Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood S2E28: “Beyond the Inferno”

Beyond the inferno. Mustang either finding light at the end of the tunnel, or dying. One or the other. Maybe both. Begin!


Start with a flashback to the end of the Ishval campaign. Hawkeye kneels in the center of a depopulated, ruined city, fashioning a makeshift grave marker. Mustang approaches and asks her if she's going to pack up with the rest of the troops, and she ignores him.

After another moment of silence, he asks her if she lost a friend in this battle. No. Just a grave for an unnamed Ishvalan child. Symbolic, given that the war also started with the murder of one of those. Riza whispers that "this one was left dead by the wayside," but given the way she ducks her head and drops her voice to a tiny whisper as she says it I think she knows quite a bit more about this particular child's death than that.

Roy tells her that the war is over, she should try and move on. But, she remembers Kimblee's words (though she obviously interprets them differently than he himself did) and tells Roy that it's not over for as long as she's still alive. And then makes a kind of backhanded accusation in telling Mustang that she trusted him with the secrets her father tattooed on her back, and therefore shares complicity for the much larger number of civilians that he slaughtered. In other circumstances, it would sound like she's judging him, or trying to deflect her own personal guilt onto him. In context though, they clearly both know that - were their situations reversed - she would have behaved no differently from him. She used a rifle and he used a magical oxygen flamethrower, but they both followed the same orders and would have used any weapons they were given.

Also, can I just take a moment and point out how WTF it is for Hawkeye Senior to have tattooed his revolutionary air transmutation formula onto his daughter's back and not written it anywhere else?

I feel like the show could be doing a lot more to acknowledge how fucked up this guy was. Principled stand against the State Alchemist program or not.

Then again, just him being a father might be condemnation enough in context of FMA. There are no good fathers in this story. Maybe new instances of this just don't need pointing out anymore.

Riza tells Mustang that she wants him to burn the diagram off of her back, so that no one else can use flame alchemy without reinventing it themselves. He tries to convince her that that isn't necessary, but she remains resolute. So, that's why her back is scarred and the diagram half-illegible during the time of the series proper. Mustang looks like he's about to just set himself on fire instead, as he realizes that - while he and Riza might be equally culpable - it was HIS actions specifically that makes her feel like this is required of her. And that, even though he's the one who actually used the flame alchemy, he CAN'T burn that knowledge out of himself.

It probably also is making him think of the old versus new traditions of alchemy. Alchemy used to be used for the sake of science and quality of life improvement, and alchemists were responsible for sharing knowledge. Now, he's being made to remove knowledge from the community, because he himself misused it. Hawkeye Senior might have been a terrible human being, but he was right about this one thing. Mustang just proved him right, and destroyed his life's work in the process. Feel like a hero?

Roll OP. That was a nice teaser, and it feels like the last important piece of the puzzle with regards to how Mustang and Hawkeye ended up where we found them at the beginning of the series. Additionally, being reminded of the shift in Amestrian alchemisy culture that happened just within the last few decades brings me back to a question I raised back in the Briggs arc.

...

How much control of Amestris did Father actually have until the present regime?

He was guiding the country's expansion step by step, which meant direct control of at least a big chunk of the central military. But we WERE told that Amestris was democratic until sometime within living memory. And, as I've said before, if Father already had total control of even the military government, he wouldn't have needed to install Wrath as the dictator. Doing so would have just been a liability with little benefit.

The reminder of the philanthropic, scientific history of pre-junta alchemy in Amestris makes this question a more burning one. Father is supposed to have personally introduced alchemy to the lands west of the great desert. If he carefully taught it only to yesmen and cultists and had them keep it a secret, as seems to be his general MO with things, I don't see how an alchemist subculture like this one could have ever developed. I don't expect that Father could have kept a perfect lid on it forever, but even just him TRYING to keep it under control would have influenced the way alchemist traditions and attitudes developed in the region.

Putting these things together with what's been more and more strongly implied regarding how Father has changed over the centuries due to his creation of the Sins, it's starting to seem like Father still had good in him even after his consumption of Xerxes. He started out trying to encourage a democratic state in which knowledge was exchanged freely and pursued for its own sake. Hell, he might have started teaching alchemy to the locals well before he thought of founding a country, just because teaching alchemy to a human (Hohenheim) was one of the few things he'd enjoyed as the dwarf in the flask. But then, driven by the bad lessons he'd learned about power and self actualization, he lost his "pride," his contentment and self-respect. And then his "lust," his ability to care for other people. And then his "greed," his desire for companionship.

