Fullmetal Alchemist S1E23: “Girl on the Battlefield”

Girl on the battlefield? I feel like we've had a few of those, already. I guess there's always room for another.

Yao and Ninjette escape from Wrath...somehow. When last we saw them, he had gotten around the flashbang and headed them off, but now they're escaping the building with him and Gluttony racing to catch up. Wrath mutters something about more grenades having been used, but this really needed to have been onscreen, and I suspect it was in the manga. Is it just me, or do Yao and Co keep drawing the short stick when it comes to the adaptation?

Back to Edward and Winry. More soldiers finally arrive, and Edward leaves the still-sobbing Winry in their care, promising he'll come back and tell her everything he's learned about Scar and her family as soon as he's done helping Alphonse.

Winry is not happy about only being able to wait and hope that people make it back from danger so that she can hopefully put them back together afterward.

Well Winry, if you want to become our newest girl on the battlefield, I strongly recommend that you build yourself a mechsuit or something first. Or else make sure you have a full case of throwing-wrenches.

Mustang and Hawkeye overhear the latest set of communications, and he sends her to render aid. Probably to the brothers, since he only coordinated with them as far as we know, but he could also mean "find Yao and help with the capture attempt if possible." He gives her the address of a new safehouse she can retreat to if needed, and she warns him to stay the hell off the battlefield this time.

Mustang doesn't get to be the girl on the battlefield this time. ;_;

Hawkeye might have trouble catching up to anyone in time to help though, because the situation in the field keeps getting more chaotic. Yao tries to escape into the poorer, less navigable part of Central, still carrying the semi-conscious Ninjette over his shoulder. Either one or both of them is leaving a blood trail, so Wrath doesn't even need Gluttony to track them at this point; he sends Gluttony to go deal with Scar while he runs down the Xingites on his own. As she wakes up a little more Ninjette realizes that her left arm is unresponsive, and tells Yao that she can no longer be of any use to him.

That's...a bit surprising to hear. Even in Amestris, which lacks Xing's medically focused alkahestry, limb replacement is a fairly common thing. You'd think she'd be used to the idea of...oh, I see. She's just trying to use this to get him to leave her behind again.

Still, he refuses to do so, even when she reminds him that he's much more essential to their clan's survival than she is and that he has a much better chance of escaping if he drops her.

Man, what IS going on in Xing?

Looking back at the hints we've gotten so far, with Yao being laser focused on an immortality formula specifically rather than "anything that can shift the balance of power" as he told the Elrics, I don't think he's actually trying to take the throne. It seems more like he's trying to make the current emperor immortal and prevent succession from ever becoming an issue again. Which would suggest that his own tribe is in a precarious enough situation that almost any outcome of an imperial succession would be ruinous for them. What the heck got them into this situation?

Realizing that she can't convince him to let her die, she manages to produce one of her blades and turns it on herself. The camera cuts away just as she's about to stab herself with it, but given that she was literally doing this behind Yao's back...well, I don't think he'd have been able to stop her. Fare thee well in the land of the spooky glowing kid, Ninjette. We barely knew you, but there were already way too many minor characters.

That cut goes to Scar, who Alphonse has pursued into an industrial area. Scar, who's figured out that Alphonse is just a kid infused into that armor, asks him why he has such faith in alchemy after what it's clearly done to him. Alphonse is emotionally immunized to this sort of question now, after "Father Before the Grave's" revelations, and tells Scar that he sees it as alchemy having saved his life as much as ruining it. Scar isn't making much sense here. Less so than usual. He's definitely deeply rattled by what just happened with Winry, and you can get the sense that he's sort of retreated into himself and is just repeating accusatory phrases rather than really engaging in conversation. Scar pulls a clever trick in disintegrating some water to form a steam cloud and charge through it as concealment, but Edward catches up in time to intercept him. Edward might still be exhausted, but at this point Yao will have either succeeded or failed, so the brothers aren't trying to prolong things anymore. And, fighting to win, the two of them are still a match for him with their new powers and skills.

Edward whinges about having failed to cheer Winry up for a bit, and then before they can resume the battle Gluttony comes shooting out of nowhere. Scar recognizes him from East City, while the brothers have been informed about a fat haemonculus with a tattoo on its tongue, so everybody knows that they should target this thing first. Scar manages to get the first blood, landing a disintegrate on Gluttony. It only does minor damage, but still, if the three of them are smart enough to cooperate against Gluttony I think they can beat him without too much trouble. Scar may not be onboard with the whole "take one alive" plan, though.

