Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood S2E15: "The Abyss"

No teaser. The new intro is just being itself. I think I'd put it on par with the second one, and below the first and third. We'll see if my feelings change. Also, just going to take the opportunity to remind you all that this one is not a blind watch. We've got one more episode after this one before we get to where I stopped watching ahead.


After the OP, we open on Winry, Scar, and company making their way through the mines, Yoki with his mining experience leading the way. Winry trips over a crate that turns out to be full of dynamite, scaring everyone when they realize, but after a cursory inspection Yoki assures them that these explosives are completely soaked through and won't be detonating. A pity, they might have been able to use them otherwise, but on the bright side they won't have to worry about accidentally triggering anything.

Meanwhile, back in the field base in Baschool, the snowstorm has ended. Miles gets a couple of his most loyal soldiers together with himself and Edward, and talks plans. After mulling over the situation a bit he tells the soldiers to kill Kimblee and his remaining pair of suspected chimaeras as soon as they can get a good shot without too many witnesses.

Edward protests, trying to appeal to the usefulness of having Kimblee as a captive informant. This time I'm going to have to take Miles' side when he tells Edward that they're not going to be able to get anything out of Kimblee, and that he's too dangerous to keep captive with their limited resources. While I maintain that Armstrong was rash in killing General Raven instead of capturing him, Kimblee is ideologically committed and personally dangerous in a way that Raven wasn't. If Kimblee ever turns on the haemunculi, it'll be at an unpredictable time for moon logic reasons that make sense only to him, and there's no point in keeping him around just on the off chance of something causing that to happen. Edward then asks about his men; they're enslaved chimaeras, surely they should be shown mercy. Miles just tells him that he can't be sure that they can be turned, which means they can't afford to take the chance. It's the law of Briggs: you get careless, you get dead. Having mercy on powerful enemies in their current situation would be careless.

Miles and his men leave the room, with the former repeating his order to them, and the latter commenting on how Edward really is still just a kid after all. When they're out of earshot, Miles comments that he wishes he could still be naïve and childish and believe that killing people isn't always the safest and most efficient approach. Edward is left frustrated and fuming.

I'll comment on this at the end of this episode. There's another scene later on that provides some context for the point I want to make.

Back in the mine tunnel, the group has set up camp near the desired exit point, and May and Dr. Marcoh are pouring over Brothar's notes with Scar's translation help. There's some mention of the philosophers' stone (albeit under a different name), and of entities called "Aurelians," or "golden ones." Ancient Ishvalan is Latin, then? Sure, why not. Scar isn't quite sure of what that means in this context, but May does. In Xingese, Golden Ones are a theoretical alkahestric concept of a perfect, immortal being. Translated into ancient Ishvalan, "Aurelian" would be the word for them. In her words, the roots of this term come from gold being seen as the most perfect and previous of metals, and from the Great Western Sage - believed by alkahestrists to have been such an entity - being said to have had golden hair and eyes.

I guess they hadn't seen ethnic Xerxians before, for these features to be associated with him specifically? It does seem like Xerxes was much closer to the Amestrian side of the desert than the Xingese side, so that could be possible.

Anyway, since we now know that there were exactly two immortal wizards who walked out of Xerxes that day and that at least one of them probably didn't stick together after that point, it's pretty much explicit that Hohenheim is the Great Western Sage, and is probably technically an alkahestrist himself at least partly. Well...actually no, the story must be more complicated than that. Edward and Alphonse first taught themselves alchemy by reading Hohenheim's books, and they were mystified by some of May's abilities, so alkahestry must have gone in a pretty different direction since he left his Xingese disciples to their own research.

Why did he leave Xing and cross the entire desert the other way, I wonder? Also, when did he do that?

