Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood S2E25: “The Immortal Legion”

The multi-pronged attack on Central has commenced, with Mustang, Grumman, and Armstrong's forces running distraction all over the city while Hohenheim, Edward, and Scar lead a small group of elites into Father's lair. Meanwhile, Alphonse and Pride remain entombed, though with Father having received Pride's distress call that's likely to change within this episode or the next. The last thing that happened was a panicking general activating the not-quite-ready golem army, which is probably this episode's namesake. Begin!


New OP, and presumably the last one of the series since there are less than ten episodes remaining. This is the lowest key of the lot, both musically and in terms of accompanying visuals. Lots of people standing around in a rainy nighttime Central looking haggard and morose. A few fighting scenes, but mostly just standing or sitting around. Some standouts are Mustang falling into some kind of deep black pit that I suspect relates to his role as a sacrifice, Father surrounded in red philostone lightning turning into some weird cyclops-like form vaguely reminiscent of his original flask-bound appearance, Leed in full carbon-armor standing over a pile of dead or wounded soldiers, and Edward having a vision of his mother.

There's also this highly suggestive shot:

I guess maybe Wrath really can't regenerate after all. Or, if he can, he'll lose that ability somehow in the near future. I guess it does make sense with his aging. On the other hand, I'm almost positive that we HAVE seen Leed regenerate his human body, so...yeah, not sure how or why they're different in this regard, but evidently they are.

The title card drops immediately after the new intro, and then we're back to the alchemy lab in the Command Center where one of Father's loyalists is hastily force-awakening the golems. After the initial screaming and thrashing, they wriggle themselves free of their storage racks and slowly rise to their feet for the first time. Those big central eyes they all spontaneously manifested are still giving me a bad feeling of the "each of these might just have a mini-gluttonizer in their heads" kind. As they rise, their movements take on a kind of uniformity, almost like a flock of birds moving in unison.

If I'm right about all of them being parts of multiple souls spliced together, then that might be creating a sort of low-key telepathic network between them. If so, that kind of instant and invisible-to-outsiders coordination could make them deadlier still.

Buuut this apparent unity doesn't last long, as each of the golems starts babbling its own incoherent, miserable tangents. "I'm hungry." "I'm scared." "Where am I?" "Who am I?" "It hurts." I think the scientist dude might have had the right of things when he said that the golem army really needs more work. Which again makes me wonder when and why Father even is planning to use these things at all, since he's probably not intending to have a research team at all after today.

The general seems pleased with what he sees, and appears to be under the impression that these things will start loyally following orders as soon as they've finished waking up and getting their bearings. I'm...really not sure what he's predicating this belief on, considering how completely out of it they seem. He starts trying to give them orders, which prompts one to smile broadly and shout "papa!" before advancing on him with its arms raised as if for a hug.

Hmm. Is the soul fragment just randomly calling out for a half-remembered family member, or is this some programmed worship of Father coming out? Likely one of those two. The general seems to think that the golem is imprinting him as its father, and tries to roll with that, only for the golem to summarily tear his throat out with its teeth.

Oh. I see. "Papa." That was a Spanish-speaking soul fragment taking the wheel, and the weak monocular vision of the golem caused it to mistake the general for a delicious baked potato. Oh, the humanity.

Hearing their fellow's cries and not wanting to miss out on the starchy refreshments, the other golems surge forward in a ravenous crowd and take their own bites out of the fallen general. The scientist who had been trying to warn the general not to do this tries shooting them, but he looks hopeless even while drawing his pistol; he knows damned well they're built to be bulletproof. He lives only a few seconds longer than the general, and the bullets don't seem to have made a difference at all.

The golems' theme music is playing through all of this. It's both fitting, and refreshingly new after the show's increasingly mis/overused musical mainstays.

Meanwhile, Edward, Scar, and the chimaeras have found what they're looking for and regrouped before pushing on. It's the glowy white room with the pseudo-Woggish door at the back of it, where Mustang killed Lust. The broken pieces of Barry and Alphonse's armor are still laying on the floor, as is the skeleton of Barry's original body and the pillar Alphonse created to protect himself and Hawkeye from the fireballs. I guess the haemunculi don't come this way often, if they didn't bother to clean this up by now. Anyway, this is the kind of door that couldn't possibly be unlocked, and there's a good chance of it having some sort of anti-transmutation defenses as well.

