Fullmetal Alchemist S2E17: “Bite of the Ant”

I think we're going to be dishing some pain back on the haemunculi in this episode. Both because of the various plot threads leading to confrontations that I doubt the Elrics, Scar, or their companions can back away from (and it's too early still for them to start dying), and because of the title. Insects, ants in particular, have been repeatedly used to symbolize humans in this story.

So, either Miles and Hook are going to out-politic Kimblee and prevent the bloodbath with the Drachmans, Scar and Alphonse's party are going to put Envy down for good when she arrives at their location, or Armstrong and Mustang are going to do...something. Edward isn't going to be relevant until he gets his blood vessels reconfigured, most likely, which isn't going to happen until he meets up with either May or Hohenheim. Then again, there's also a chance he could figure out some mystical thingy while fading in and out of consciousness that can help them. He does tend to do that sometimes.

Anyway, let's go!


Well, right off the bat, we see that it isn't that first one. The new officer Central put in command of Fort Briggs doesn't, in the end, cripple their own forces to drag out the fight. Rather, they engage the Drachmans with full readiness, wiping out their artillery battalion with a line of their own mountain on and in the wall. The Drachman commander outlives his heavy weapons unit by mere seconds, as he just barely has time to realize that Kimblee has vanished on him, and that this entire operation was an Amestrian trap, before Briggs' shells land on him as well.

Poor Drachman commander. I was hoping I'd get to know you a little better before you bit it, at least. Don't think you even had a chance to be named.

Kimblee seems to think he's already succeeded in creating the necessary bloodshed. That's surprising. Just wiping out the Drachman artillery was enough? Did they also somehow slaughter that entire mass of infantry between cuts or something?

You know, Kimblee's bangs are fairly ant-antennae like. Wonder if I got the title's meaning backward? Would be sort of counterintuitive, considering the earlier foreshadowing stuff, but still. The visual connection in this shot in particular is easy to make.

After the OP, we move over to Asbeck village, where May is teaching Alphonse the fundamentals of alkahestry (but not doing a very good job of it, on account of Alphonse missing some cultural background info that her explanations lean on). Outside, Scar is thanking the Ishvallan father whose house they're being allowed to hide in. To be fair, the man says, they're paying their way fair and square. Winry has been doing a ton of housework and home maintenance for them, and Yoki has done a great job entertaining the children.

One of the chimaeras wants to go get a load of firewood for their hosts, but isn't sure where his counterpart went. Cut to said counterpart meeting up with Envy (in an Ishvalan male guise) and beginning to walk her into their neighborhood.

Just Envy, no soldiers or alchemists. Looks like they're going to be taking the cloak and dagger approach, trying to get close to Scar and May and kill them before they even know there's danger. Makes sense; Scar has proven himself able to evade big military crackdowns, and he's bested or slipped away from every irregular they've sent after him. Trickery is the one thing they haven't gotten a chance to try yet, and yeah, it's probably the most likely thing to work.

Well, it's time to dust off that Chekhov's Gun of Xingese ki-sensing being an obvious hard counter to Envy! What remains to be seen is how much damage Envy can do before she gets in range of May's senses.

In Central, Hawkeye is pouring Wrath some tea in his office. I wonder. Does he actually need food, being a human-bodied haemunculus? Maybe it just saves a little bit of battery power, even if he doesn't strictly need it? It could also be that he just still enjoys the taste. As she serves him, he informs her that Pride told him about what she learned, and asks what she thinks and how she feels about Amestris' royal family being haemunculi. I wonder what his angle is, with this? Several possibilities. Anyway, Hawkeye takes a moment to choose her words carefully, and tells him that she's just "sad" that the leadership she once believed in turned out to be something completely different, and indeed artificial.

Notably leaving out the part where she and Mustang were plotting against it even before they knew the philosopher's stone and haemunculi were a thing, lol. But, well, what else can you do?

Wrath tells her that it's true, he didn't become Master In Commander Kobra Kai the way that the public thinks he did. His promotions were rigged. His loyal supporters were cultists that Father won over before his career even started. His "son" isn't actually his son (and is in fact much older than him), and was foisted on him by a mandate from below.