Sure enough, Edward, Alphonse, and Scar put their own fight on hold and gang up on Gluttony. Wrath is still on the way after Yao though; even if Ninjette is dead, Wrath isn't going to be satisfied with just one corpse after they both saw his eye. Still, Yao manages to surprise Gluttony and plant another grenade inside of his mouth. This, combined with the disintegration wounds Scar has been stacking on him, does enough damage to stun Gluttony for a moment while he regenerates his missing head and shoulders. That moment is long enough for the Elrics, at Yao's prompting, to transmute some nearby train rails into thick metal cords and bind them tightly around Gluttony's body. As his head and shoulders grow back, he traps himself more tightly in the metal bindings; he can't get a limb free enough to start tearing them, and he evidently isn't quite strong enough to break out of them without any leverage.

Well played, guys! Especially Yao, but everyone made a vital contribution.

Just then, Wrath follows the trail to...um...

Okay. It's not that this is a stupid idea conceptually. If they know that their pursuer is probably going to be following the blood trail, and Ninjette isn't getting any more use out of that arm anyway, sure. It also allows the fakeout where it looked like she was killing herself rather than just amputating a limb to work.

The problem is that they just barely escaped that building with Wrath less than a minute behind them. Wrath is at least as fast as them, and can seemingly go much faster still for short bursts. Yao was carrying another person over his shoulder while fleeing through a city he barely knows. How the hell are they supposed to have had time to bind or cauterize the amputation wound, find a dog, tie the severed arm to it, and send it in a different direction without Wrath getting close enough to even see it happen?

Also, are they supposed to have done that without getting themselves all bloody? Wouldn't Wrath have seen multiple blood trails diverging from that point (we see that Ninjette has retreated into the sewers a moment later) and realized something was up?

I just don't buy this. Maybe the manga justified it better. As I said earlier in this review, the Xingites always seem to get shafted by the adaptation omissions. If so, that's a pretty major black mark on this episode. If not, that's a pretty major black mark on this part of the source material.

With Gluttony bound, Yao wants to know who the hell Scar is and Scar wants to know what the hell any of this crazy bullshit is. Before the conversation can get off the ground though, Hawkeye comes zooming around the corner in a civilian car, wearing civilian clothes with her hair down and some glasses on, and shoots Scar in the ankle before he sees her coming. Holy shit, she actually got him! It was a total cheap shot, but still!

...

I was about to say "aw, you didn't have to do that Riza," but on further reflection...well, she sort of did. Scar is in an even worse headspace than usual right now, and odds are good that in the absence of mental energy to spare he'd default to "destroy the abomination" and prevent them from recovering Gluttony. So yeah, that was probably the best course of action Hawkeye could have taken, though admittedly she didn't know a lot of those contextual details.

...

Yao laboriously hauls Gluttony into the car (okay, maybe carrying Ninjette wouldn't have slowed him down that much if he can lift Gluttony) and the three of them drive away. All the brothers have to do is claim that they chased Scar here, and that a random cop they passed on the way must have landed a lucky shot. Scar is leaning against a freight car, unable to move very far or fast with a bullet in his tibia. A group of soldiers catch up, and the brothers close in to finish subduing Scar for them.

But then...

I like itty bitty kung-fu panda trying to help.

Here's our girl on the battlefield, I guess. Distinguished by being young enough to unmistakably be a girl rather than a young woman. Assuming May isn't actually an elite Xingite warrior who's been biomodded to look like a kid, of course; I'm still not convinced she isn't that.

We have another incidence of the Xingian Time Dilation, this time even more egregious. After May surprises and knocks down the Elric brothers, she and the wounded Scar are surrounded by soldiers with guns trained on them demanding surrender. And somehow, May has time to throw two sets of englyphed darts at the train cars on either side of them, draw another glyph into the dust on the ground with her foot, and activate all of them to make a giant smoke bomb that blinds everyone, without anyone pulling the trigger.

I think that her performing this complicated series of actions in less time than it takes to squeeze a trigger is a little more extraordinary than ranged transmutation, Ed.

Unless May is actually supposed to be as fast as Wrath in speedboost mode (which is a possibility, to be fair, but someone should have called attention to it if so), this was just some total bullshit.

