Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood S2E14: “The Dwarf In the Flask“ (part two)

The "irrigation canal" intersects a little farming village. The townsfolk are a little confused, but appreciate that the king is giving them a more reliable water source. What a great king. He seems to have been popular among the rurals even before now, but this act of generosity is exemplary. That night, the soldiers who were digging it come back and burn the village, slaughtering every man, woman, and child in it, their blood soaking into the ground along the trench.

Back in the palace, his majesty is getting impatient. These trenches are taking a long time to dig, and he doesn't have more than a few years remaining.

Looks like the transmutation array that Edward found half of in Xerxes and half of in Gluttony wasn't from a temple or laboratory. That building was the royal palace before Father had it gluttonized.

The next day, Hohenheim is taking Mike for a walk in the marketplace and overhears people worrying about these mysterious marauders. First, the brigands destroyed a small village to the west. Now, another to the north, and the royal army hasn't had any luck in identifying the culprits and retaliating. Hohenheim comments on how awful this is. Yeah, Mike agrees noncommittally, real tragic.

Hohenheim doesn't know about this, then. I guess that makes sense, since he's still technically a slave. The number of people who actually know the hows and whys of what's going on is probably fewer than ten, and they're wanting to keep it that way.

An unknown period of time later, Hohenheim's master (who seems to have been promoted to Court Wizard or whatever) and some others inform the king that the circle is complete, and the final preparatory sacrifices have been performed. King Peter is bedridden at this point, and seems just barely able to rise and stagger out to the central glyph room to perform the ritual. His time really is just about up.

Digging that entire macroglyph using only pre-industrial technology (if technology in the FMAverse developed at more or less the same rate that it did IRL, then commercial steam engines would juuuust be starting to make it off the drawing board at this point. And. while the Xerxians do have alchemists, we haven't seen any earthbending like what the Amestrians later develop) took a good many years, and Peter didn't have all that many left when they started.

Also, as you see in the above picture, Hohenheim has reached the same physical age and hairstyle that he will retain for the next three centuries, and has become Mike's flaskbearer even during visits to the royal court. Has he been made aware of how the immortality ritual works, at this point? He didn't seem to suspect the connection back when he and Mike overheard the talk in the marketplace, but if he's the one carrying Mike to and from the palace now he might have been brought onboard. I can't imagine he'd have approved of this, but it also doesn't seem like he'd have had much choice, so.

Although...hmm. As he witnesses the ritual, Hohenheim doesn't seem at all put out. He just murmurs "amazing, the king is going to become immortal!" with an intrigued semi-smile. So I guess they kept the sacrificial aspect of this whole thing from him...though in that case letting him come here seems like a hell of a liability, and forces them to be extra guarded with their words for little benefit. Maybe he's been turned around to their way of thinking after months of intellectual bullying or whatever.

King Peter spills some of his own blood into a vessel placed before the central array, and the macroglyph activates.

Black smoke pours out from the vessel, and then the writhing, tentacular Hands of Wog rise from the floor all around them like extra columns. At first, the king and his court are just marveling at the lightshow the spell seems to be accompanied by. But then, they all start twitching in pain and falling to the floor.

All, of course, except for Hohenheim, with the massively grinning little black sphere in his bottle. He just looks confused, and horrified.

King Peter of House Thiel, Ruler of Xerxes and first of his name, chokes out his disbelieving final words as his brittle old bones crack against the stone floor.

The same dissonantly upbeat balletic number that played during Edward's jaunt behind the Gate starts playing as the nobles all die in agony, and Mike - grinning more widely and wildly than ever before - excitedly explains to Hohenheim what's going on. The safe zone in the center of the macroglyph is much smaller than he told everyone, and he nudged Hohenheim to stand juuust in the right spot before the process started. The ritual really did need to have the caster and a vessel containing some of his own blood within the center, but, well, he and Hohenheim are already that, aren't they?

The almost childish enthusiasm he displays here. This is exactly what we've seen Father like, in his goofier moments. He might still look like dark matter Mike Wazowski, but in terms of who he is, this is Father. He has become the entity we've seen throughout the show.

I guess King Peter spilling his own blood just outside of the true center was merely a little catalytic spark that it needed. It wouldn't have mattered who did that bit. As Mike grins and exults and Hohenheim gasps in shocked disbelief, the Eye of Wog opens in the floor underneath and sucks them into itself, before swelling to engulf the entire palace and extend its soul-grasping tentacles all throughout the city state of Xerxes and its satellite towns and villages.