When exactly along the line did he decide to start the new macroglyph project? And, did that actually postdate his initial creation of Amestris? Did he start out just wanting to found a country for its own sake?

Greed has expressed interest in political power. I wonder if Father created Greed when he realized he was getting attached to Amestris, and excised that attachment so that he wouldn't have trouble melting it down into philostone when the time came? Or else, he only had the idea of sacrificing the nation-building pet project that he'd previously treasured in order to become more powerful after excising Greed?

Is Amestris' fall into authoritarianism and eventual self-destruction just the mental decline of Father as he butchers himself?

...

Back to the present, but with the same two characters. Hawkeye has her gun to the back of Mustang's head. One of them is likely to be Envy, but it's also possible that this is just a test or a misunderstanding and Envy is about to jump out at them from the side. Mustang asks Hawkeye what she wants him to do to prove it's actually him, assuming that it's actually her. She simply replies that when the two of them are alone, he always calls her Riza, not Lieutenant like he just did.

I...feel like I've seen him do otherwise, but okay.

Well, it turns out that Mustang is, in fact, a fake. But it also turns out that Hawkeye was lying, and just wanted to see if he'd get confused by her claim (thus proving his identity) or try to come up with an excuse (proving he's Envy). Hah, well played! In her current mental state though, Envy can't even find it in herself to try and recover this like she normally would. Instead, she just attacks.

Hawkeye seems to have learned from her past tribulations, though. After hitting Envy with a high powered bullet that knocks her away, Riza draws a faster, more accurate weapon and starts hitting joints. She knows she can't really hurt Envy with bullets, but hitting her limb joints slows her down while she regenerates them, giving Riza time to hit another joint before the last limb has become functional again.

She can't keep this up for long, of course. Well before she runs out of bullets, Envy figures out what she's doing and forms a boneless tentacle to grab her with. But Hawkeye wasn't trying to escape Envy; she was just stalling for as long as possible while the sound of the gunshots alerted Mustang to the battle location. And, in their current positions, it's easy for him to know who the target is, and to burn away the base of the tentacle before moving the brunt of the flame onto Envy's main body.

Mustang coolly tells Hawkeye that she shouldn't have followed him, he told her not to for a reason. Then, he starts torching Envy again. It's not like when he killed Lust, where he was just going all out and trying to kill her as fast as possible. It's deliberately drawn out and sadistic, with the heat turning up to keep her stunlocked when she makes an escape attempt but otherwise staying at a deliberate slow burn. Also, with Lust - despite his injuries at the time - Mustang was standing firm, keeping steady aim, and firing like a trained war alchemist. This time, he's swaying drunkenly, almost limply, as he attacks.

Finally, Envy's newly absorbed energy supply gives out, and her body disintegrates. She crawls out of the pile of smoking ash in her tiny worm form once again, rendered helpless. Mustang approaches, and places his foot on her before she can try to wriggle away, holding her in place without crushing her to death just yet. Commenting on how ugly and pathetic she truly is. Mustang might not know that this is exactly how to inflict maximum emotional pain on Envy, but he's lucked into it.

There's also this interesting tidbit:

This confirms something that I've suspected for a long time. Like a lot of anime, FMA:B ignores language barriers for the most part, but it's making an exception here. The names of the Sins are in Xerxian. That might be why the author didn't bother translating them into Japanese to begin with. Presumably, Mustang looked these words up when Edward and Hawkeye informed him of the haemunculi's probable Xerxian origins.

He starts slowly pressing his heel down to slowly crush Envy to death, and preparing another flare at the same time, as if unsure of which killing method would be more karmic. However, he's stopped by Hawkeye, who raises her gun toward the back of his head just as she did to Envy a few minutes ago.

At first, I just thought she was afraid he was losing it and holding up the gun in case he went totally off his rocker. But then, I remembered something established back in the first Ishvalan War flashback (which the one in this episode helped me recall; probably part of the reason for its placement). Mustang told Hawkeye that if he ever seems like he's been corrupted and no longer trustable with power, she should shoot him.

He's right at the borderline now.

...

