Fullmetal Alchemist S2E17: Bite of the Ant (part 2)

As Yoki bullies the de-stoned Envy, Dr. Marcoh is resting against the wall being mother hen'd by Winry. She tells him that he took a foolish risk by even preparing a melee attack for use against a Sin without being named Scar, Edward, or Alphonse. Marcoh simply explains that he's spent the last decade (at least) of his life doing what other people told him, regardless of whether it seemed wise or unwise, moral or immoral. So, he did something reckless, just for the sake of having done something on his own initiative, and it ended up paying off.

He also cites Winry's parents as positive examples of resistance against authoritarian follower behavior that inspired him. So, that's nice.

While the adults have their backs turned, however, Envy manages to flick herself around and latch onto Yoki's finger with her little lamprey-mouth. And...huh.

Envy is a hell of a lot more complicated than I thought, with regards to how she actually "works."

It's notable to me that she didn't use this body-puppeting ability in combat at any point, even when it seems like it would have been a winning move in fights that she was taking seriously. I suspect that the reason for this is that up until now, she was already latched onto a different "host body;" her philosopher's stone battery. Appropriately, this mirrors Father's own fundamental weakness and reliance on the humans he performatively looks down on; Envy is small and pathetic except when she can hijack human bodies or souls. I still wonder, though, if it's only Envy who works like that. Again, Lust seemed to literally BE her philosopher's stone. So did Greed, come to think of it. Yeah, Envy might just be an outlier from Father's usual design style.

She doesn't seem able to warp or reshape Yoki's body. Just control it. I'm guessing that's another benefit of using philosopher's stone substrate instead of living humans with stable bodies.

Envy threatens to kill her new host if they don't let her escape. Which...man, you really are not having any luck today, Envy, given that the one party member that you're trying to blackmail them with is, well.

On one hand, Yoki has actually been helpful at this point, and has stuck with them through thick and thin.\

On the other hand, he did try to sell out Scar to bounty hunters, in betrayal of the people who'd taken him in and helped him despite their own penury. And the only reason he hasn't betrayed them is probably because he knows that he knows too much, and Father would not let him live.

And, like. While he's certainly suffered enough since his graft and union-busting days, he hasn't expressed any regret for them. Quite the opposite. So, while the others might be bluffing about not caring about Yoki, I wouldn't judge them too harshly if they were genuine.

They tell Envy that if she flees, they'll do what they have to to recapture her, and if it doesn't look like they can pull it off they'll just kill her. She grudgingly, reluctantly releases Yoki. The others claim to have been bluffing, once they recapture and contain her. Yoki is unconvinced.

Whatever Yoki.

They put Envy in a glass jar for safekeeping, now that they know that she's still dangerous even in this form.

Well, we've really come full circle now, haven't we? If I'm correct about which aspect of Father she embodies, this has got to be extra traumatic for her.

They try to get information out of her, but Envy's convinced that they're just going to kill her anyway as soon as she tells them what she knows, so she refuses. I don't think that that's true, considering that (as Envy herself pointed out earlier this episode) Marcoh is as guilty as she is, and they've still grudgingly taken him onboard, but I think she honestly believes it to be so. After some time of this, Envy changes the subject and asks why Edward isn't here. When no one shuts Alphonse up before he can tell Envy that Edward is back at Fort Briggs as far as they know, Envy tells them that the last she knew was that he was caught in a mine explosion/collapse and hadn't been heard from since.

Fortunately, Alphonse has a smart moment to make up for that dumb one, and reasons that if Edward is still alive he'll have had confidence in their success and will not be expecting them to head back to the Baschool/Briggs area. So, they should do likewise, and not make themselves harder for him to find. Left unsaid is that if Edward actually did lose to Kimblee in the mines, they're not going to be able to get back there in time to make a difference at this point.

Good call, Alphonse. I'm not sure where the other two furries actually are bringing Edward, but the logic is sound.

That does leave the decision of where they all should be going, now. Scar has an idea for how to help his people now instead of just avenging them (yay) having been inspired by Miles' example (boo), and he'll need Dr. Marcoh's assistance.

...

Hmm. That reminds me.

If Dr. Marcoh invented a philosophers' stone deconstruction spell, and he regretted what he'd done before, why did he still have that jar of protostone to show to Edward and Armstrong during his first appearance? Shouldn't he have freed those souls, instead of continuing to burn them for medical spellcasting?

Maybe he only finished that project after Lust caught him, when he was in Father's prison. Though in that case, it would have been untested when he used it on Envy, which...well, I dunno.

...

So, Scar plans to take Dr. Marcoh and do something Ishval-related. Alphonse, meanwhile, wants to head back to Liore and see if they can find another macroglyph access point and sabotage the array. Right, they don't know about Pride yet. My prediction is that if they get to Liore, they'll meet Hohenheim who will warn them before going down there.

