Fullmetal Alchemist S2E29: “The Adults' Way of Life”

Thank you, FMA:B, for being there when I need you. True, you let me down in such a situation once before when I was counting on you to help me get through Abusive Workplace Simulator 2012, but luckily I've had the blind skeleton of this review written for months now, so I can go into this rewatch already knowing that it's not going to be terrible. In your face, Yu-Gi-Oh! In. Your Face.


No teaser for this episode. After the OP, Edward's party is trying to find its way back to Father's antechamber. The Mustang vs. Envy fight took them way off course into the general undercity, and now they've kind of gotten themselves lost trying to find their way back under the command center. Edward expresses his displeasure at Mustang for this. Mustang, looking drained and almost zombielike, responds with childish little deflections and non sequiturs. Damn, he's really fallen apart from the Envy encounter. He's like a shell of himself. Walking alongside Hawkeye, Scar muses darkly that with the amount of noise they made, the other enemy forces must certainly be aware of them; the question is just if they have any defenses left to use against them. Then, after a silent, pensive moment, Hawkeye thanks Scar for helping her talk Mustang down.

She says that she doesn't know how much the gratitude of an Amestrian war criminal means to Scar, but that he has it. Scar is silent for a moment himself, before gruffly telling her that her gratitude is misplaced; helping keep Mustang sane and on task was just the pragmatic choice as far as he's concerned. They both look like they want to say more to each other, but neither of them speak again.

Also, "Lurking," the creepy black magic/conspiracy theme, plays here for some reason. Just another data point in the pattern of FMA:B being really bad at using its awesome soundtrack.

Back on the surface, the tank ceases its bombardment of the Command Center gates. They've gotten the word that the insertion team has seized the main office and taken the last of the surviving four-stars prisoner. Another baffling musical choice here, as it plays one of the dramatic fight themes just as the fighting is STOPPING, but oh well.

It's revealed that the tank served a triple purpose. As well as providing a distraction and preventing escape through the command center's main entrance, the noise of its cannon was drowning out the sound of Izumi's earthbending as she tunneled up under the building. Clever.

The choice of music gets more appropriate as we switch over to the command center's hallways, where the awkward three-way battle between humans, Sloth, and mannequins continues. As Alex inexplicably keeps Sloth occupied singlehandedly, Olivierre gets the memo about her underlings having seized the office and radios Hook to tell him about what else is going on in the building. She warns him about the mannequins, and warns him to keep the doors shut and prevent them from getting out into the city at all costs. She doesn't mention Sloth, but I guess they already figured that he and the other surviving Sins would be in the area. With the order given, Olivierre continues helping her newly recruited soldiers disable more mannequins, while also trying to convince them that these creatures' existence is proof of the senior staff's malicious intent. She seems to be slowly getting through to them.

Sloth manages to get free of Alex's continuous attacks, and starts speedboosting again. The Armstrong siblings both lose another chunk of hit points off of their near-unlimited columns, and Sloth's chains come off of his wrists entirely. This gives the soldiers a soft counter to his speedboosts, since he's too big and stupid to avoid or even really notice the chain, and its long enough to attach as much weight to as they feel like.

I'm guessing Olivierre came up with this trick. I can't imagine these guys being smart enough to on their own.

Some of the soldiers urge the Armstrongs to get a head start while Sloth is slowed down, but neither of them (Alex in particular) is interested in leaving a Sin free to rampage if there's any other option at all. Fortunately, thanks to Olivierre and Hook's recent radio conversation, Izumi has now been dispatched to assist them.

I'd have thought her biggest contribution to the battle would be that she's another heavyweight combat alchemist. But no, her opening move is to intercept Sloth's next charge with a judo throw that, inexplicably, works.

Whatever, I'm not going to comment on feats of strength or durability in this fight anymore. It's a slapstick Loony Toons battle with no actual danger for the characters.

...

Just to be clear, that's not *inherently* a bad thing. A series like FMA:B can afford to have those from time to time. But this just isn't the time or place for one.

This is supposed to be the climactic battle for the Armstrong siblings, if not for Izumi as well. And, while Alex in particular is one of the sillier characters in the show, he has some real depth and gravity to him as well. His sister, meanwhile, has almost never been used for comic relief except during the (staged?) succession duel. This doesn't work as a conclusion for either of the siblings. It would have worked as a silly penultimate battle for Alex to celebrate that aspect of his character, but with how long its gone on so far I don't think that that's what it is.

Also, while Sloth was never the most menacing or antagonistic of the Sins, he's still a Sin. A Loony Toons meme fight might be a less unfitting sendoff for him than any of his siblings (except Gluttony, perhaps), but that doesn't make it actually fitting.