Hohenheim and Father are disintegrated within the white void of the Antechamber of Truth, just like we saw happen to Edward's limbs and Alphonse's everything. The blank white grin that Father has on his face is so similar to the one that Alphonse's Wogdat had during a similar scene where he was getting Alphonse's body, that...yeah, I'm pretty sure that that's what Mike really was all along. Hohenheim's Wogdat, his Higher Soul, enslaved and imprisoned by the same mad alchemist as his lower soul and body.

Back in realspace, the eye closes and the arms withdraw, leaving a silent corpse-city under the full mooned night. I think the greenery around it we saw before might have also vanished? Did the spell convert whatever bits of soul-stuff plants have, in addition to the humans? That would explain why the whole place got turned into just another part of the sandy desert where before it was livable. The distorted color scheme makes it hard to tell, though. I guess it could just be that Xerxes was built around a small natural oasis, and that greening the land around it took persistent work, so the peripheries just withered again once there was no one to do that. That actually would explain why the pool that Edward dipped himself in in the ruins still had water in it, if it was connected directly to the aquifer and the ducts or whatever that used to carry the water around had just fallen apart by then.

The next morning, Hohenheim awakens on the ritual room floor, a shattered glass flask beside him, corpses all around.

Hohenheim calls out names. Nobody answers them. He looks at the broken jar beside him, and at the bodies.

It's worth noting that when we saw Dr. Marcoh and the others transmuting Ishvallan prisoners into protostone, their bodies vanished as well. I think this might tie in with what happened to Izumi, and possibly Edward. Imperfect, clumsy human transmutation attempts - like producing cheap protostone instead of high grade philosopher's stone, or trying to revive a person without really knowing how - causes random pounds of flesh to be taken by the Gate with a severity depending on the scale of the transmutation. Izumi vaporized her uterus. For Marcoh, the bodies of the soul-donors were zapped. In Xerxes though, Father knew exactly what he was doing, so everything happened neat and orderly and without random disintegrations.

Though on that topic...it seems that Mike was "born" with great alchemical knowledge, including how to make true philosopher's stone, but it must be very scattered and patchy knowledge. As I noted in an earlier review, he's still reliant on human inventors to develop new techniques that he wasn't born knowing. This is part of what I liked about his Japanese VA's "muddled old man" vibe in Mike's early scenes. If he was torn from the flank of Wog-Sothoth with just random bits of cosmic knowledge being ripped with him, then "muddled and senile-ish" makes perfect sense.

"Lurking" starts playing as he reaches the palace walls and sees that it's not just the castle, but the entire nation of Xerxes, that has been exterminated overnight. Judging by his reaction, he had very much not been informed of this aspect of the plan. Which means that Father was keeping it from him just like his master and the other elites were.

As he begs for someone else to please be alive, please hear him, a voice from behind him explains that there will be no answers. Their souls have all been removed. He turns around and sees a figure wearing the king's royal robes, and starts to prostrate himself before him. The figure doesn't correct him, waiting for him to notice on his own that he's bowing to himself in stolen robes. Before, Mike enjoyed Hohenheim's lack of fear and reverence. Now, he's basking in exactly those things.

He copied his physical age, hairstyle, beard, etc as well. It's not just a genetic clone.​

Father explains that for giving him life and company, he has rewarded Hohenheim with the gift of a name, the gift of knowledge, and now finally the gift of immortality. The spell converted all the souls of Xerxes into philosopher's stone, which Father shaped into two indestructible, nigh-immortal bodies based on Hohenheim's original fleshy one. Half of the souls are now screaming forever inside of Hohenheim. The other half, inside of Father.

What's interesting here is that Father seems to expect Hohenheim to actually be happy about this, or even grateful; it doesn't feel like he's gloating or taunting him. And yet, he kept the secret of what they were doing to Xerxes away from him, which meant that he knew that Hohenheim wouldn't like it. Did he just miscalculate how much Hohenheim's human self would value different things? Is he projecting his own anger and hate for Xerxian society onto Hohenheim and expecting him to feel the same way?

The flashback ends before we can see Father's reaction to his anguished scream.