Well, unless Alphonse can get Scar and Marcoh to come. In that case, facing Pride in combat might not necessarily be a bad idea at all. Alphonse is also musing about maybe using Brothar's reverse-glyph to do...something? Do they even know what it does, exactly?

Scar also tells May that she should head back to Xing. If time really is running out for her own people, then she should try to save them from this point on and let the Amestrians and Ishvalans protect their own. She might not have (or want to) a philostone to bring to the emperor, but she has something adjacent that might appease him.

On one hand, if they can't get Envy to talk anyway, they have no reason to keep her.

On the other...are they sure that Father has no way of tracking Envy? If they catch up to May before she escapes Amestris, without anyone to help her fight them off, things could get bad. Though I suppose just imagining Father's reaction to the news that they literally mailed his daughter to China might still make that worth it. The next morning, the group leaves Asbeck and splits up.

The next morning, the group leaves Asbeck and splits up. First, May heads off to find her way back to Xing. Alphonse promises he'll come find her again after they've saved their respective peoples and continue their alchemy/alkahestry synthesis research to follow in Brothar's footprints.

So, off she goes to bring a haemunculus in a jar to a genocidal emperor with a craving for immortality. I foresee absolutely no way that this could go even remotely wrong.

Honestly, her MAKING IT to Xing would be worse than her getting caught by Wrath before she leaves the country. Envy almost certainly knows everything she needs to know to repeat exactly what Father did in Xerxes. If she has access to any of his old memories as well as their associated feelings, she might even have firsthand experience.

The characters don't know exactly how the Fall of Xerxes went down, of course. But goddamnit.

After May's tearful farewell, Scar and Dr. Marcoh leave in the direction of Central for whatever scheme Scar has in mind (assassinate Wrath and/or Father using Marcoh's anti-philostone spell, maybe? He said he wanted to make things better for the Ishvalans with this plan of his, but maybe what he meant by that was just "kill the bad guys so they'll be safe going forward"). Alphonse, Winry, Bebop, and Rocksteady go southeast toward Liore, where they hope to find a macroglyph access point that doesn't have a fresh garrison from Central sitting over it.

Hehe, if only they knew that they'd passed right by another entrance on their way through the mines.

From there, we cut ahead to the following evening in...I was about to say Liore, but no, we're in Dublith now. In Dublith, and following a character who I really never thought we were going to see again.

Gecko seems to have been one of the only survivors (if not THE only survivor) of Wrath's raid on the Devil's Den. Which is unfortunate, because out of OG Greed's entire crew of failed supersoldier experiments he's probably the one least able to blend in and live a normal life without the help of others. He's probably had a very miserable life in the months since then, and right now he's stalking sadly through an alley missing his dead friends, and their would-be savior especially.

He sees a suspicious car heading to the house of the woman who was involved in the downfall of Greed's Gangbangers. He uses his gecko stealth powers to sneak up and eavesdrop, which reveals that these are secret police here to recover Izumi and bring her to Central. Fortunately, as we saw, she and Sig aren't in town at the moment. Gecko realizes that there's a chance Greed might still be alive in the state's custody, and that if so these black ops people might be able to give him some idea of where. So, he stows away on the underside of their vehicle and lets them bring him to whatever secret facility the alchemist human sacrifices are meant to be offered at.

I do like that this random mook is coming back to play an important role. Definitely furthers the humanism-in-the-face-of-a-nihilistic-universe theme that FMA seems like it's trying to build toward. Anyway, I suspect he's going to happen into NeoGreed and either a) assist him in undermining Father, or b) if NeoGreed ISN'T yet in league with Ling, jog his memories so that he becomes so.

From there, we cut to the command center in Central, where Olivierre Armstrong is stepping on her brother's toe for calling her by her name instead of addressing her as a superior officer.

He relents, and then surreptitiously asks her how much she knows. Her response comes back as a loud, stern speech about how Amestris cannot tolerate any quarter for enemies within or without, and how she plans to not allow a single threat to the security of the people go unmet. Which satisfies him, and also passes muster as proper nazi rhetoric for all others in earshot.

Then he makes a personal comment about her being single at her age, and she kicks him in the shin and marches away while denouncing her worthless coward of a brother who betrayed his country in Ishval.

I can't tell if Alex pushed it too far there, or if this is just normal sibling bonding for them.

Also, how old IS Olivierre supposed to be, anyway?

She continues on her way, and is joined by a creepy official who says that it's time to show her one of the big secrets. He leads her down a staircase, and into a curving hallway that is almost certainly part of the inner detailing of the macroglyph. As they walk, he asks her if she can name the big three major legal restrictions on Amestrian alchemists.

First law of alchemical practice in Amestris is "do not defy the state." And presumably, that's the one that supersedes the latter two, considering that the latter two are regularly broken by the state. The second is not to create gold, so as to prevent at least one commodity from being devalued and thus ensuring economic stability.

