Everything's better when... YOU'RE RIDING A TANK
Summary:
"My head!! My head!! Nooooo!"
The episode starts off with Ed getting his arm repaired at the mechanic/doctor’s office in Fort Briggs. Apparently he was getting frostbite, which was why his arm wasn’t working well. As all of this is being explained to him, Buccaneer runs in complaining that he can’t get Al’s head out of his AWESOME CHAINSAW ARM. Al grabs his head back, minus most of the long plume. We learn why Ed’s alchemy wasn’t able to stop Buccaneer last episode, as he misjudged the composition of his automail and thus was not able to decompose it. As Al cries about his plume, Olivier bursts into the room to ask the brothers what they are doing in Briggs.
I love how she crosses her legs like a guy
Hesitating to tell her about the Homunculus, the Elric brothers let her know about May Chang, eastern alchemy and getting their bodies back. Fascinated by this power, Olivier decides to obtain it for herself in order to better fight Drachma. While he presses for more information, the brothers remain quiet, and she ends up sending them to do some menial labour in order to earn their keep while she searches for May Chang herself. As they walk towards their new job, the brothers talk to Major Miles, a part Ishbal soldier (pictured above) who fights for Olivier. Apparently, he managed to escape the purge by being stationed at Briggs, and the nondiscriminatory Olivier decided to keep him because he was a good soldier. Meanwhile Olivier is notified that Kimblee is in the North and apparently freed from prison, news that she does not like at all.
I love how Ed is struggling while Al just does it one handed and absent-mindedly
The brother’s new job is to knock off icicles outside, lest they hurt someone (warning: graphic link!). There they run into Falman, who since being transferred from Mustang’s command is now stuck in the north, also knocking down icicles and totally hating his life. Falman decides to give the brothers a tour of the fort and shows off the nifty tanks that Oliveria has invented and created, and then takes the brothers into the lowest level of the fort where the vital equipment is.
Yay!!! It's Sloth! One more Homuculus to go! (Pride)
As the brothers gaze at the amazing machinery, they suddenly hear a deep rumbling from deep in the bowels of the ground. Apparently someone’s been digging tunnels underground, and as the hole digger surfaces right inside the basement of the fort, the sixth Homuculus – Sloth – is revealed. Scared that they have been found out, the brothers quickly try to make up an excuse for Sloth, but he has no idea who they are. Meanwhile the soldiers at the fort believe Sloth is a Drachma spy and start shooting at him to no avail. As Sloth goes up an elevator, Olivier is notified and fires a bazooka at him, but he is unscathed. Not one to give up, she decides to pull out the still untested tanks and shoots Sloth multiple times but he easily recovers.
Meanwhile some soldiers are in danger as Sloth throws some things to crush them, but Ed manages to save everyone just in time with a well placed alchemy wall/giant hand. After the save, Al runs to Olivier to let her know that her actions are futile and that Sloth cannot be killed. She attempts to question him more about what he knows, but Ed refuses to say anymore except that Sloth is probably made the same way humans are. With this information Olivier has a plan. She asks for some tank fuel, and decides to show just how things are done in Briggs.
The episode ends before we see just what it is they do in Briggs.
Reaction:
Finally! After a few pretty low-key episodes, including a really unsatisfying fight last week, we’re treated to a fairly awesome episode. Like Omni, I didn’t realize that the second half of the episode (the entire Sloth thing) was actually closer to the last third of the episode as it seemed much, much longer. With Sloth introduced, we’ve finally seen 6/7 of the Homuculus with only Pride (shown in butterfly form a bunch of episodes ago) the last one remaining. I really liked the build-up to Sloth appearing. I loved the music, and I loved the increasingly ridiculous ways that they decided to try and kill the guy.
It’s fairly important that Sloth is digging tunnels and that he has no idea who the Elric brothers are. Since he doesn’t know the Elric brothers, it’s fairly safe to say that he’s been digging for a very, very long time. My own theory of the digging of course ties into the title of the next episode “The Shape of This Country”, which likely refers to the fact that Amestris looks like a giant transmutation circle. The tunnels probably act as a physical ‘drawing’ of the transmutation circle. The fact that the circle is still being ‘drawn’ means that the Elric brothers still have a bit of time before Father’s plan is set into motion. It also likely means that Sloth won’t be killed off next episode, especially because that would end the series fairly quickly as the tunnel making would come to an end.
The other important thing about this episode was all of the character introducing. We are introduced to the doctor (and brilliantly introduced to her family when Olivier picks up her family photo from her desk to look at) and her money-making quirks. We’re introduced to Miles (who gets his own eyecatch) and his Ishbal connections, which shows that while Olivier is a hardass, she judges people purely by talent. From last episode we’re introduced to Buccaneer, and of course Falman is shown to tie everything together. Overall, there’s a lot of new characters and things introduced which the episode spent a considerable amount of time doing which can only mean that the Briggs crew will become extremely important at least for the next large number of episodes.