The proximity to the definitely not comical mannequin troopers doesn't help either.

...

Anyway, given how fast Sloth was moving, Izumi's judo-toss was at least slightly closer to being reasonable in the context of anime superheroics than Hook's when Sloth was practically holding still. So, at least there's that.

She throws him into Alex, who punches him into Sieg (I guess Sieg is here too), who in turn punches him into one of the stone spikes Alex has been creating. Alex and Sieg notice each other, JoJopose in mutual respect, and sparkle.

Someone already shared the clip from FMA2003 that this is a shortening of. You don't need to post it again.

They keep pummeling Sloth. Blunt force is possibly even worse at killing haemunculi than bullets would be, but they do keep ripping him apart with those spikes. Finally, as he's pulling himself free from one impalement too many, Sloth is covered in flickering red lightning, and he starts disintegrating from the hand he was pulling at the spike with outward.

Ah. It's not the impacts that hurt him, or even probably the spikes especially. It was his own momentum. That's why he doesn't like to use his speed boost: it's dangerously energy-intensive.

Sloth dying of exhaustion is fittingly ironic, I suppose. Ironic, or appropriate, depending on which definition of "sloth" we're using at the moment.

The tone finally gets more serious again as everyone watches, a little horrified despite him being a monstrous enemy, as Sloth exhausts himself to death and slumps back, slowly turning to ash as the last of his Xerxian souls are used up. What I think disturbs the observers more, though, is Sloth's final words. Such a pain. So much pain. But...living was the greatest pain of all. In his final moment, his slablike face takes on a serene, almost relieved, expression.

And that's when I realized what Sloth actually was.

...

One definition of sloth is laziness and indolence. Another is apathy, carelessness, and indifference. But there's also a third. In the eastern orthodox tradition, the word sloth is used synonymously with despair.

When it came time to dig the Amestrian macroglyph, a task that would take centuries of isolated, mindless, endless labor, what part of himself might Father have extracted to perform it? What memories and emotions would have gone into the being he dubbed his Sloth?

During those decades he spent in his flask, desperately seeking solace in Hohenheim's companionship and hoping desperately that his plan to outwit the king would work, there must have been a part of him that wanted to give up. To stop struggling, stop hoping for and aspiring to freedom. To just do what he was told and build the Xerxian macroglyph, letting his very soul wither and atrophy until they finally let him die.

Those horrified, aghast expressions on the Armstrongs' and Curtises' faces as they hear him express his final pain. It's like they're just getting the tiniest sense of the horror they never had the context to identify or understand. Just enough to feel the weight of its passing.

...

They take a short breather after this. The Armstrong siblings collapse into place from their wounds, though not all the way to the floor. Just to a sitting position. After finishing their introductions, the soldiers and Curtises all tell the Armstrongs that they should take a breather while everyone else hunts down the remaining mannequins. The Armstrongs refuse, though, on the grounds that there are literal kids still fighting this battle, and it would be both shameful of them and setting a bad example if they didn't keep participating as well.

That's our title drop, I guess. It's a pretty good thematic tie-in with Sloth's defeat, and Father's ultimate childishness in sending his children to do his dirty work, a symptom of never having gotten proper socialization. Though on the other hand, "pace yourself" is also an important lesson for children to learn from their elders, and would likewise be an appropriate one to attach to Sloth's manner of death, so...your mileage may vary, I guess.

So, they pick themselves up and go rally the remaining troops for mannequin-hunting. Izumi does notify them that she won't be able to help for much longer, though. According to (presumably either Greed or Olivierre's) intelligence, she's one of the sacrifices. So, she plans to leave Central a good while before the eclipse begins, and to drive very fast away from it until it's passed just to be safe.

Honestly, she should have made tracks as soon as the tunnel was finished. Even if it meant that the Armstrongs didn't get their last minute rescue and ended up dying to Sloth.

Hmm. Come to think of it, Scar's killing spree at the beginning of the series might have been a double edged sword in its effects on the endgame. On one hand, no alchemists defending Central. On the other, the good guys have very, very few alchemists to spare themselves, and keeping one of the sacrifices away from Central means losing a significant chunk of their combat assets.

As Izumi reminds them that the REALLY bad guy is still on the loose and not someone she'd like to get his hands on her, we finally transition back to the Sin Inc Executive Office. Father is standing before his throne, the protostone feeding tubes hanging loose where he just pulled himself free of them upon rising. Hohenheim is facing him from across the room. For a time, there is silence. Then, Hohenheim remarks on how emotionless and robotic Father seems. Back when they both were young, he recalls how - even after the atrocity Father committed - he was Hohenheim's friend and companion, and had a personality conducive to that. Now it's like he's missing most of himself.