Can alchemists transmute elements? I thought that that was one thing they notably couldn't do. It's never been explicitly stated that that's the case, but every single explanation for every single transmutation provided thus far has avoided transforming elements into other elements, and there's been an emphasis on how, eg, you need dynamite to make ammonia. So, this is kind of weird.

The third, of course, is human transmutation. Specifically, trying to create a person. He asks her why that is. She supposes that this is rooted in the pre-junta alchemist subculture, with its religious taboos. He assures her that this is not the case. Rather, he explains as he leads her into a warehouse full of thousands of hibernating clones, it's to prevent anyone aside from the military itself from being able to create manpower too quickly.

It looks like those are some of the pipes connected to Father's throne flowing through this room. It's dark in the corners there, but I think the clones' IV tubes are connected to those same pipes. So, he's either feeding on them, or (more likely) infusing them. Or perhaps the lot of them are just being fed from the same protostone labs.

If the stone is flowing the other way, Father pumping it out rather than sucking it in, then that means he's planning to take control of them all and become a literal one man army. "Assuming direct control" type deal. Sort of an ironic inversion of how he got his own body in the first place. Of course, the fact that he's prepared this very extensive operation but then not used it even a little bit even just days or hours before the ritual has implications for what his goal actually is.

Is he not trying to literally supplant Wog-Sothoth? If he were to become a monotheistic God, or even just create a separate universe of his own to be God of while leaving this one intact outside of Amestris, he wouldn't need a clone army. I could see him having his cultists experiment with making people from scratch so that he'll have a better understanding of how to creator god properly, but repeating it this many times? He intends to use these for something specific. Maybe consuming Amestris is just step one on the road to godhood, and this will be his army for conquering more countries for steps 2-6 or whatever?

Not sure what this is all about. A surprise reveal for sure, and quite a bizarre one.

The credits roll, followed by a stinger of Team Alphonse arriving at Liore and running into Hohenheim, who's apparently been an aid worker helping Rose and the others out for the last...days? He has time for that, what with Amestris about to melt any minute as far as he knows? I guess it's nice that he is paying them back for the meal he bummed off of them for emotional manipulation purposes earlier, but him repaying it with his time is a rather baffling choice right now.

Alphonse and Winry haven't seen Hohenheim since they were little kids, so this is a real shock for both of them. Bebop and Rocksteady, meanwhile, are just in the background wondering who the hell this guy is supposed to be. It would have been darkly funny if they mistook him for Father and reacted in blind panic, but they probably never met Father in person so nah. End episode.


This was a really weird episode. Good, for the most part. Aside from some minor plotholes and apparent inconsistencies, this was a really engaging segment, and a hell of a lot of stuff happened in it. But it was also just weird. I think the strangeness is mostly a product of two new, unrelated, and very WTF concepts being introduced back to back, with Envy's nature and the clone army. Throw in the tonally very different successful(?) ploy by Kimblee up north, and the out-of-the-blue return of Gecko, and it's very hard for me to not misremember this as multiple different eps instead of just one. It's the usual off-kilter pacing that FMA:B has persistently suffered from, along with some of the new concepts just being inherently weird and hard to understand on their own.

It's a testament to the writing quality that this episode remained thoroughly enjoyable and engaging even with all of these issues.

The good guys going on the offensive in a way they haven't done since Mustang was running the show is refreshing, and Alphonse becoming not only an independent actor but a minor leader is great character growth that he's been building up to for a long time. Getting out of Edward's shadow for a few episodes seems to be letting him capitalize on the lessons he's learned and experiences he's gained, and I think Edward will be surprised when they meet again.

Of course, that also leads back to the question of "where the hell even is Edward anyway?" I suspect we'll start with him and the furries next episode.

The insight that the Envy stuff provides into Father (assuming I'm interpreting it correctly) is welcome, and continues nicely from Hohenheim's reading of Pride last episode.

I'm not sure what the impact of the Drachmans being slaughtered (how many WERE even slaughtered? I find it hard to believe that the Briggs men took the time to wipe out all the infantry before dealing with the artillery, and it looked like they'd just finished off the artillery when we cut in to see the commander's death. I guess Kimblee could have just murdered all the infantry himself while that was going on; a mass of routed infantry struggling through the snow would make easy prey for his protostone-amplified ground blasts). Anyway, is the circle complete now? Is Father just waiting on his secret police to bring in the special alchemist sacrifices? Unclear.


As I said before, I'm going to watch the rest of the series much more quickly, writing outlines of the reviews as I go, and finish it within the next couple of weeks. This will make sure my memory of what's going on in all these subplots doesn't get confused. I'll post them at my usual pace over the following month or so, which will give me more time to think and write out my final series review. See you next time.