Cut to the present, with Hohenheim waking up in his seat during a train ride. So, this started out as Father's reminiscing, but then just shifted mid-flashback to someone else reminiscing on the same events at the same time? Well that's confusing as heck. What kind of hack writer even tries to pull that shit? Slowly, he pulls himself out of his troubling reminiscence, and in a moment he's hailed by some familiar passengers.

Oh right, that reminds me. One of the first things that made me suspect that Hohenheim might be the Father (before we saw Father in person) was Izumi's story about meeting him in Central, where he seemed to be jubilant over a philosopher's stone-related discovery. I wonder what that was about, now. Maybe she met him right after he had Edward, and was exulting in him having managed to father a biologically normal human child via careful manipulation of his own philostone body? Or maybe that was when he went to Central to confront Father after leaving his family in Resembool, and he thought he'd divined some sort of weakness in Father's body and/or philostone creation formula? If it's the latter, then he must have realized his error since then given how morose and fatalistic he's been about that in recent times. Or did Izumi actually run into Father during a rare outside stroll and mistake him for Hohenheim? That would be silly, but Father is given to unpredictable bouts of silliness, so it's possible.

They get off the train together and walk and talk through the streets of...I think Central? I doubt Hohenheim would have reason to visit Dublith, and we know that Sig and Izumi go to Central sometime, so it's probably the outskirts of Central. They chat about how Izumi never realized her students were his children and Hohenheim never realized that his children were her students. She diplomatically refrains from asking him about the whole "ghosting his family" thing. Suddenly, she has one of her attacks and collapses to her knees.

Sig gives her her medicine, and Hohenheim - after watching for a moment - tells Sig that he knows some medical alchemy, so Sig should go find a driver to help them while he does his best to stabilize her. Sig reluctantly agrees, and runs off to do as Hohenheim asked.

In the meantime, Hohenheim does the same injury-sensing-touch thing that Father did when he healed Edward that one time. He asks her if she lost her uterus the way that he thinks she does, and she confirms it.

He says that he can't restore what was taken; that's an indelible fee charged for her sin. However, he can mitigate the damage.

...

When he says that he "can't" restore her internals, does he mean that literally, or just that he won't for ideological reasons? I thought the whole point of philosopher's stone was that it lets you pay the toll for things that would otherwise put you in the red, right? So, shouldn't he be able to replace her uterus just like Envy was able to substitute some of her own juice to save Edward another limb during his experimental teleport?

Then again, Edward didn't use that opportunity to reconstitute his lost arm and leg. So maybe there's a special divine exception when it comes to fees already paid? That sounds dickish and petty enough to be a rule that Wog-Sothoth would enforce.

...

Hohenheim apparently hasn't quite mastered Father's non-invasive healing spell, though, because his method requires him to actually impale her gut with his fingers up to at least the knuckles. Sig comes back just in time to see him do this, and punches Hohenheim clear across the street before crouching over the gasping Izumi...only to find that there's no puncture wound, and that her attack has stopped.

Hohenheim explains that he generated some new blood vessels to bypass the missing organs, thereby solving the chronic blood clot issues she's been having. She's still never going to be fertile again, but this should be the end of her pain and internal bleeding fits. When the Curtises ask who the heck Hohenheim even is, he finally comes clean to someone besides Trisha; he is a philosopher's stone, reshaped into the form of a man named Van Hohenheim.

There's a brief stinger after the end credits. Edward in the Baschool building they've turned into their field base, going through his notes and telling Miles everything he knows about the philosopher's stone. As he explains, the "stone" can be manipulated into many different physical structures. Marcoh's protostone was a liquid. Kimblee's was a small crystal. The higher-grade Envy core looked like a pearl. Miles expresses surprise that something so powerful could be that small. Edward reminds him that even a tiny, low-grade stone requires a a double digit number of damned souls. If it's possible to make one bigger, then it would probably take hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, to make it. He would never want to see such a thing.

As he speaks, the camera switches back to Hohenheim, having dinner with Sig and Izumi at a restaurant. Well, to be fair, Edward had already made it clear he didn't want to see Hohenheim again, so this isn't a contradictory position for him to hold. He's wrong about himself not having seen one before (doubly so, as of his encounter with Father), but still, he's consistent. End episode.


I started typing my conclusion, but it quickly became apparent that I needed to divide it into sections for it to be readable, which in turn meant it needs to be a separate post. It'll go public later.