Father just repeats the names of the seven deadly sins. You'd miss this, going by just the subtitles or a dub, but in the past Hohenheim and Father's VA's have always said the Sins' names in (Japanese-accented) English. In this conversation, those names are actually being translated into Japanese. I'll take this as confirmation for what I already suspected, about the names of the sins being in Xerxian; Father and Hohenheim are speaking in their native tongue now, so everything is getting translated the same amount. Hohenheim responds to that litany with the observation that Father has not only crippled himself by removing those impulses, but also made himself unable to understand the humans who he nonetheless thinks he can predict and outmaneuver.

Father doesn't speak again. Just starts opening up with the alchemical attacks, throwing Hohenheim around the room on exploding earth-columns and smashing him between plates of metal piping. That can't actually hurt Hohenheim, of course, and Father knows it. He's just letting him know that he has no interest in hearing what he has to say right now. Hohenheim reluctantly taps into his own philosopher's stone supply to free himself from these repeated burials as he keeps shouting at Father over the din.

Finally, Hohenheim manages to get close enough to Father again to ask him the armor piercing question. Why did he create the Sins? Why did he keep them around him? Why did he make them call him Father? And, implicitly, why does he still wear the form of Van Hohenheim?

Father stops shooting. He's silent, still, but his face is no longer coldly impassive.

More than ever, he's showing what he really is on his own face now. The sullen child-tyrant expression on that wizened old face is extremely off-putting, but also extremely telling. He still doesn't answer. He can't bring himself to.

Instead, he sinks into the floor, and then erupts out of it again behind Hohenheim and impales him with his hand.

Finally speaking again, Father venomously hisses that he DOES NOT want to be human, or understand humans, or relate to humans, despite all appearances to the contrary. He repeats that if Hohenheim is going to be this way, then he'll just be taking back all those Xerxians he gifted him with four hundred years ago. The veins on his impaling arm bulge as he begins liquifying Hohenheim's synthetic body and assimilating it, just like we saw Pride do to Gluttony earlier.

I still want to know what that incinerator was even for lol.

Abruptly, Father feels something wrong. He hastily pulls his arm out of Hohenheim and leaps back, staring at the arm in question. The fingers are twitching, seemingly involuntarily, like some type of alien hand syndrome. He demands to know what Hohenheim just did to him. Hohenheim slowly gets up, healing the hole in his back shut, and tells Father that he just did the one thing that Father never did. Something that Father has discarded, along with those "vices" he removed. Father repeats his question, and Hohenheim just glares back at him and says "You'll never defeat us."

Us, plural.

I think this is what Alphonse with his "immortal legion" was building up to. It also adds some new meaning to how Hohenheim repeated a list of names when he spilled a few drops of his philostone onto the ground and apologized for "having to use them."

We know that Father's ability to modify the souls within his own body mass is limited, and even prolonged assimilation isn't enough to totally subjugate them. Leed's returning memories were ample demonstration of that. Hohenheim ALSO knows this, since he's had the chance to talk to Leed and Edward at length since then. If Hohenheim has found a way to actually *communicate* with his constituent souls well enough for them to cooperate despite their maddened state, then he might be able to use them like a virus inside of Father.

If that's what's going on here, then I suspect Father will still be able to isolate and eject the hostile souls again if he concentrates a bit. But it might weaken and distract him long enough for Hohenheim to hit him with something else. Depending on how incapacitated the infection has made Father, this might be the perfect time to break out a version of Dr. Marcoh's philostone-breaker.

Cut to somewhere on the streets, where Lionheart, Yoki, Marcoh, and Alphonse have gotten one of their tires stuck in a cratered bit of pavement.

Bringing Alphonse back into Central before the eclipse has passed was a very foolish risk to take. But, again, limited alchemical resources, hard calculations, stressful situation making it difficult to weigh them objectively.

As they work, a lone, sword-wielding figure walks up the street behind them, toward the command center.

It doesn't show his face, but it doesn't need to. Damnit, Wrath! You had your chance! You should have beat it while you could. Or at least buried yourself in the mud somewhere downstream for a day or two before starting back, in case Father won.

Well. They have Queen onside, now. So, this will be the final test of Wrath's character. His father, or his wife? He seemed to be putting a lot of effort into making sure Mustang and Hawkeye knew that Queen was his weakness, so...maybe this is what it will take for him to make the last step. I look forward!