Anyway, Winry comments on Ed and Al having the golden hair and eyes combination. No one is able to put it together, but then I don't think any of these people have been told about Hohenheim being Father's doppleganger. Although that said...Scar did at least get a look at Father, and his failed attempt to disintegrate him is ample evidence for him not being a normal human, so he at least might be suspecting a connection between Father and the Sages, if not between either of those and the Elric brothers.

...then again, Father is sort of pale and washed out these days, so his hair and eyes might not have registered to Scar as "gold" at least in that lighting.

The Sage discussion is cut short when Yoki comes back from scouting ahead and reports that he's confirmed their exit and the weather has cleared up. They pack up their little camp and head out into the sun on the Fort Briggs facing side of the mountain.

Yoki tries to lead on ahead, but sinks into the soft, fresh snowdrifts left by the blizzard. The chimaeras decide that they should lead the way and use their denser bodies to pack down the snow and create a path for the others. Sensible.

As they match on, the vibrations of their feet get someone's attention, and Winry hears muffled cries for help coming from under the snow nearby. They dig up Alphonse, who seems to have returned to consciousness despite his weird out-of-synth-body-experience in the blizzard.

He must have recovered pretty early on in his trek, if he was able to find his way to the mine exit and start advancing on it before getting buried in the snow.

God, how awful would it have been if he'd been too far away when that happened, though? Nightmarish, especially for someone like Al.

Anyway, May glomps him (and probably gets her skin frozen to his armor, but eh, she's a healer she'll be fine), and Al relays the critical warning about Wrath having installed a new command crew at Fort Briggs. They'll have to head somewhere else, but there aren't a lot of options within travelable distance. Especially if they don't know how long the good weather will hold out. Scar decides to lead them to Asbeck, an isolated village in the area with an expat Ishvallan community. Ah, okay, that's why he hid Brothar's notes up here of all places before going on his killing spree. He went with a group of refugees who relocated up here, and chose that abandoned cabin near their new village as a hiding place. That tracks. Anyway, the chimaeras aren't thrilled about trying to take refuge in an Ishvallan slum, but they wisely don't make an issue of it.

Also, I kind of doubt that this is going to be a "slum." You need decent housing in order to survive a climate like this region's, and an out of the way village on the Drachman border is probably not going to have the same prejudices as the Amestrian heartland. I suspect they'll find the Asbeck Ishvallans to be, if perhaps not integrated, at least living in a decent-ish rural neighborhood they built for themselves.

They head off after Scar. As they go, Winry asks Alphonse if he's not worried about his own disappearance getting Kimblee suspicious. Al responds that he is, but they decided that Edward and Miles would have to deal with that problem on its own, and he has faith in his brother to handle it. Given Kimblee's performance so far, I think Al's placing his bets pretty safely.

Cut back to Baschool, where Edward is standing morosely next to...Alphonse?

Looks like Edward transmuted up a decoy. Not sure how long that'll fool anyone for, but hopefully it'll at least buy a little more time for Alphonse and the others to put distance between them and Baschool.

Miles divides everyone into search parties just like yesterday, and they split up to continue their search of Baschool, looking for Scar's party and their new captive. The soldier who he and Edward have wearing the Alphonse suit is having trouble moving in it; Kimblee already seems suspicious. Not long after they split up, Kimblee and his two Central troopers with weird badges leave their assigned sector and head for the mineshaft to search the tunnels. Presumably, Miles had people of his own "assigned" to check there, but Kimblee has figured out that that would be the perfect place to hide someone in this town and he doesn't trust Miles.

Miles instructs his loyalists to head Kimblee and his men off and take up sniper positions along the road leading to the mine.

They race to the spot. Kimblee approaches the mine, and then sends his two probably-chimaeras to check the entrance ahead of himself. The dust inside the entrance should have been sheltered from the snow, and be crisp enough to show footprints. As he remains behind, the snipers line of a bead on him and are just about to pull the trigger when Edward walks up to him, giving them pause.

Goddamnit, Edward. You could have at least pointedly looked away while Kimblee bit it before running on ahead to try and save the chimaeras. Perfect chance. Well, fine, I guess you'll just have to do this the hard way then.