It would have been so easy to just have the soldiers arrive a little later, and for May to do her smokebomb trick before they got a chance to assess the situation and level their weapons. It seriously wouldn't change the scene in any way whatsoever except to make it make sense.

She and Scar escape in the smoky chaos, and Edward gets mad about it. Cut to the getaway car. Hawkeye is bringing Gluttony and Yao to the new safe house, and Yao is trying to convince her to make a detour so he can recover Ninjette from the sewer she's hiding in. Hawkeye is reluctant, but acquiesces, and that turns out to have been a mistake.

Picking up Ninjette means driving through the local neighborhood instead of beelining out of it. Wrath, who has regrouped with his soldiers, catches a glimpse of them. He recognizes Yao. And he recognizes Hawkeye, despite her civilian attire, as Mustang's accomplice who was present at Lust's death. He probably also noticed that the thing chained up in the back was his brother Gluttony.

Wrath silently decides that Mustang has gone too far now, and that now he can nail him. Or...maybe not. He recognizes Hawkeye as one of Mustang's, and then thinks "now you've done it, you punk." But with Wrath's true motives still potentially unknown, this might mean something different than "I can nail Mustang to the wall and do it by the book now." The "punk" could be referring to Mustang, Yao, or someone else entirely.

Brief interlude of Scar, in hiding, being healed by May while still recovering emotionally from his revelation with Winry. Does May realize she just kicked Edward Elric in the face while protecting Scar? Maybe her whole fangirl thing from before was just an act, but if it wasn't...well, it's going to be funny when she finds out who that was. As Yoki finds them (for some reason. Why was he looking for them? Why is he traveling with them? Why does he exist in this story?), May realizes that her panda-rat-thing is missing. Cut to said pandarat, which is...oh. huh.

So. In a different car, Edward and Alphonse are being ferried back to base for first aid and debriefing. As far as the general public or soldiery knows, they just outfought Scar and forced him to flee with the help of an accomplice, which is closer to taking him out than anyone has gotten so far. So yeah, the Elrics are gonna be looking pretty damned good right now. But more importantly, Alphonse is holding the spoils of their recent battle.

Apparently, Alphonse has a history of stashing cute animals inside of his armor that Edward has long been trying to get him to stop. Provoked by Edward's shouting, and by Alphonse's too-rough petting, pandarat bites Alphonse's finger, and has its worldview fundamentally altered when he doesn't react at all.

I'm not sure why Edward was on that pyramid in the first place given that pandarat has barely known him for twenty seconds, but it's still funny.

They're brought back to HQ, where they find Winry waiting for them after her own questioning. Also, she's being treated to a cup of coffee by Wrath.

Apparently, the head of state had the time to just sit there and shoot the breeze with Edward's automail technician. He justifies it by telling Edward that he's one of Amestris' most valuable alchemists, and that means that his support team are important too. Also, Winry's a really cool gal, isn't she? You should make sure you take good care of her.

Point communicated very ambiguously and yet very clearly. Like in his previous interactions with his subordinates, Wrath is having multiple conversations with Edward at once. He simultaneously is congratulating and making Edward feel special, and threatening his loved ones. If Edward isn't sure about him, then he's subconsciously being given a choice; he can choose to believe that he's being praised by an inspiring leader figure, or he can choose to believe that he's being threatened and that Wrath is indeed an enemy. He'll naturally gravitate toward the former, and therefore find Gravelord Nito unsuspicious, being unwilling to ask the questions and acknowledge the possibilities that threaten himself and Winry.

Well. That's the idea, at least. I don't think these manipulations are going to keep working on Edward for long.

Cinder King Gwyn leaves, getting distinctly suspicious looks at his back from the brothers as he does so, and then Winry asks them to fill her in on what they know about her parents. They tell her the little that they've learned; that the Rockbells went AWOL and saved as many refugees as they could, and that Scar was a patient of theirs who killed them for unknown reasons. She's comforted somewhat by the knowledge that they at least died doing something good, but she's still as melancholy as you'd expect. When they get back to the hotel, Winry is told there's been a phone call for her; her master back in Rush Valley is starting to get antsy about her being away for this long, and their customers even moreso. She's made a real name for herself (and for him, by extension) it seems, and well...yeah, she does kind of need to get back to her own life now.

