Fate/Zero S2E5: "Distant Memories"

Returning to Fate/Zero. We're approaching the home stretch now. This show didn't thrill me at the pilot, grew on me rapidly throughout the first season, but then started disappointing me again from around the midpoint. There's still time for it to do yet another turnaround though, and I'm willing to give it the opportunity to win me back over if it provides an olive branch.

So, "Distant Memories." Sounds like we're getting someone's backstory. Or else doing a commentary on past vs present existence of the Heroic Spirits, in which case it's likely to be Alexander-focused.


Open on a lush, tropical island. Some kids are playing in a crystal-clear lagoon. They're wearing modern bathing suits, so this has got to be the backstory of one of the living characters rather than a Servant. Kind of disappointing, considering that the Servants are the ones who are *all about* having interesting backstories, but eh. One of the boys has a similar hairstyle to the adult Grey, in typical anime childhood flashback style.

Oh. It's his backstory. Well, maybe this will manage to be decent despite the antipathy for the character that Zero has been nurturing in me.

Babby Grey (Greyby? Greyby.) climbs atop a tall rock as the other children watch from the lagoon below. He jumps, and everyone claps, oohing and ahhing over how he's the bravest and awesomest of their friend group.

Of course KarySuegu was the envy of his peers ever since he was a kid, Urobuchi. Of course he was. Why wouldn't he have been?

A pickup truck dives up to the beach, and its teenaged driver calls him over. Is this a younger version of the lady who will eventually make those anti-Snape bullets out of his ribs? I forgot what that lady looked like. Maybe. Anyway, she's supposed to pick him up and bring him home apparently, so I guess she's either a relative or a family friend. He gets in, addressing her as Shirley as he does so.

As they drive, Shirley - apropos of absolutely nothing - starts telling him the story of how this island got its name. Okay...if Greyby is only visiting this island or recently moved here, then this is fine. If he's supposed to be local, then this is a truly stilted "as you all know" scene. Anyway, Arimago Island, or Crab Island in the local dialect, gets its name from an old folktale about how a poor girl stole a food offering from the shrine of the sea gods that existed here to feed her mother, and the uncaring gods punished her by turning her into a crab.

Girls with crab curses. It's only a matter of time until the paedophilia now. Fuck, this episode really is off to a bad start.

As they drive, they pass pig farmers, beachside smoking tables, and a church with a rather imperious-looking Catholic priest at the door. Looks like we're in the Philippines, I think? The name doesn't sound Tagoloc OR Spanish, though, so maybe it's supposed to be from an obscure local...ohhhh, I see. Localization fuckup. According to google translate, the Tagoloc word for crab is alimango. It's the common Japanese L/R mixup, plus an N somehow getting lost along the way. Okay then, we definitely are in the Philippines. Of course, going by his name Kiritsugu (FINE I'll use his actual name are you happy now? I'm still not admitting fault though. This series opened with THREE SEPARATE CHARACTERS whose names were variations on the same two syllables. Three of them!) probably isn't an ethnic Filipino, which is more evidence for him having recently moved here.

Kiritsugu reacts with horror to the island's namesake. Shirley goes on to tell him that the shrine where this took place was located up in the hills near where his family lives now, which is why the islanders don't like to go near there. Okay, now it sounds like she's just fucking with him.

And also continuing the "as you know" shtick and taking it to really ludicrous extremes.

The author isn't normally anywhere near this bad at exposition. I suspect that this is that ever-annoying adaptation decision when they take a piece of third person omniscient narration and shove it into the mouth of a random character.

Anyway, Karysuegu wasn't always Karysuegu, even if the time before then isn't depicted onscreen. Eh, good to at least be informed of it if nothing else. Also, Shirley gives me some validation, which is nice:

Other than that though, this car ride scene continues to just be extremely bad. Stilted, exposition-laden, nonsequitor-ridden. Just bad dialogue, on a very elementary level.

Eventually, they get to the big house up on the jungle hillside. They sit down for lunch. Kiritsugu's father comes out and shows off his latest successful experiment; some orchids that he's enchanted to stop aging, via precise time-manipulation magic.

His ultimate goal is to perfect this procedure for use on humans and invent an eternal youth spell. Unfortunately, he's nowhere near the animal testing stage yet, let alone the human testing one.

Hmm. Kiritsugu's dad seems to have been a much more conventional wizard, and seemingly not a weak one either. Wonder what led to his son taking such a different, less mana-intensive approach?

Anyway, Shirley also managed to enchant one of the specimens herself, with Daddytsugu's instruction. She's his apprentice, it seems; she has the natural talent necessary to be a wizard, even if she isn't from one of the established families. I'm told you can only have one heir though, so she couldn't inherit his own powers unless he chose her over his own son. Hmm.

Kiritsugu even asks his father when he'll start getting lessons, and is told that he isn't old enough yet. His father's explanation doesn't seem honest. He also excuses himself from the lunch table immediately after saying it. That evening, Kiritsugu stares morosely at the magi-engineered flowers, and at his father instructing Shirley in another of their lessons.

The next day, Kiritsugu sees Shirley get a stern talking-to from the stern looking priest we briefly saw during the truck ride.

Either the Church has something against Daddy Kiritsugu, or this priest just doesn't like the idea of one of his intimate community's members getting mixed up in the wizard underground with all its brutality. On the other hand, knowledge of the real magic might be classified and compartmentalized within the church itself, in which case this guy might just be acting on superstition. In any case, the padre notices Kiritsugu watching, and brings Shirley inside to avoid his eyes and ears. Kiritsugu looks morose again.