Then, as he stares moodily out the window, he says that the only thing he got to choose for himself, and that he came by honestly without any direct help from Father and his lackeys, was his wife. After that, he keeps staring moodily out the window, as Hawkeye tries to figure him out.

With him being all moody like this, and the almost...apologetic? Ish?...tone of voice, along with the ways it seems like he could have sabotaged Father more actively than he has until now but didn't, especially now that I know how Pride's surveillance actually works...

I'm starting to feel like Wrath hasn't actually decided on rebellion, but is wavering. Every act of sabotage so far has been not only plausibly deniable, but also something he can readily undo by himself if he so chooses. There's no way to read some of those scenes except as deliberate sabotage or as Wrath picking up a gigantic idiot ball that doesn't remotely suit him. And, I'm not sure what the point of the lamppost conversation scene between him and Pride could have been for if not setting up Wrath's loyalty slipping away. But with how agitated he's seemed in recent scenes, here and in his interview with General Armstrong in particular, it really feels like "man having a crisis of conscience/loyalty/etc and trying to keep a calm veneer over it." He notably wasn't like this in his earlier appearances. When he laughed before, it was this easy chuckle, not the manic, cathartic cackling that outright shocked me to hear come from him in the Armstrong scene.

I think the situation with Wrath might be more complicated than I inferred, at any rate. He could end up coming down on either side of this conflict once his back is really to the wall.

As for this scene? It feels like he's simultaneously asking Hawkeye for help, and making sure she's too scared of him to actually give it.

My prediction is that it'll turn out that Greed II and Ling really are working together, with the former having somehow kept his rebellious motives. And that seeing Greed's desire for freedom reassert itself against all that hard work and magic pushing against it might finally sway him for real. He did seem sort of performative when he declared his disgust for Greed during that fight in Dublith, like he was maybe trying too hard to convince both of them.

Well. I believe in you, Wrath. You can't wave your resentment of Father's abuse of and control over you in front of literally every single other character you have a private conversation with and not get me to believe in you.

Back on the outskirts of Asbeck, the non-traitor chimaera is chatting with Dr. Marcoh as they tie up the firewood that they ended up gathering without the missing dude. Rocksteady asks Dr. Marcoh if he was actually in charge of the lab 5 team, and Marcoh replies that he was only in charge of one small subteam and not actually important at all.

Marcoh played up his role in the research when he was trying to get Scar to kill him. I feel like he's doing the opposite now and downplaying how important he was. It seemed like he was fairly important, being the guy who performed the first successful protostone transmutation after all. Speaking of, Marcoh wonders what happened to his old Unit 731 team. I guess Envy didn't tell him.

Just then, Bebop shows up leading a mysterious Ishvalan friend he just made.

Either Scar is about to randomly burst through a wall, or this will be Dr. Marcoh's final scene. Probably the latter. His deathwish has been deferred for long enough at this point. He's also made himself as useful as he could in decoding the notes, so May, Scar, and the Elrics can probably handle that from here. All that's left is for him to an hero to prevent his own recapture. So yeah, this looks like a good exit point for him. And probably at least one, if not both, of the Shredder sidekicks. Good riddance to the latter.

Envy advances, and Dr. Marcoh impales her with a bunch of icicles from the transmutation array he'd hidden under the snow ahead of time. Bebop runs over to join the other two. Presumably, Scar (and May, and Alphonse) actuallyisabout to burst out of nowhere.

Well, like I said. Bebop and Rocksteady's defection would have still been dumb even if one of them really did defect back again afterward. So, my biggest regret at this new twist is that both of them are still around. Well, Envy is still only slightly injured, so that's not too late to fix.

At any rate, this is probably the titular "bite of the ant," or at least the first stage of it.

Envy tears herself free and advances further, only for another eruption of ice - this time a blunt hammer that throws her back, erupts under her feet, without Marcoh appearing to do anything. Ahandshaped hammer, actually, similar to what we often see Edward and Alphonse do. I'm guessing Alphonse is hidden under the snow or something.