Back in the command center, the mannequin-mopup is going well. Conventional tactics are useless against the synths, but now that word has gotten out about their weaknesses both behavioral and anatomical they really aren't so hard to deal with. Hook in particular has the perfect build for this, using his anti-automail cyberarm to grab the mannequins and break their jaws or arms before they can get close enough to grab him back. He even impresses some office ladies by saving them, so good for him. The remaining security forces are quickly joining the rebels in order to deal with the mannequins. It looks like they've pretty much seized the command center.

In one of the lower levels, just above a suspicious looking staircase leading downward, a second rung general (or is it another first rung? I thought the four stars were all accounted for, but I could have missed one) is making haste. When a group of mannequins catch up and corner him, his words make it clear that he was running down after Father (or "the Good Gentleman" as he refers to him) to ask why he abandoned them in their hour of need and (more urgently) why the mannequins he guided them to create have turned against them.

Well, the answer to that last question is clear to the audience; the mannequins weren't ready yet, as demonstrated by both their madness and their less-than-impressive abilities for an "immortal" legion. I still suspect they were supposed to have gluttonizers built into those mystical forehead-eyes of theirs.

Though that brings me back to the question of what Father wanted them for. They don't seem to be needed for the plan, and I don't understand why he'd need them afterward. Yeah, weird.

He's rescued at the last moment by Izumi, who unwisely has not yet fled the city. After tossing the mannequins into the abyss where I guess Edward's group will probably have to deal with them, she punches the general in the stomach and starts interrogating him.

That is a strange epithet for Father to have chosen for himself. Maybe the generals or their predecessors chose it for him?

Olivierre regroups with members of the Briggs insertion team and steps into the Big Bone Bonanza's office. She stares at the chair, clearly lusting after it. Though when one of her soldiers asks if she's going to take a seat, she voices some practical objections to the office's current layout.

Well, I don't know if the office was set up like this in the time of Wrath's predecessors, but at least for the most recent occupant "being bulletproof" is a good enough explanation.

Or...going by the latest OP, Wrath might not be bulletproof like his siblings after all. Well, either way, between his speed, toughness, and nebulously explained Ultimate Eye powers I figure a sniper isn't much of a threat to him.

Anyway, looks like Olivierre is much more likely than Mustang or Grumman to get the big chair, given where and what condition the other two are in. Granted, I don't think that chair is going to mean nearly as much a year from now as it currently does. Balkanization seems like the most likely outcome for Amestris by far.

A song that sounds like it could be an instrumental of the Amestrian Anthem or something plays as the Briggs troops declare victory over the Central garrison. The Armstrongs and Curtises start making plans for what reinforcements they should send downstairs to help assault Father's lair, and continuing the interrogation of their high-ranking captives.

Then, a familiar voice speaks up over the radios. Telling the Central forces that their commander in chief has returned to reassert control. The man (type thing) himself comes walking up the street and approaches the tank-battered main entrance.

The tank that did the damage has turned its turret around and is now guarding said entrance, but that's not going to be much use against Wrath. Worse, the indecisive and confused Central troops have now fallen back in line at the return of their Master Gaster Blaster Disaster. Moreso than his combat ability, Wrath's mere presence and visibility are a massive threat to the rebels and their nascent hold on the city.

He instructs his regrouped soldiers to stand back, and let him take point in the reclamation of the command center. I wonder if he knows where his wife is? Maybe that's what he wants to find out. Regardless of who he chooses in the end, from his current position the logical next step would be "beat some information out of Mustang and Armstrong."

It could be just me, but he appears to be limping or staggering just slightly. Did he sustain an injury in that explosion after all? In either case, this would further suggest that no, he can't heal like the others.

End episode.


This would have been another excellent episode were it not for the issues with the Sloth fight. The implications of Sloth's final words make the whole thing even more tonally dissonant than it already was. Well, if Sloth ends up just being the warm-up fight with Wrath being the actual last hoorah for the Armstrong siblings, that will at least help a little. Though in that case there's still the issues with schizophrenic tone and excessive screen time.

We ended on a pair of big cliffhangers, both of them very uncertain in terms of which way they'll turn the tide. How much damage will Hohenheim's soul-virus be able to do to Father? Will they manage to get Wrath in touch with Queen before he can slaughter half the main cast, and if so will his human side be able to overcome his haemunculus side?

The Elric brothers did pretty much nothing in this episode. Hopefully that'll change next time. Edward's group arriving in time to take advantage of Father's weakened state would solve that problem. I suspect Pride will be catching up shortly as well, so there should be plenty of work to go around!