Sure enough, the door's composition rejects Edward's transmutation attempt, and its either too heavy or too well locked to force open.

Where is Hohenheim? I just noticed that he's not part of the group that's reformed here. Some secret plan of his own that he didn't want the others to know about, for some reason?

Scar offers to try next, and approaches the door to see if he can guess enough of the right elements to make a disintegration work. Before he can lay his own hand on it though, the huge door opens from the other side, and a mob of crazed, wildly babbling synths comes flooding through. From the looks of them, their lust for vegetarian appetizers has not yet been sated.

Cut to somewhere upstairs in the Command Center. Olivierre has one of the generals at gunpoint, and is using him as a hostage to make the guards that have closed in on her back down. She's also trying to get him to give an order for the forces opposing hers and the other rebel forces to stand down, but he's proving braver and more determined than most of Father's inner cultists. Even jabbing her sword through his foot fails to produce compliance. He ultimately impresses Olivierre by ordering his men to fortify the gates and fight to the bitter end against the dissidents, regardless of what she does to him.

Before either of them can do anything to break the stalemate, though, Olivierre hears something coming up behind them, and quickly dashes aside and lets her captive take the descending blow head on. He's not getting back up from it. Looks like an old friend of Olivierre's is eager to catch up.

She's damned lucky Father is still downstairs doing command and control stuff and just sent Sloth up here to deal with her. She might not have any heavy artillery or flash-freezing liquids to use this time, but there are plenty of escape routes, and Sloth isn't exactly difficult to outrun. So, worst case scenario, she can run away and just do her best to not get shot by random soldiers while fleeing.

For now, Olivierre just thanks Sloth for saving her the irritation of getting that little weasel's blood all over her ancestral sabre. Unfortunately, Sloth has specific orders to kill her this time around, so attempting diplomacy isn't going to be viable. Ah well.

Back downstairs, Edward's group is fighting off the zombie-like golem army. Unfortunately, they seem to have some pretty formidable defensive magic going for them, seemingly along the same lines as Sloth and Pride's main body have. Rather than regenerating damage, they just aren't taking it in the first place. Even Scar's disintegrating touch doesn't seem able to overcome it. I guess its a good thing he never tried to fight Pride or Sloth then, assuming that this is in fact the same type of shielding. That's where the "immortal" part of the immortal legion comes in, I presume. They don't seem to have much offensive firepower, but that could be down to the souls inside them not knowing how to use all the features; those central eyes look distinctly ominous to me, given other things we've seen in this show. On a related note, they aren't all attacking, and even the ones doing so aren't making any persistent effort. They seem to cycle between wild hunger or aggression, and just passive confusion or misery, every few minutes.

Even so, the sheer number of them, combined with indestructibility, is making it hard to hold them all back.

One thing that's bugging me is that they don't seem to be attacking each other at all. This might be explained by them being interconnected due to soul splitting, but I don't think that would protect all of them from all of the others. Granted, this is an issue with zombies and zombie-adjacent creatures all up and down the pop culture milieu, so it may just be a case of the author not questioning the trope.

...also, I'm not sure why Edward isn't just raising a wall around the party. We know the floor in this room is transmutable; the wall that Alphonse raised is still right there in frame. The group is discussing the risk of these things getting out into the city, so they don't want to just let them pass by, but even so you'd think some breathing room would help them come up with a better plan? Ah well.

Edward also recognizes their cacophony of babbling voices as being similar to the mass of faces perpetually wailing from Envy's neck, and concludes that the mannequins are being piloted by philostone chunks.

...May is going to be forced to let Envy out when she encounters these, and Envy is going to tear out their cores and rebuild her outer body. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's coming.

Edward finally remembers that he's an alchemist, and raises a barrier over the door leading out into the city. The golems stumble around in aimless confusion in response to this, but it's only a matter of time before they go aggressive again. You gonna raise that wall around yourselves, Edward? Or just raise the team up on a steep, hard-to-climb pillar? The ceiling certainly looks high enough. You do that all the time, come on man, this isn't hard to think of. Cut away after an action shot of the group moving to charge through the big door and just punch the synths out of their way or something, I don't know, it's dumb. Making structures out of stone surfaces is literally Edward's go-to move, and it would solve this problem entirely if he'd just use it for more than locking the robozombies in.