Edward tells Kimblee that he really ought to wait until Miles' troops have given the mine a once-over before going in himself. Kimblee's reply is predictable.

Edward insists that he's mistaken, which prompts Kimblee to ask if he's just trying to distract him while snipers get a bead. Ironic. The snipers HAD a bead and would have already killed the prick by now if it weren't for Edward showing up. Now that Kimblee has reason to suspect he's being stalled or set up, he's going to be a LOT harder for them to hit.

And yeah, before anyone can say or do anything else, Kimblee uses one of his blast spells to evaporate the snow around himself and put up a fog cloud, shielding himself from the snipers before Miles can tell them to ignore what Edward is doing and just shoot Kimblee already. Edward manages to catch sight of Kimblee's silhouette hurrying into the mine entrance and tries to chase after him, but Captain Simian and Mayor Lionheart have already been called back out to guard the doorway behind him and assumed their true forms.

As Kimblee moves on into the mine and easily finds the party's tracks, Edward tries to slip passed the chimaeras using the same fog concealment as Kimblee. Unfortunately, there's a reason Kimblee chose this particular trick; he knows that the chimaeras have heightened hearing and scent, which gives them a huge advantage over baseline humans when vision is being limited.

That's definitely better tactical thinking than I've come to expect from Kimblee. I guess he's either an idiot with rare strokes of brilliance, or a cunning mastermind suffering from random bouts of idiocy.

Luckily for Edward, Kimblee has been taking that "don't get any more sacrifices killed" instruction to heart and relaying it to his minions. Lionheart seizes Ed instead of killing him, and then makes the mistake of telling him how he did it in an attempt at intimidation.

Also, Edward might not like killing, but he has no compunctions against cutting someone's hand off, and he has his arms free enough to transmute.

Well, not off, exactly. But he transmutes his synth arm into the blade configuration and puts it right through Lionheart's wrist, which has got to have at least mostly severed it.

Edward shouts a warning to the snipers not to try to engage the chimaeras in the fog, and then tries to exit the cloud in the direction of the mine. He succeeds, but does so by falling off the edge of the entrance tunnel and falling at least ten feet or so to the bottom. Good thing there was fresh snow to cushion his fall. The chimaeras follow him, and he spots the dynamite and threatens them with it. Lionheart (who's wrist doesn't seem to be bothering him. Healing factor?) laughs and tells Edward that they already scouted this entryway; they know that dynamite is soaking wet and useless.

Edward is unfazed by this pronouncement.

Oh, this is where they're going to regret telling him about their heightened senses. He's going to free up some nitrates from the TNT and overwhelm their sensitive noses, isn't he?

Oh, hah, it's even better than that. It's not TNT, its ammonium dynamite. So, he's literally got a box of ammonia just waiting for alchemical distillation. Stronger and safer than what I was thinking; a lot of gaseous nitrates are toxic in addition to smelly.

Anyway, Edward's stinkbomb knocks the sensitive beastmen out while only inconveniencing himself. Unfortunately, the gas eruption also alerts Kimblee to the situation, so Edward loses the element of surprise as Kimblee doubles back to face him.

Edward tries to get him to surrender, telling him that he won't let Miles kill him if he spills everything he knows. Predictably, that doesn't work. Kimblee spits out his old protostone and starts to cast, but we already saw him lose the initiative to Scar during the train fight, and as of his new automail limbs Edward is faster than Scar. Kimblee doesn't get a chance to cast, and only manages to parry a few of Edward's blows before the latter knocks the stone out of his hand and then cuts Kimblee's palm open, ruining the transmutation array he has tattooed there.

Well fuck. Even my unimpressed-with-Kimblee self didn't expect Edward to take him out that quickly!