The focus that the call gives on many of her customers needing their own prosthetics attended to also, I think, is a reminder that she isn't just passive in her chosen lifestyle and career. She's helping people. She's making new friends and forging new relationships instead of clinging desperately to the dwindling number of them she retains from her childhood. So, while she and Edward have gotten close over the course of this visit, and I've warmed up to her immensely during it, her leaving Central again is framed as a good thing and I accept it. Also, Rush Valley is probably the safest place she can be without leaving Amestris if Wrath really does try to mess with the Elrics' loved ones.

They see her off at the train station, after some rather more emotional goodbyes than the usual.

Looking back at Edward and Alphonse's retreating, comically bickering forms. Winry has a slightly too long emotional flashback montage of her last few years' worth of Edward memories, and realizes she loves him. It's a little sappier and more hamfisted than it needed to be, but much more restrained than FMA:B usually is about this kind of thing, and the placement in the narrative is certainly believable.

That evening, Doctor Whatsisname the coroner who played along with the Ross fake arrives at the new safehouse. A plainclothes Mustang greets him at the gate, and reminds him that helping him here WILL be dangerous for him, so he can choose to back out without losing any of Mustang's respect. The doctor doesn't care.

He does half-seriously call Mustang a "punk," though, which seems like a deliberate callback to Wrath's inner monologue earlier. I guess Wrath actually is planning to move against Mustang now; I guess he was willing to temporarily postpone that after he killed one Sin, but now that he's captured another it's just too much.

Also, apparently the doctor no longer DOES have a family. He and his wife got divorced immediately after he came back from Ishval. No word on which of them divorced the other, though; I imagine we'll find out later.

He patches up Ninjette, though he warns that hiding in a sewer with a massive open wound may have given her a worse infection than his drugs can help with; they'll know in the next day or so. Also, it's been a while since he's worked on living bodies rather than corpses, so his ministrations are not the most painless. Poor Ninjette. Yao has a moment, where he's furious at himself for letting one of his subjects sacrifice more than he himself did to ensure the success of their mission. That's hard to reconcile with his first appearance, where he sat back and let them do all the fighting against a pair of opponents of unknown power and ruthlessness, but I can see how he might not have really internalized the stakes until now if he's lived a relatively sheltered life. It's still an eyebrow raiser, though.

Ninjette finally says a nice thing to Edward about his clever defeat of her during their first meeting, when the doctor is finished. Edward offers to help her get in touch with Winry and her colleagues for a state of the art arm replacement. They smile at each other. So, that's nice.

Once Ninjette isn't in immediate danger, Mustang and Yao introduce themselves to each other. Apparently, this is their first time meeting in person.

Attention then turns to the restrained Gluttony. When the doctor asks what the hell that thing is, Mustang tells them about some conspiracy with deep military infiltration apparently having haemonculi at its disposal. Yao cuts in at this point, finally remembering the very important thing he learned (he actually forgot to mention this until now? Really? Really?) that indicates it isn't just a section of the military that's corrupt, but the entire thing up to the very, very top. This follows from the last episode pretty naturally, with Edward and Alphonse having started to grasp the truth of this although not the specifics.

Alphonse points out that there's an issue with this story; according to all the sources he and Edward have ever been able to find, the legendary haemonculus is supposed to be sterile. Assuming that literally every single historical and pseudohistorical account of these things isn't a total lie, how could Great Gray Wolf Sif have a son if he's a haemonculus.

Well, my questions from the end of "Those Who Lurk Underground" turns out to have a surprisingly mundane answer.

Okay then! Selim having a vague physical resemblance to Wrath was just coincidence (or perhaps he deliberately chose an orphan who looked a little like him, since he apparently wants the public perception to be that Selim is his actual son. The fact that only the doctor seems to know the truth suggests that it's something you have to pry a bit into the records to find out). I wonder if Wrath did that as part of his image (it wouldn't do for a dictator of his style to not have a picture perfect wife and children, after all), or if he actually wanted a kid?

Also, this raises some more questions about Hohenheim. Either he's an exception to the sterile haemonculus rule, or he created Edward and Alphonse through means other than normal human reproduction, or he actually isn't a haemonculus himself after all. In which case...hmm. Father also may or may not be one. Just identical twins, perhaps? I may have read too much into Father drinking Greed's philosopher's stone; maybe any human can gain longevity by ingesting that stuff even if they don't have it built-in like the sins do.