Cut back to the city outside. The Central garrison is locking down the roads, trying to isolate the dissident cells and hopefully locate Mustang's vehicle. However, Hook and his elite scout units are doing a good job ambushing those teams and opening the city up again as fast as it can be locked down. In the outskirts, Mustang and Co listen to the panicking enemy via radio.

They consider their next move. Getting back into Central doesn't seem like a good idea just yet. Mustang looks at the ice cream truck they've converted into an ammo cart, and thinks.

A little further from the city, the injured Lionheart is still standing around sort of keeping Alphonse company through the walls of the stone dome he and Pride are stuck in. He watches the smoke rise over Central, bemoaning his inability to take part in the battle. He hears the ongoing, metallic tapping sound from inside the dome, and asks Alphonse what the hell is causing that. Alphonse tells him that Pride is *still* playing with his helmet. Lionheart starts to shrug and conclude that maybe Pride really is just a distractible little kid inside after all, when he realizes that he recognizes the rhythm of the taps. He hurriedly turns around again and urges Alphonse to stop him.

Yep, Morse code. From the sound of things, anyone in the Amestrian military would be able to decipher it, though Father with his underground tendrils is probably the only one with the sonar-equivalent necessary to hear the pulses.

Unfortunately, as is the way of such things, Lionheart only heard the pulses and had this realization literally ten seconds before Pride's rescue arrives. A rescue that announces its presence via large explosion, blasting Lionheart away in a bloody mess and blowing a hole in the dome in one fell swoop. While Alphonse is busy being startled, Pride walks out into the sunlight.

Well, that's certainly a better use for Kimblee than sending him after Mustang would have been lol. No Yakety Sax required in the end.

Cut to another part of the Central undercity, where May is - just as I predicted - fleeing a group of mannequin zombies. Looks like the glowy entrance room wasn't the only passageway they found themselves out through. Despite Edward's measures, it seems inevitable that at least a few of them will be wandering out into the city. May tries to outrun them, but eventually tires, and is then forced to fight them off while struggling to not let Envy's jar break.

She makes a valiant effort, and causes some amusing slapstick as Envy is buffeted around inside the spinning jar, but the synths can keep getting back up no matter how many times she takes one down. Eventually one of them literally reenacts a moment from "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" and crunches the jar in its mouth.

I'm not sure if the thing's mechanical jaws closing on Envy would have been enough to kill her, if it had chewed a little faster. Perhaps not. Regardless, Envy almost instantly takes control of the golem from inside, and - as I predicted hurriedly extends some feeding tubes into the others to harvest their cores as well. It's a bit reminiscent of the dog scene from The Thing, only much less disturbing due to them being synths.

Soon, all of their cores (and seemingly their inert mass as well. Envy can also digest raw matter, I guess, as long as she has energy to manipulate it with?) are absorbed, and Envy is free.

The music is really on point here, playing an ominous, slowed-down version of one of the show's familiar fight themes. That said, I don't know if May is actually in quite as much trouble here as the framing suggests. It looked like there were around fifteen or so golems in that group, and they're powered by (likely small amounts of) low-grade Amestrian protostone rather than the concentrated stuff from Xerxes. Envy can shapeshift again, but I doubt she's anywhere near full power. May might actually be able to take her. The much bigger risk is if Envy doesn't stand and fight, but runs off to get more fuel, or (even worse) heads straight outside and impersonates Mustang or one of the other rebel leaders.

That's likely what she'll do.

Out in the shantytown near Pride's broken prison, Dr. Marcoh and Yoki are blending in with the locals. The arrival of a group of soldiers has made them nervous though, as they fear Central might be looking for them. It isn't long, though, before they hear the boom and see the smoke rising over the stony mound, and realize that the soldiers were here to recover Pride, and have just succeeded in doing so.

At the breach in question, Pride finishes exiting the dome and thanks Kimblee - seemingly earnestly - for the help. Kimblee asks what happened to Gluttony, and Pride nonchalantly replies that he out-gluttony'd him. Kimblee is surprised to hear about haemunculi betraying each other.