That night, he and Shirley are sitting in the back of her pickup truck, and she's telling him about the priest's latest set of warnings. He thinks that if she keeps paling around with Daddysugu, she'll end up getting herself possessed by a demon. That isn't actually a major occupational hazard of magecraft, from what I've seen; the Fateverse seems to be a place where other humans are by far your biggest worry, not spirits from beyond. This is making me lean toward the priest just being ignorant and superstitious. To be fair, his advice may actually be good in this case, but not for the reasons that he thinks. Shirley thinks that Daddytsugu could help them all a lot by behaving less aloof. If only he'd come down from his hillside abode and socialize with the townsfolk sometimes, they'd surely be less fearful and superstitious about him and his magic. In any case though, the priest did give her something when she refused to stop her studies; a dagger with a Crusader Cross on the hilt that he said was a powerful talisman against black magic.

Hmm. If that dagger actually is magical, then that priest might not be as much of an ignorant bumkin as I thought. I doubt someone not in the know would be entrusted with an item like this.

For now, since she hasn't run into any demons that she needs to stab before they can possess her, she's just using the dagger to cut fruit. It's a very good fruitknife, regardless of any magical properties it may or may not have.

After that, they go on a stroll through the beautifully drawn jingle by a romantic, reflective river, and talk about their futures. Or rather, Shirley talks, and Kiritsugu mostly just listens. She talks about how awesome Daddytsugu is, and how his fountain of youth research is going to change the world, end the paradigm of magical secrecy, and usher in a golden age for all mankind. She wishes to be the one who continues his work, and brings it to its final stages if need be, so that humanity will know how great and praiseworthy Daddytsugu was.

...

Like father, like son.

-_____-

...

I was wrong. They don't talk about their futures in this conversation. Rather, it ends up being almost entirely Shirley talking about Kiritsugu's future. Contrary to earlier appearances, she insists that she has very limited magecraft talent, and that she can tell Kiritsugu's is much greater even though she's never seen him try it. To make sure we know she's for real, we cut to her orchid, which has wilted.

He is to be his father's true heir, and if Daddytsugu isn't able to finish the research in his lifetime then she will dedicate her life to assisting Kiritsugu just like she's assisted his dad so far.

The whole thing is also framed romantically, which is honestly sort of weird given that she appears to be in her mid teens while he seems to be like, eleven or twelve.

...

So, is Kiritsugu's dad going to be the girl who gets turned into a crab for trying to use that which was meant for divine consumption to benefit mere mortals? Or is Shirley just being incredibly naive about Daddytsugu's goals, in which case she's the crabgirl and he's the miserly sea god?

Well, I give Daddytsugu a 50/50 chance of either dying by the end of this flashback episode, or being left in disgust by his son when he pulls his heel turn.

Shirley, of course, will absolutely, 100% end up in Kiritsugu's refrigerator within the next fifteen minutes of screentime. There is no chance of anything other than that happening whatsoever.

...

The next morning (or maybe a few mornings later; hard to tell how much time has passed) Daddytsugu wakes his son up and asks if he went into his workshop last night. When Kiritsugu truthfully answers that he didn't, his father looks worried.

He tells Kiritsugu to stay in the house, and not to talk to anyone until further notice, before leaving without another word.

Sounds like another wizard just raided Daddytsugu's workshop, and he's afraid they might have hung around to do something worse as well.

Kiritsugu obeys his father's order and stays inside all day. By sundown though, his father still hasn't come back, and he hasn't seen Shirley even hours after she was supposed to come by for her work in the lab. Eventually, he gets worried enough to disobey his father and run(?) downhill to the village to see if he can find either of them. He asks some kids if they've seen her recently. No one has. He goes to her house and knocks on the door. No answer, but it's unlocked. He goes inside. No movement. No sound. Just the orange of the dying sunlight slowly fading away.

Hmm. Whoever it is that broke into the lab is now targeting Daddytsugu's assistant? Or maybe they mind controlled her and made her do the stealing for them? Or maybe she was secretly an enemy agent all along, and that whole vomit-inducing speech she gave to Kiritsugu the other night was intentionally phony? That would be cool. I'd be earnestly impressed with Urubochi if he found it in himself to do that.

As he pokes around in Shirley's house (does she live by herself? Maybe she's supposed to be older than she looks), Kiritsugu spots something laying on the floor in the middle of the room. He picks it up, and recognizes one of the reagent jars from his father's lab. As he's puzzling over why she'd have brought that here, he hears panicking chickens from outside, and we see a flash of...claws? blood? teeth? something bad involving a chicken. Kiritsugu hurries out and sees Shirley's chickens panicking, one of them splashed with blood.

...

Man, there really is a lot of chicken abuse in Fate/Zero, isn't there? Just wait, it's going to turn out that one of Waver's parents is responsible for this. Chicken mutilation is the force of the Velvet family's powers.

...

Anyway, Kiritsugu nervously follows the chicken's bloody footprints, and finds another chicken, dead and in the process of being eaten raw by Shirley. She looks up at Kiritsugu, slack jawed and glowing-eyed.

Color me surprised. That priest was right after all. Somehow. Did he maybe know something about Daddytsugu's research that his son didn't? Or, maybe he knew that Shirley was extra-vulnerable to demonic possession for whatever reason? If so, he probably should have explained that to her in detail, because that's a much better reason to stay away from magic than anything general about magic or wizards as a whole.

Kiritsugu tries to approach her, but she thrashes backward away from him and huddles against the back of the chicken coop, limbs spasming, body twitching. She explains that...

....

*blinks*

You know, I thought I might actually be able to cover this episode in one post. But if this revelation is any indicator of things to come, this might end up being another three parter. And no, not in the good way.