Moment of truth for Roy Mustang. His entire arc - possibly his entire life - until now has been about this. All the self-doubt as his attempts to serve the state he believed in and his later mission to take over and reform it brought about a mounting death toll of innocent civilians and close friends and loved ones. Years of military indoctrination that he's only recently started to shake himself free of.

That's the textual stuff. If we want to go into subtext and implication as well...

Raised in a foster home. Almost certainly abused prior to that point. Nature of said abuse unclear, but I suspect the worst. Raised by a madam after that point, spending his time around prostitutes; the most poorly regarded representatives of traditional femininity.

Went into the army young. Cultivated a hypermasculine persona even before he started his mission to out-nazi the nazis for the sake of rising through the ranks and launching a coup. Close, intimate friendship with Hawkeye, but never romantic or sexual. She's seemed like she's into him, sometimes, but there's never been a sign that it was reciprocal. Near-obsession with Hughes. Annoyed by mentions of Hughes' wife and children. Over-the-top performances of heterosexual banter in front of company, but never more than just banter.

Mustang's masculinity has been under attack from within and from without almost since the day he was born. He fought back against it by dedicating himself to the most extreme traditionally masculine way of life he could within the context of Amestrian society with its semi-fascist militarism. All emotional repression, control, and violence. Whenever he's had to confront something really damaging to himself personally, he's doubled down on toxic masculinity. Even his attempts at redemption for the Ishval atrocities are all about glory, dominance, and death; the only tools he can allow himself to use.

He's at the point now where these psychological issues are really compromising his ability to lead. Envy has gotten away from him multiple times in the last couple of episodes due to his insistence on torturing her instead of just killing her as quickly and efficiently as possible like he should. He's wasting time torturing an enemy when they're on a short countdown to the apocalypse. If Hawkeye lets him have this, lets him validate all the mistakes he's made, there might not be any way to convince him not to seize power he can't be trusted with afterward.

Mustang proved that he was self-aware enough to know he wasn't far from this kind of madness back in season one. Now, can he muster that cognizance again when he needs it the most?

...

Hawkeye tells him to back down. She'll kill Envy. Someone has to, obviously. But if Mustang is the one who does it, it seems like he might never come back down to earth from it. Mustang screams at her to drop the gun, and looks like he's close to firing another flare in an uncertain direction. Fortunately, Edward and Scar have doubled back around thanks to the alarming noises, and Edward takes Mustang by surprise and snatches Envy away from him with an earthbending trick. Mustang dementedly asks for Envy back, but Edward refuses. Scar, meanwhile, stands impassively by.

Mustang tells Edward that if he doesn't hand her over right now, he'll just burn off Ed's automail arm along with her. Edward replies that if he tries that, he will fight back. And that he fully expects to be able to kick Mustang's ass. With Edward's current speed, coordination, and versatility, I don't doubt he could do it even if he couldn't at the series' start. He also tells Mustang if the kind of person who threatens to burn his own allies' and underlings' limbs off for standing in the way of personal revenge can be trusted to run a country. Or even to serve in the cabinet of someone running a country.

Mustang thinks back to his planning with Hughes, back when the two of them were staring hatefully up at Wrath as he gave his victory speech over the ruins of Ishval's capital. Mustang looking forward to creating a meritocracy in which every officer or politician is concerned primarily with protecting those below them. Hughes being a little skeptical, but looking forward to seeing what Mustang's "naive idealism" might be able to accomplish.

The next to speak is Scar. He simply tells Mustang that unlike Edward and Hawkeye, he won't try to stop him from killing Envy. But he will be disappointed in him if he does it, and that he isn't sure how things will end up going after that point if Mustang becomes a major player in a reformed or balkanized Amestris.

Not quite spoken here is that to Scar, Mustang is sort of a symbol. Scar did things he's not proud of. Mustang did much, much worse things that he's even less proud of. If Mustang is able to rise above the conditions that turned him into a monster, then anyone can. If he can't, then Scar probably has less hope for himself. Not to mention less likelihood of the country's de-Fatherization working out much better for the Ishvalans.

Then, Hawkeye speaks almost the exact same sentence that I did at the start of this scene.

If Mustang kills Envy, he'll feel justified in doing things the way he's always been doing them. He'll learn that ego, brutality, and aggression work, and he probably won't be able to unlearn it.