He still has that second protostone Envy gave him, though. I'll bet he's going to trick Edward into letting his guard down and then use...yup, that's exactly what he does. He comments that while Edward's dedication to not killing is admirable, he really should have gone for the kill there instead of contenting himself with what he thought was a disarm.

...

It strikes me as a bit off that Kimblee is attributing that decision to Edward's ideals rather than his stated desire to interrogate him. Especially if he thought Edward was trying to set him up for snipers earlier. Bit of an author knowledge vs character knowledge issue there, as I don't think Kimblee's ever gotten a chance to learn about Edward's strong convictions on this subject. He refused to murder the Briggs soldiers before, sure, but there's a big difference between "won't negotiate with terrorists" and "refuses to kill ever for any reason" and I don't know why Kimblee would have jumped to the latter.

Ah well.

...

Anyway, Kimblee takes advantage of Edward's surprise and uses his second protostone to spontaneous-cast one of his explosions. Either he calibrated the blast carefully to injure Edward without killing him, or he's decided that keeping Edward alive just isn't worth the trouble and Envy can bitch him out for it later if she wants to.

...okay, given the scale of that explosion I'm pretty sure that it's the second one.

Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if that killed some of the dudes outside the mine entrance.

...or not? It looks like Edward and both of the stunned chimaeras survived, and they were all pretty damned close to the center of the explosion. Maybe most of that smoke is from the chemicals Edward left over from his dynamite transmutation that the blast reacted with, or something. That, or the manga or studio (whoever decided on this visual) just kind of made a bad decision with that inappropriately gigantic smoke cloud.

Cut back to Edward. The floor gave out under him, and both he and the chimaeras fell down the built-over mineshaft onto the level below. It wasn't too bad of a fall, but it brought down a lot of rubble on top of them, and well:

I guess I have to take it back. Kimblee's combination of wits, skills, and tactics won out over Edward's combination of wits, skills, and tactics. Kimblee won this battle fair and square by Edward's own standards per the Slicer battle.

Edward is disbelieving, then panicked, and then his thrashing makes him lose more blood and he starts passing out. Over on the far side of the mountain, Alphonse collapses again, suffering another momentary glimpse of his body in the Antechamber of Truth. He recovers, but remains weak and shaky.

I'm guessing that's the metaphysical knot connecting him and Edward at work. Given that this didn't happen either of the previous times I can recall that Edward passed out from blood loss, I think Alphonse's golem body really is starting to lose its grip on his soul. First he started being called to his body because the snowstorm visually resembled its environment, and now it's happening again less than a day later in response to Edward being hurt...well, maybe he's never been hurt QUITE this badly before, but he's certainly come close. So yeah, Al's soul is weakening its connection to the armor glyph, and these fugues of his are going to happen more and more easily until the glyph gives out completely.

Well, I guess that means they'll have to recover his body AND beat Father within the next few in-universe days to get a happy ending, as opposed to just the latter. Although...hmm.

Actually, come to think of it, maybe they don't?

Alphonse's body isn'tdead. It's alive and biologically active, if unhealthy and malnourished. If Alphonse is seeing visions of it as his armor gives out, that probably means his (lower) soul will probably be drawn back into it when it shuts down completely. So...he'll just be alive and in his own body in the Antechamber. From there I suppose hecoulddie, but it's just as likely that his reunited self will be shunted back into the physical world.

I'm sure they'd rather not risk it. But regardless, it may well turn out that all Alphonse ever had to do to get his body back was wait.

Anyway, for now Alphonse passes out again, and I suspect he's going to remain out at least until Edward has been stabilized. I wonder if he's going to be in his organic body sitting around before the Gate and arguing with his own Wogdat over who gets to control each limb in the meantime?

Back to the Baschool mineshaft. Edward has a second wind before he can bleed out, and manages to reshape the rubble pinning the chimaeras enough to free them. Their augmented bodies have sustained only mild to moderate injuries from the blast, unlike him, so once they're free they can act. They're a bit surprised by this, seeing as they're the enemy and all, but they were told not to kill him so whatever, it's not that much of an anomaly.