Or...actually, according to Dr. Marcoh, these are proximity mines triggered by being stepped on, rather than active casting. Huh. Didn't know that was a thing.

Envy tries to circumvent the minefield by stepping only in the (trans)humans' existing footprints in the snow, but that doesn't help; she still gets impaled by more icicles. Marcoh then gloats about how he designed a special variant that only activates when it detects a haemunculus.

Oooh. I'm guessing he teamed up with Alphonse and May to make these? The "detect haemunculi specifically" thing doesn't seem within the realm of Amestrian alchemy, but if May can encode her ki-sensing ability into a kind of runic "smart bomb" and have it only trigger if it detects a certain threshold of soul energy overhead...

Oh, hah, the answer is less impressive than that. Alphonse and May are hiding in a nearby shack. There aren't WTF proximity mines that we've never heard of before, just May remote-casting using some dagger-glyphs she arranged around the field under the snow.

So, they're trying to get Envy to adapt to the wrong tactics and then deliver a killing blow once she's put herself in a vulnerable position. Something along those lines. Clever.

Even more clever, though, is the fact that Alphonse seems to be actively participating in the "minefield" barrage. It looks like he and May are working together, with her transposing his attacks alongside her own out into the glyph field. That's really impressive, given that May has only had a few weeks at most to study alchemy/alkahestry synthesis, only a few days to do so with anything close to an instruction manual on the subject, and, like one or two for Alphonse to learn the pre-basic basics.

Anyway, Envy can do a lot of things, but enhanced senses are one thing she doesn't have, so she's not able to sniff out the actual source of the attacks. Instead, she shifts into her true form and tries to get through the "minefield" by relying on her size and bulk.

...that wouldn't actually help, if her weight is allegedly conserved in all forms. It would actually make things worse. But then, we saw her sitting on Wrath's wooden desk an episode ago without cracking it in half, so at this point I'm just going to say that there's no consistency with how Envy's mass works and move on.

So, she transforms. Alphonse and May have warned everyone about this, of course, but actually seeing her true form complete with the gibbering neckbeard of the damned is something else. Still, they all recover quickly, and Bebop and Rocksteady kite around Envy to keep peppering her with ranged attacks while Alphonse and May keep hammering her.

Are they trying to do what Mustang did to Lust? I doubt it'll work, if so. These mechanical trauma attacks aren't disintegrating large sections of flesh the way that Mustang's flares do, so the energy costs will be minimal and they're likely to tire out before Envy does. They must know that themselves, so more likely they're still just stalling until Scar can get close and start actually reducing her hp.

Ah, yup, he just jumped onto her back.

I'm pretty sure most of Asbeck will be able to see this. Well, that's more Father's problem than theirs, so they have no reason to be subtle.

Scar maintains his disintegrate for as long as he can before leaping off of Envy's body. Fortunately, much like Mustang's flares, Scar's touch does enough damage to stunlock the haemunculus, so he doesn't have to worry about Envy just crushing him while he's applying the pulse.

It knocks Envy down. Probably made her burn through a good chunk of her Xerxians. Unfortunately, one blast - even a prolonged one - wasn't enough to disable her. She lashes out with her tongue, and manages to grab Dr. Marcoh from behind the chimeras.

A green monster, packed with imprisoned human souls, telling its captive opponent that he "really is an idiot" for continuing to resist.

...

I...did that actually inspire...nah, probably just a coincidence.

...

She informs Marcoh that she's going to take him right back to his prison, but not before bringing him along to see her slaughter of the townsfolk they were holding hostage that they for some reason still haven't slaughtered in the many weeks since his escape. Actually, Envy taunts him, maybe instead of killing them she'll just have them all disappeared and turned into more protostones, just like the rest of his old research team.

You know, with Dr. Marcoh knowing what he now knows, killing his friends and loved ones would actually be doing them a mercy. If they survive long enough for Father to do the thing, they'll be getting a fate worse than death. In fact, they'll be getting the exact SAME fate worse than death that Envy is now "escalating" to. Envy, you're not thinking this through. To be fair, Dr. Marcoh wasn't thinking it through either back when they had him imprisoned, but he's been exposed to smart people since then so this might not work on him anymore.