Mustang fires his flares down empty passages, not looking at anyone. Then, finally, he admits to what he's implicitly being accused of, and starts whining - actually whining - about how humiliating it is to be lectured by a child and a person who tried to murder him once. They all silently agree. Yes, it is humiliating. And if he can't deal with that, then he needs a bullet, because he's never actually left the cult of machismo that made him a war criminal.

And, Hawkeye explains when he asks her, if she shoots him, she'll shoot herself soon afterward. As the episode reiterated earlier, she's not really more innocent than he is, and without his leadership ability and vision she has zero confidence in ever being able to make things better herself, so might as well cut to the "and then we're all executed" stage of the plan right now.

Mustang gently reaches out and guides Hawkeye's hand downward, pointing the gun toward the floor. He averts his eyes from where Edward is holding Envy. He won't do it.

Then, Envy starts speaking up. In a whiny voice that's almost reminiscent of Mustang when he was complaining at being talked down to by Scar and Edward. Urging them to stop this already and just kill each other, or at least kill her if they won't do that. Her urging becomes more and more unhinged, and it soon becomes clear that she's not actually talking to them at all.

She's broken.

Slowly, looking down at the writhing, crying thing in his hand, Edward goes back to the Xerxian word that Mustang just translated. It's humans, specifically, that she's jealous of. Human ability to rise above their worst selves, and to help one another overcome adversity. That's why she does her best to deny and destroy those aspects of people, even aside from her missions from Father.

Envy cries harder, and says that this is the ultimate humiliation. Not being defeated, or demeaned, or destroyed. But being understood. That's something she can't possibly live with.

...

Thinking back to my own reading of her, with her representing Father's shame at his old self's weakness and helplessness as well as his envy of those who had it better, I can see why it was important for Mustang to be the one to defeat her this way. The whole thing with Envy being sent to Xing and then randomly reappearing in Central due to May's timeskip spacewarping, only to THEN be turned back into her little worm form and defeated once more without really getting to do anything in the meantime, is pretty clumsy and time-wasty on its own. But with Mustang's entire arc being about overcoming his own moral and sexual shame, on top of the particulars of how Hughes died, Envy really was the final boss for him.

I feel like if anything, it's the whole sending Envy to Xing thing that should have been cut. Or at least reworked so that it built up to this rather than feeling redundant with it. Scar and Marcoh beating Envy back up north was also important for their own arcs, but...there had to have been a better way of consolidating them.

...

Envy manages to wriggle free of Edward's hand. Hawkeye is about to shoot her, but there turns out to be no need for that. Envy reaches down her own throat and answers a question I've long had about her physiology.

She isn't that different from her siblings, constitutionally. The philosopher's stone that Marcoh destroyed up north wasn't her actual battery, it was an external one that she uses to power her "host." She's a philosopher's stone that latches onto and controls other philosopher's stones (or living humans) without absorbing or fusing with them. If Marcoh had cast his anti-philostone spell a second time on her little worm form, it would have destroyed her actual core and killed her.

It did seem weird that she would be so fundamentally different from the others. Apparently, she actually wasn't.

And, on the topic of killing Envy, she saves the humans the trouble. She does *something* to her own core. It looks like she's just squeezing it, but we know that philosopher's stones are very hard to destroy with direct force and that Envy's worm form is not strong, so she must be doing something more than that. Whatever it is, it causes the stone to vaporize, and Envy bids Edward and the others goodbye as she dies.

Of all the Sins, she and Pride struck me as the least likely to be turned. And yeah. She would literally rather die than be understood. That's the nature of shame and self-loathing. She's probably better off this way, almost as much so as the handful of Xerxians who were just released from her nucleus. Envy dies, and Mustang lives on.

Cut to (sigh...) the Armstrongs and Sloth. As Sloth works himself free of the stone spike Alex impaled him with, some more soldiers arrive and explain to the other soldiers that they have orders to shoot Olivierre. While Olivierre is standing right there. Fuck. Why. However, with Sloth almost fully freed and healed, Olivierre manages to convince the newcomers to help her deal with that thing first.

It also helps her case when another band of mannequins find their way into the hall and start attacking.

Armstrong comes up with a similar strategy to what Edward did down below, and tells the men to try and break the mannequins' jaws. Those seem to be more damage resistant than the legs, sure, but they're also more structurally fragile, and they seem to be the only method by which mannequins inflict killing blows. Meanwhile, Sloth scratches his head and tries to remember what he was supposed to be doing until he recalls that he's supposed to kill Olivierre. He starts lumbering up behind her while she rallies her less-than-loyal troops against the mannequins, but Alex has taken the opportunity to bind Sloth with one of his own chains.