Lots of questions. Not enough info to even begin answering them yet.

Mustang is kind of thrilled about this news; now he KNOWS he'll have an opportunity to overthrow the regime. Also, once they're done interrogating Gluttony, he plans to tinker with his battery and see if there's a way to purify it for safe use, so he can use it both to heal his underlings and for further anti-Sin operations. Holy...fucking HELL, Mustang! I guess this is a reminder that for all that he's trying to make the world better, this is a man who participated in genocide all the way until its end. I guess that, to be fair, Gluttony is the least humanlike of the Sins, and you'd have to actually talk to him to know that he's basically an innocent child who's been weaponized by his "family" rather than just a mindless monster. But even so, his degree of readiness to dissect and cannibalize something that even just MIGHT be a person is a chilling reminder of who and what Colonel Mustang actually is.

Yao objects to this, though; his people lost more to capture Gluttony than Mustang's did, and he demands the rights to Gluttony's core. Edward and Alphonse obviously take Mustang's side, given their personal stakes in getting to use the stone. A fight breaks out that...okay, I couldn't help but chuckle at this part. I have a part time job running Dungeons and Dragons games for schoolchildren, and this is literally the exact same fight that breaks out whenever they find treasure that can't be easily divided. So yeah, this might be a more ghoulish version due to the treasure in question being a character I find sympathetic, but it still hits my funnybone.

Unfortunately, during the argument Mustang's name is spoken repeatedly in close proximity to Gluttony. Gluttony might be simple, but his memory is sharp.

Shit. That's going to give him the rage he needs to overexert himself and break out, isn't it?

It's that theme of recursive violence again, isn't it? I'd say Gluttony is more or less in Winry's position now. He knows that Mustang killed the most important person in the world to him, but he's not equipped to understand why he did so and how it wasn't ultimately his fault. Granted, unlike Winry Gluttony is already a killer many, many times over himself, but I doubt he was ever encouraged to make the connection between "people who do things for reasons I can relate to" and "people who my father and siblings tell me are enemies."

As the argument continues and the humans remain distracted with each other, Gluttony continues stretching and struggling harder and harder against the steel cords. He's either going to muster the strength to tear through those bonds, or (more likely) just tear himself through them. Come to think of it, one of the smarter haemonculi might have already thought to try that by now in Gluttony's situation. He struggles, rolls over, and...

...

....what the fuck

I. Um. I guess the Father put a lot more work into this one than I realized.

...

So, let me get this straight. In addition to the strength, longevity, and healing factor, each Sin has some extra abilities. Lust had extendo-claws. Envy can shapeshift into other human-shaped things. Greed had carbon fiber armor. Wrath is super fast and has some kind of enhanced vision. And Gluttony has super-scent and tracking ability, and also can turn himself inside out into a Resident Evil boss when sufficiently provoked.

That's...a combo breaker, for sure.

...

It's sort of a waste that Father gave this ability to a creation that lacks the tactical intelligence to use this ability at more opportune times. But then, I doubt Gluttony's personality and intelligence were intentional on his part at all, so.

Gluttony's new central eye shoots a blast of white energy. It looks almost Wogdat-ish, actually, with the giant eye glaring out of a dark crevice and the white light. Did Father build some kind of mystical soul or memory extracting weapon into Gluttony, based on or connected to the Gates of Truth?

Whatever the hell just happened, Gluttony shoots his giant eye laser. Cut to Hawkeye standing guard outside, who is very startled when an entire wall of the building explodes outward from the blast. End episode.

This was a pretty meh episode all things considered. It had its highlights for sure, and the Gluttony eyeball laser reveal was one heck of a cliffhanger ending, but just...there were so many things that just didn't add up. The wonky temporal stuff during the chase and fight scenes, Yao waiting for a dramatically relevant moment to share the crucial intelligence he just gathered, the hard-to-reconcile contradictions in Yao's character, etc. There wasn't as much interesting stuff going on with the characters as there was in the last few episodes, Winry's subplot aside; lots of just running around tossing plot coupons back and forth.

It wasn't a bad watch, objectively speaking, but by FMA:B standards it's definitely subpar. Which isn't a big deal, considering that the last few episodes were all significantly above the show's average quality. They can't all be winners. It's still better than "City of Heresy" or "Created Feelings," and worlds above "Miracle at Rush Valley."