Hmm. I wonder if this is shaking his belief in haemunculus superiority? His tone of voice as he asks about this kind of suggests it.

If so, however, Pride's explanation seems to satisfy him. Pride claims that what he did wasn't murder at all, because he and Gluttony are both just fragments of Father to begin with. Gluttony and Pride have just merged back into a larger collective again, and may be absorbed or divided other ways in the future, with it being all the same to Pride.

Hmm. Well, Gluttony certainly didn't agree with that perspective, going by the way he reacted when Pride engulfed him, but that doesn't necessarily mean that Pride is wrong. If Greed was retrievable after his own reabsorption by Father, then maybe Gluttony actually isn't permadead either. Hell, Gluttony himself was ALSO reabsorbed by Father during the timeframe of the show, and subsequently recreated as good as new. So, if the end of the show wasn't just a few episodes away, it's entirely possible that Father could extract Gluttony from Pride again, and that Pride knew this and expected Father to be understanding of his actions because of it.

Though on the other hand, there must be a reason Father keeps that big incinerator/distillery around. Violently, crudely absorbing another stone the way Pride did might result in some important stuff being lost or permanently damaged. It would explain why Father has a complicated external mechanism to do it more efficiently. So, yeah, Gluttony's current status and future revival prospects are a big question mark until we learn more.

On a related note, if Pride was being honest about his feelings on the subject of Sin autonomy and identity, then that would ironically make him incredible humble, at least in some regards. Perhaps humble isn't quite the right word. More like selfless. He conceives of himself as just part of a greater whole, and seems content and at peace with that. Not a worldview I'd describe as prideful.

I wonder. If he's Father's pride, and he self-identifies as a component of Father rather than his own entity, maybe his pridefulness just encompasses the entire composite. He's proud of himself, but he considers all the others to also be "himself." Him happily explaining his family's fluid individuality could be an expression of pride in haemunculus nature, including, ironically, their convolutedly humble and selfless aspects. So, Pride isn't about ego so much as supremacism. That fits. And also explains why he's the most similar-looking to the dwarf in the flask, as he embodies self acceptance and...

...

......

..........

Father you fucking idiot.

You...excised your ability to be pleased with yourself.

Are...you...oh my god dude you seriously...

...now I'm wondering if the entire Amestris project only happened as a consequence of Pride's creation. He's the oldest of the lot. Does he predate the start of the second macroglyph plan? If so, was Father content with his vast newfound power and freedom until he cut that contentment away?

If so, then this really is all just fucking Peter Thiel's fault, for teaching the dwarf in the flask that part of being free and powerful is never being content with what you have. That encounter taught him to dismiss contentment as a frailty that needs combating, and associated it with the (Xerxian, in the world of the story) sin of Pride. Just as he dismissed a desire for companionship as a kind of Greed, and (possibly, if my interpretation of her was accurate) the ability to care about others as a form of Lust.

Literally every single wrong lesson that it is possible for a person to learn.

As he muses on Pride's answers to his questions, Kimblee notices that Lionheart isn't quite dead yet. I honestly wish he was at this point. Seriously, FMA, you've got tons of characters, you can afford to let the bad guys actually be dangerous once in a fucking while.

Alphonse moves to retrieve the even-more-badly-wounded-than-before Lionheart, but is promptly grabbed around the ankles by Pride. Alphonse makes a circle with his arms on the ground, and a blast of dust and smoke erupts all around him, obscuring Pride and Kimblee's view. When Pride pulls on his tentacles, he finds himself holding Alphonse's severed greaves. I'm guessing he's transmuting himself a new pair of feet further out in the dust cloud right now; hopefully he can beat Kimblee at a game of Battleship.

Back in the Command Center, Olivierre is staring down Sloth. He's got some longer chains affixed to his wrists than before, which gives him a much longer effective reach and faster strike with the swinging ends than he did in their last encounter. Also, last time she had a bunch of soldiers with tanks and freezing liquids to fight him with, and he was barely fighting back. The conditions of this rematch are just a tiny bit less favorable to the general. She tries shooting him, on the off chance that he's inexplicably gotten 100% less bulletproof since last time. No dice. Was that really an effective use of your time, Olivierre? As she evades his lunges and flailing chains, a row of soldiers take position nearby and...demand that Olivierre stand down so that they can shoot her as per their orders.

