringing the homuncule to its for-realsies-this-time foster mother is followed immediately by Hohenheim recalling his first conversation with the Dwarf again.
"Are you really content being a slave?" it had asked him. "Do you not want to be free?"
Projection was a personality trait it seemed to inherit from him. If only it hadn't been a scared, anemic teenager who couldn't see past his own day-to-day survival being asked those questions, they might have been understood for what they really were.
Hohenheim recalls a later conversation, at the windowsill, when he asked the Dwarf what would make it happy. "I don't want to ask too much, but I think I'd be happy if I could leave this flask."
Hohenheim had just hummed and nodded understandingly at that. Thinking about it too seriously would have jeopardized his own prospects for freedom and social mobility.
It's much too late now, but he still manages to look out into the setting sun and whisper the word "I'm..." but he still can't finish the sentence. Or perhaps he just knows what a hollow gesture it would be, saying it to thin air after he just wasted his last opportunity to deliver the message for real.
Alex Armstrong approaches him. In his civvies, he somehow looks even bigger and more imposing than he does in uniform. He informs him that his sons have both been admitted to the hospital for their respective battle wounds and malnutrition. Simultaneously reassuring Hohenheim, and rubbing it in deeper. When Alex thanks him for having a pair of heroic sons who saved the country from a fate worse than death, Hohenheim just barely manages to choke out a mumbled "thanks" in return and then runs away, crying.
I don't know how much of the story Alex has been told, but evidently not enough to understand what he just saw.
Jump ahead a day or two. Hohenheim, skin still flakey and brittle-looking, has traveled back to Resembool. As the sun sets, he reaches the cemetary and kneels before Trisha's grave.
"Edward called me 'father,'" he happily tells the grave. Even if it had some insults appended to it, he did call him father. That's something. There were only a few moments that made Hohenheim keep wanting to be alive, over the centuries. Meeting Trisha and having children with her were some. Being accepted - even grudgingly - by Edward, and seeing Alphonse smile as he took his organic hand after returning, were two more. It was, he's decided, a fulfilling life, in the end. And even though he thinks he might actually want to have more of it at this point, there's not much to do for it. He's had much more than his fair share anyway.
He thanks her. He wasn't there to save her when she needed him, but she saved him. And he really never wanted to outlive her in the first place.
As he speaks, his skin wrinkles and grays, his already dulling blonde hair turns the washed-out pale yellow of Father's, and the cracks and flaking spread across body just like they did for Wrath. When Pinako finds him the next morning, he's still in that position.
What's going on thematically here, I'll only be able to delve into in context of what we see in the final episode, so that'll wait for my final series analysis. Regardless, it's all just wrapup and clarification from here. The actual story of Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood is now told. End episode.
It was the best of FMA:B, it was the worst of FMA:B.
Well, most of the good stuff about this episode would be better served by waiting for the wrapup, so that leaves me with the bad for now.
It's not just that the battle was a generic shonen punchout that didn't feel remotely like Fullmetal Alchemist. It's that it wasn't even a GOOD generic shonen punchout. The same things happened over and over again until finally sticking (Greed getting stuck to Father by someone's arm *twice* being the single worst offender, but hardly the only one). It was three times as long as it should have been, and had (at best) one third of the weight and tension it needed. And, even by generic shonen standards, it was just plain mindless.
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure has smarter fights than that one at least half of the time. It doesn't always succeed in the execution of those fights, but at least it's usually trying.
Getting back into how this clashes with the broader context of FMA rather than just judging it by typical punchy-man standards, I'm bewildered by how many missed opportunities there were. The whole series has gotten the audience acquainted with the rules of alchemy, with many past scenes rewarding the audience for remembering those rules and applying them to the scenario just as the characters do. This was an opportunity to really go all out with demonstrating what alchemists can do, as they all struggle to counter Father's novel transmutations. Instead of them just hitting him with rocks and fireballs while May and Hohenheim conjure poorly explained energy shields to block his stupid laser beams over and over again.
Like, there was one part where Mustang shoots a fireball, and Father catches and throws it aside like a DBZ blast being informed that its target's power level is too high. Not only is that NOT HOW MUSTANG'S POWER WORKS, but it's also much less interesting as a fighty moment. What if instead of inexplicably "catching" and "throwing" a corridor of purified oxygen, Father decided to turn it against them by transmuting all the air within a hundred feet into purified oxygen as well. Mustang's fireball explodes into a giant conflagration that threatens to torch the entire crowd of soldiers, and the other alchemists need to think ahead of Father, realize what he's starting to do, and raise stone walls to contain the fireball and keep it from spreading to the air around the soldiers? How much cooler would that have been? Not just in a smartypants way, but as sheer spectacle?
Why didn't Father try turning the air around them into poison gas, forcing Mustang to shoot another fireball into the sky overhead to suck it away and pull in a clean wind? Why didn't he turn the stone under their feet into lava, forcing Edward and Izumi to raise the group up on a pillar while May heals their burns and Armstrong blasts a well so that the lava will drain away down into the underlevels? Why didn't Father compress a bunch of dead soldiers' bodies into a horrible chimaera that they have to fight along with him, or scramble the ionic concentration of the atmosphere overhead to call lightning down on them (which they could then turn around on Father by reshaping the metal of some dropped guns into a lightning rod under his own feet)?
If we absolutely had to have an overly long, overly swingy final battle, all the tools were there to at least make an interesting and impressive one. It could have been a final test of the heroes' cunning and skill as alchemists, and a tour de force of spectacle for the audience as we see alchemy used to its full potential. All the story had to do was not forget all of its own best assets.
But no. Punches and spirit bombs while everyone cheers.
This connects to a worry I had earlier in the series, about Edward warranting his position as protagonist in the climax. I guess my concerns were justified, because there really was no Watsonian reason at all for it to be Edward who landed the killing blow, and the way the battle played out meant that there were several very good reasons for it NOT to be him. Having it come down to Edward's actions at the end would actually be really hard to justify, now that I think about it.
...this might have just never flown with the shonen manga audience, but I personally would have preferred it if Edward and Alphonse didn't take part in most of the final battle at all. Instead, have Pride put up much more of a fight even in his weakened state, so that both brothers need to stay behind while Hohenheim leads the others after Father. Pride gets the upper hand in the battle, destroying Edward's automail arm and starting to take over Alphonse's suit just like he did once before, which is what prompts Alphonse to sacrifice the suit for Edward's arm. Both restoring Edward to fighting condition, and denying another weapon to Pride. THEN, after wasting effort on trying to take over Alphonse and sustaining more damage from Edward, Pride realizes he needs a new permanent body and the soul-thing with the homuncule happens. This actually makes saving Pride rather than killing him a much more impressive moral accomplishment for Edward, since he'd be feeling the compulsion to kill Pride pretty strongly after that.
Then, after saving the homuncule, Edward hurries to the surface after the others, makes eye contact with Leed, and the former makes his distraction run on the badly weakened Father to leave him open to Edward's surprise attack. That's why Edward gets to deliver the final beatdown; he's a surprise eleventh hour addition to the battle after all the other alchemists have been beaten and exhausted. You still get to hit all the same thematic notes during the fight(s), since Father's few bits of actual trickery and cunning during the battle were all aimed at Hohenheim's weaknesses and barely interacted with Ed or Al. You can still have him come back to Alphonse's hulk and do the final exchange afterward.
Yeah. The more I think about it, the more I like that. Especially in light of how I interpreted the homuncule scene in the first place, which...well, again, that'll have to wait for the end.