It won't take him long to break that, but Alex got his attention. They start punching each other. Alex tanks multiple direct blows to the head and torso that call into question why everyone is treating the Sins' powers as so unbelievable if people like Alex are just a thing that exists anyway. One of the soldiers gets worried when he sees Alex's arm get broken and Sloth beating him into the floor, but Olivierre tells him not to worry, her brother can take care of himself. And sure enough, it turns out that Alex's arm wasn't actually broken, just dislocated, and Sloth's next attack knocks it back into place.

Alex then punches Sloth a whole bunch of times and wins. The whole thing that he and Olivierre were doing before, where they had to figure out how to penetrate Sloth's shields and how to use his speedmode's momentum against him, was apparently just a game they were playing out of boredom. Alex could have just outpunched Sloth at any time.

Meanwhile (yay!) the military police have raided the Armstrong manner, and found a hangar-like area where it looks like that tank was assembled out of multiple components.

So, they trucked the tank to there in parts to get it close to Central unnoticed before reassembling it. Makes sense. How they got it into the city itself I'm less sure of. The only obvious answer is the macroglyph tunnels, but they couldn't have known Pride wouldn't be there when they planned this.

At any rate, the tank is still blasting its way through the Command Center's front gate, and finding the assembly site isn't doing much to help the Central garrison destroy it. I wonder what happened to all the state alchemists? Were there really none in Central at the time besides Kimblee and Alex? I guess between Grumman's skullduggery, Olivierre's insider status, and Hook's surprise attack they could have ensured there'd be very few in the area and that Hook's troops would quickly get the drop on them.

Heh. It occurs to me that Scar might have done them quite a favor with his rampage earlier in the series. He killed quite a number of their heavy hitters, and that may be a contributing factor to how few they have to defend the Command Center now.

As that last derpy general in the Command Center orders the defenders to just bury that tank in explosives and damn the collateral damage, Hook grabs him.

Somehow I don't think that Hook himself would have hesitated to do that himself if ordered. Ah well.​

It turns out the tank was mostly a distraction. Thanks to Mustang and Olivierre's intel, the Briggs troops knew exactly where to dig up under the command center to get to the four stars' command post without breaking into one of the glyph tunnels and drowning in chimaeras. And, they also had someone very good at moving earth on hand, which also explains how they might have gotten that tank under the city walls.

Izumi steps out from behind the Briggs troops, and brings a little arc of her own to a very satisfying conclusion as she introduces herself.

Being an alchemist in modern Amestris means either becoming an attack dog of the state's, or living in shame and ostracization. So, she was just a housewife. Now that the regime is coming to its end, she can finally stop humbling herself and playing into fascist ideals about gender. With her delivery here, you can tell how much frustration and rage has been building up in her over the past few decades. Why she always sounded so bitter when doing her previous catchphrase.

Roll credits. As the outro song starts to play, we return - finally - to Hohenheim, as he finds his way into the center of the complex. He enters the executive office for a long anticipated reunion.

Hohenheim says that he's finally come to deal with his disappointing son. That's probably the first time that Hohenheim has actually acknowledged the haemunculus as a child of his to his face, but there's no visible reaction. Whatever part of Father might have been touched or shocked or hurt by this is elsewhere right now. Father simply replies that it's about time he took back that body he gave to Hohenheim, if he appreciates it so little. End episode.


This would be one of the best episodes of the series if it weren't for the stupid Sloth part. There's just so much going on. So many characters revealing their depths as their arcs come to a close. It feels more like part of the finale than any of the others leading up to it did.

Mustang's final test in particular was the high point, especially in how it interplayed with Scar and Hawkeye's stories. Izumi's moment was short, but no less powerful for it. The sheer coldness of Father when confronted by Hohenheim at the end almost reminded me of the way I felt at the end of Paradise Lost, realizing how much of himself Lucifer had lost since the beginning of the book. Coupled with the realization that Father might have still had redeeming qualities well into Amestrian history, seeing him like this is just saddening.

It's unfortunate that Armstrong, despite being one of my favorite characters throughout the show, is stuck with this stupid time-wasting DBZ punchout while everyone else does interesting stuff.