-______-

FMA:B why you do this to me?

Olivierre gives them the Darwin Award they were begging for by luring Sloth into bisecting them all with a chain while they loudly repeat that they're preparing to shoot any second now. Lol why bother even including these guys? Armstrong tries hitting Sloth with a grenade next, even though she knows he can stand up to persistent cannon fire. She then hides behind a column until he grabs her.

Did she take brain damage in her fight with those generals? She knows nothing she has on hand can hurt him!

She's being written as if she's heard about the haemunculi, but hasn't had firsthand experience and isn't sure how much to believe. But she's had extended firsthand experience dealing with this specific haemunculus! Goddamnit, Araki.

He starts crushing her against the column in his hands, and somehow she isn't instantly turned to pulp. She grunts and groans in pain, struggling against his literally rock-crushing hands that somehow are taking a long time to kill her. Then, someone shows up and punches Sloth across the hall.

It's probably the only character in the show who I can actually buy pulling that feat off. But that doesn't really get the bad taste of the sequence leading up to his entrance out of my mouth.

Oh, now she fucking remembers.

So, it's dumb that she survived getting crushed in the hands of a creature that can flip tanks and tear through stone. But it's arguably even dumber that she didn't do the obvious and just run away from what she knows to be an indestructible but very slow moving monster. I'll just pretend that she ran away from Sloth until he cornered her or collapsed a hallway in front of her with his chains or something, and Alex arrived before he could grab her. This whole sequence is just awful.

Cut back to the legless Alphonse trying to drag Lionheart away under the gradually disappearing cover of the dust cloud. I guess Al doesn't have quite the finesse that Edward does with his free transmutations, and isn't able to shape himself some new feet out of part of his chest plating or whatever. Lionheart tries to get Alphonse to leave him behind, since he's almost certainly going to die anyway, but Al refuses. Lionheard urges him that their chances are bad enough as it is without Alphonse trying to drag them both together on his thigh stumps, and asks what Alphonse even thinks he's trying to accomplish. Alphonse just repeats his oath to not let anyone die if he can help it. Lionheart mumbles about how completely orthogonal Alphonse's worldview is to Kimblee's "success = survival" shtick. And, on that thought, he remembers a little souvenir of Kimblee's that he picked up back in the Baschool mine entrance.

He tells Alphonse that he knows now that saving as many people as possible will always be Al's top priority. So, he's just about the only kind of person who can be ethically entrusted with a philosopher's stone. Winning this battle, right now, against this pair of opponents, may be vital to saving the souls of everyone in Amestris, and possibly the entire world depending on what Father plans to do next. And, well. Whatever's left of the fifteen-odd Ishvalans in that protostone would probably rather their lives be used to kick Kimblee's ass than just about anything else.

Alphonse considers, and then raises the stone to his visor and whispers "let's go." Clearly speaking to the stone itself. Not that they can probably understand him, but still, I'd be surprised if Lionheart was wrong about what they'd answer if they could.

Another double-entendre title, I guess. Alphonse has got an immortal legion of his own in hand.

Pride and Kimblee consider blowing the smoke away, but decide against it for fear of killing Alphonse. They still need him alive, if at all possible. They are therefore rather relieved when Alphonse comes marching out of the smoke on a freshly created pair of legs, wreathed in crackling red lightning.

Their relief may be short lived. End episode.


Good episode. The mannequin soldiers ended up being something rather unexpected, and not in a bad way. I still wonder what their intended purpose was, though, and what they'd be capable of if the soul-composites could be stabilized as the researchers intended. I still half-suspect that Father was intending to take remote control of the lot of them using the new power he's expecting to get from his ritual, but if so he's probably lost that chance. Envy's escape was predictable, and I'm not going to stop being salty about the timeline issues with May's return, but this part of that subplot was executed about as well as it could be, and Envy's return to the battlefield right when a shapeshifting impersonator could potentially do the most damage is a tension-raiser to be sure.

The philosophical stuff with Pride and the philosopher's stone...well, that's all going somewhere. Probably multiple somewheres. I won't be able to say more until we get to one or more of them, but it's a line of thinking I'm definitely interested to follow.

The Sloth fight was fucking stupid though.