Unfortunately, when he tells them to pull the shrapnel out of him, they tell him that doing so would just make him bleed to death within minutes or less.

I guess Edward is going to have them look for the protostone he knocked out of Kimblee's hand so he can use it to heal himself. If Kimblee is already out of sight, then I'm guessing he didn't bother looking for it himself before heading off after the fugitives.

...or not. Okay, Edward is actually going to try something else. Something that opens a REALLY big can of worms as far as what the setting's magic system allows for.

Edward instructs them to pull out the bar. When they do so, he'll use his knowledge of medical alchemy (which he researched before his attempt at reviving Trisha. And which he's actually pretty good at, considering that he got anything close to a human body out of just raw chemical mass) to try and heal his broken blood vessels shut to buy himself time to get proper medical attention. For the toll, however, he's going to try to use his own soul.

So. Cast from HP. Is an individual soul actually divisible in quite that way? Can he control how much of it he's going to use? Will that sicken him? Age him? Shorten his prospective lifespan? How much can you do with a nonlethal fraction of a single soul, anyway? Kimblee's first protostone was made of I think 12 or 15 Ishvallans. Do you get a logarithmic increase in value by combining multiple souls, or is it purely incremental?

Like I said. Big can of worms. Potentially an "any alchemist can do almost any thing without needing to draw a circle by spending a few years of their lives" sized can, depending on the answers to those questions.

Anyway, they pull the thing out. Edward remembers what it felt like to use Envy's core that one time, and finds that same sort of energy within himself and uses it to cast. Hopefully with some amount of control over how much of it he's using.

When he's done, he doesn't look any different or older or anything, and he's stopped the worst of the bleeding. Not sure what price he really just paid there.

His insides are still all scrambled, and he still has internal bleeding, just not enough that he has to worry about dying right this second. I'm guessing either Hohenheim will heal him using the same trick he did on Izumi last episode, or (more likely) May will with her proven alkahestric healing prowess. Though...hmm. The shortcuts and workarounds Edward must have made to save himself now might make proper recovery a lot harder to do. May might not be up to the task. Well, if Hohenheim meets his son(s) again in the near future I guess it'll be his job, then.

Edward then tries to go after Kimblee, but collapses just a few steps further into the mine. The chimaeras tell him that he's in no shape to even think about fighting. They're just going to get him to a proper hospital now as thanks for freeing them, and also probably for not killing them when he likely could have in favor of using the ammonia bomb. Edward used his last bit of proper transmutation to free them, when he knew there was no assurance that they'd help him. Kimblee, meanwhile, didn't even bother to make sure they were outside the blast radius of his explosion. They decide that this is the last straw; it's time to let the state think they died here and make themselves disappear after repaying Edward.

...

Aaaaaand here's what I said I was going to get back to, in that initial scene with Edward and Miles. And, as most of you have probably guessed, it also goes back to the awfulness of the episode before last.

The best Edward could do in the initial scene of this episode, when he was trying to convince Miles to spare Simian and Lionheart, was to appeal to his sense of mercy and justice. That makes no sense after their experiences with the first pair of chimaeras. What Edward obviously SHOULD have said there is "Dude. The last couple of these guys we fought were willing to switch sides at the drop of a hat, without us even having to to initiate the negotiations. These guys are looking for any excuse to jump ship, and it's just bad writing alone that's kept them from doing it up until now. Why would you kill this second pair instead of turning them given what we've seen?" Furthermore, Miles ends up looking like a kill-crazy lunatic rather than the simply closedminded and misguided and/or slightly nihilistic man that he seems to be intended as. He was there when Beebop and Rocksteady threw themselves at defection practically uninvited. Did he forget that already? Did he have reason to think this pair of chimaeras would be so completely unlike that pair?

Basically, both Edward and Miles were being written as if the Beebop and Rocksteady defection didn't happen, or at least as if they weren't present for it.