Dr. Marcoh is stunned to hear that his old team was rendered down. I guess he actually did like some of them. Envy tells him that he really shouldn't feel bad for them considering that they - like himself - inflicted that exact same torment on many innocents.

She's not wrong. Like. At all. Just so that we're clear about that. Envy is actually on the right side of this particular discussion.

Marcoh admits that that is true, he's as guilty as she, or her father, or anyone else. But that on the bright side, he's learned more about the creation of philosopher's stone than any living human. Which is what enabled him to spend his time since then devising a spell that reverses the process and releases the souls confined in one to a final death. He has the necessary glyphs inked onto the palms of his hands, just in case it actually works.

Well, holy shit.

...

On one hand, it makes sense.

On the other...this is a weapon that can actually kill the Father, if they scale it up. Or, if not kill him, then at least turn him back into a helpless little puff of wog. Maybe it actually has limitations that makes it impractical for doing this, and I really HOPE that it does, because. Hmm. I was going to say "deus ex machina," but it's not really that, because it IS justified by the events of the story thus far and doesn't rely on any huge strokes of luck. But.

If Dr. Marcoh's post-731 research is going to be what wins the day, I feel like the story should have been about that. Or at least, it needed a hell of a lot more foreshadowing. And some more direct effort from the ostensible main characters to bring to fruition.

In real life, a new cure or superweapon or whatever really does generally come from some researchers no one was paying much attention to up until suddenly it's unveiled and changes the course of history. It's realistic in that way. But it's not a very satisfying story. So, yeah, I hope this spell is a hell of a lot more limited than Dr. Marcoh is making it sound, because otherwise following the other characters and not him was mostly a waste of time.

...

So, Marcoh uses the anti-haemunculus megalaser spell that he independently reinvented after the loss of the version on Hawkeye's back. And it does this:

And then this:

And then, after that disintegrates too, this:

That's...oh wow, it's really tiny. Scar picks it up with two fingers, and it's the size of a large insect.

All this while, Envy is screaming and babbling hysterically about how lowly and weak and pathetic everyone else is, and demanding that they stop looking at her. It sounds like she's crying, or would be if she had tear ducts is her actual true form.

...

When it comes to Father misunderstanding or misinterpreting his own vices, I think Envy wasn't really made from his jealousy, exactly, but from his shame. She never seems to exactly covet human nature, or human form, or human connectedness, so much as she's just preoccupied by her own perceived inferiority. She's too blinded by her own sense of weakness and ugliness to even acknowledge that there's something better she could crave. Her adopted forms aren't imitations of what she wants, but disguises for what she wants to hide.

Shame is related to envy, certainly, but it's not synonymous with it. And this entity is definitely his shame. It's all the humiliation he suffered as a dwarf in a flask, and all his resentment of the creatures that kept him in that state and treated him like an object. That, perhaps, partially convinced him that he really was just an object. Not discontent, but self-loathing.

Also, while each of the Sins seems to be built very differently, Envy at least seems able to survive without her philosopher's stone battery. This is her actual "haemunculus" self, without any amplification by philosopher's stone, the piece of Father's original self that he imbued into her rather than the Xerxians he parted with to fuel her. Do ALL of the Sins work like this? In Lust's case, it seemed like she and her battery really were one and the same. Was that NOT actually true, though?

I hope not. Because if the Sins can survive in some form without their stones, then that means Gluttony doesn't need to die in order to free his fuel-souls. That would be nice. Assuming Gluttony has even been reborn yet, of course. We haven't seen him since Father started regrowing him, I don't think. Well, anyway, I'm holding out for de-stoned Gluttony playing happily with May's Pandarat ever after.

...

Dr. Marcoh is injured, and for a second it looks like he might die. Fortunately, Arakawa doesn't forget that there's a healer standing right there. He's still in bad shape when they get back to the village, but he's in no danger of dying.

They also bring Envy with them, alive and helpless.

There's humiliation, and then there's being bullied by fucking Yoki.


I'm going to split it here due to length and (especially) image limit. This is a very eventful episode. Also a really weird one. Good, but weird.