Then, compare that with Lionheart and Simian's actions at the end, and how that interacts with the surrounding narrative. The beginning of "The Abyss" opens with a question: is mercy worth it when you're staring into the face of death? That's the crux of the conflict between Edward and Miles, and the thematic center of the episode (and one that ties in with a lot of things from earlier throughout the series). When Edward disarms Kimblee when he could have killed him, and it turns out Kimblee had a backup weapon on hand and was willing to exploit Edward's mercy, that was the big moment of truth. Was Miles actually right? What follows with Lionheart and Simian is the resolution to this arc: no, actually Edward was right, his willingness to be merciful and Kimblee's unwillingness to do so has turned the tables. The ruthless option ISN'T always the pragmatic option, because ruthlessness drives allies away and makes your enemies look better. That also ties into the theme that the new OP highlights, of mutual support being stronger than individual force of will.

Having Beebop and Rocksteady switch sides before this question is raised undermines the entire arc. It also is just a far less convincing take on the chimaera-turncoat concept than Simian and Lionheart. With the latter, we see them betrayed and left for dead by a commanding officer, and then saved by the enemy. That will make people - even heavily indoctrinated people - rethink their allegiances. That could turn a loyal soldier into a dissident. The idea that the chimaeras are being sent on these sensitive black ops missions without being loyal to begin with, on the other hand, is just plain nonsense.

The story is acting as if Beebop and Rocksteady never happened. The arc is plotted and its beats foreshadowed as if Beebop and Rocksteady weren't meant to happen. At this point, I don't know if anything other than executive meddling even COULD explain this.

...

Edward passes out again. As the chimaeras wonder where they should try going and what they should do with themselves after eluding the Amestrian military, they happen to find the dropped protostone sitting on some rubble just a couple dozen feet away.

Man, that could have saved a lot of risk, injury, and untested metaphysical procedures, couldn't it have? It's too bad Edward had already lost so much blood by the time he properly understood the situation. Otherwise, I think he'd have had the smarts to give them at least thirty seconds or so to see if they could spot the protostone around here somewhere. Well, he WAS dazed and anemic, so I can't blame him for this. But still, ouch.

Granted, Edward may have also had moral reservations about using a stone. But given the stakes here, and the fact that annihilation is at least arguably a mercy after what the souls in the stone have been through, not to mention him having been (reluctantly) willing to do so once before, I think Edward would have done it if he'd thought of it.

Anyway, end credits music ends with the chimaeras carrying Edward into...deeper into the mines? IE, the same direction that Kimblee went in? I figured they would take their risks with Miles and Co (though it might be for the better that they didn't). It'll be kind of hilarious if they just sneak up behind Kimblee and maul him to death without any of the main characters even witnessing it.

On a similar note, it's really too bad Edward had no way of getting a message or something to Alphonse. If he could have done that, there'd have been no need to stop Kimblee from pursuing them through the tunnel. Kimblee can easily one-shot the party if he sneaks up on them, but a forewarned Scar with a favorable environment to hide in, heh, well, we've already seen how that goes. Even if Kimblee had his chimaeras with him, I think Alphonse and May would be more than up to the task of keeping them busy while Scar redecorates the tunnels in edgelord. Ah well.

End episode.


Along with "The Dwarf In the Flask," this episode did a lot to reassure me after my faith in the show was damaged. It wasn't an amazing standalone masterpiece like "Dwarf," but it handled a lot of the same ideas as "Daydream" in a far more competent and agreeable way. The handling of these two chimaeras, Edward's principles and how they're strained and tested, it all feels like a vastly improved second draft. Miles being proven wrong on a deep and axiomatic level, to the point of him arguably being as much of an antagonist to Edward this episode as Kimblee, also makes the show's earlier use of him a lot more palatable.

The whole Briggs arc has been a rough patch. I think the show is getting itself back on track now.