Considering how they are paining to show that Olivier is not as much loyal to the army as loyal to her men and also to the job of defending the border, shows that she can prove to be an important ally in the battles ahead. Indeed we can see her joining forces with Grumman’s troops to fight Central. The fact that she has tanks which no one else has may be important in the future as well.
Finally I just have one question for you all. If Briggs is already SO DAMN COLD, how can a full country exist north of it in Drachma? How much colder can it get? Or is Briggs really just cold cause it’s in the mountains? Well it’s not that important, but just made me think as winter is fast approaching all of us in the Northern Hemisphere.
Oh yes one more thing… I wonder if Olivier knows alchemy. She certainly didn’t bother using any against Sloth. I have no idea if alchemy power is genetic though or just learned. Don’t answer that one guys, I don’t want spoilers!
Related posts:
- Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood 35
- Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood 36
- Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood 38
This post was written by...
Epi – who has written 175 posts on Sea Slugs! Anime Blog.
As a huge fan of all things mecha, high school and tsundere, I've been writing for SSAB! since the summer of 2009, although my love of anime spreads through all genres. I'm not as witty as some, but I aim to bring comprehensive and well-written anime reviews out there for you all out there to enjoy!
{ 22 comments… read them below or add one }
… You know, I’ve never actually given much thought to why certain people learn alchemy and others do not. I guess it is just like any other skill — some people are wired in a way that gives them the talent to succeed in alchemy, and some are not. Or maybe there is some genetic quality to it, as well. There are plenty of non-alchemists in the series who could learn alchemy if they really put their minds to it, because they show a lot of dedication; perhaps there is something else they lack.
For me, I guess I sort of equate it with ‘abilities’ (like in Railgun) or magic (Harry Potter, etc) where you’re both born with it AND you need to work at it to be good. I never really thought of it as something ‘anyone’ could do with training…
I’m one of those with the opinion that Alchemy (and the ability to use it) is an acquired skill, much like Mathematics: there are people who know the basics of it (enough for day to day use), and then there are the people who can compute 2046-number equations in their heads without trying.
i really liked that doctor with her cheap trick on ed. its a while since i read the manga but i cant really remember her in any other scenes though, which if accurate is a real shame.
im also a big fan of miles, he has a very believable background compared with many of the characters. guess you could say like i prefer a good dose of character development over action at times. perhaps its because sloth is rather boring compared to many of the other homunculus, although he’s far better than his counterpart from the first fma series (she wasn’t remotely sloth-like).
ps very mild spoiler about one of your theories
Please use spoiler tags next time, but I’m glad you at least bolded it!
I’m all about character development, and it’s something that FMA really excels at.
Well…to put things in perspective for you, in Siberia people live their lives normally at -30 Celsius in winters and often blizzards, while in fat Europe or USia a little snow paralyzes the nation completely.
Well, depends; in say the UK or France lots of snow is unusual enough to cause real trouble when it happens, whereas in Scandinavia ploughing open the roads is pretty much standard wintertime infrastructure maintenance and the traffic authorities maintain fleets of appropriate vehicles specifically for the purpose. Unless they *really* liek dogsleds, I imagine the practice is roughly similar in northern North American interior – whose climate oughta rather resemble Siberia, if I know anything about geography. (Conversely the Central Europeans deal with floods more or less as a routine…)
Mind you, the far Arctic north is pretty uninhabited even by the sparse Scand yardstick… not counting special cases like Murmansk, which largey just proves people will unhesitantly develop major settlements anywhere they can be sustained if they have a reason to.
On another note, it would seem like Olivier’s private-venture tank project fast-forwarded past the FT-17 to the Panzer IV… animu tech curves are funny. :hmm:
Next up is the Edelweiss.
No kidding. Though mind you IIRC nobody remembered to fit machine guns onto *that* haxtank, so it’s that much lamer. These at least are honest enough copypastas of IRL designs to have included such rather useful auxiliary weapons (doubly so as the odds of them having to fight other tin cans oughta be fairly low…).
Except that Briggs is already portrayed as Siberia… I mean there’s a ton of snow everywhere.
There’s a ton of snow everywhere every now and then in Scandinavia (and used to be a lot more often in the past), yet I can quarantee the place’s no Siberia – Hell, as little further away from the Gulf Stream as St. Petersburg is already noticeably colder at the same latitude. You don’t need to go too much further East before hitting the full-blown continental interior winters… and those (which already hold a long record of seriously fucking up invading armies from warmer climes) are *still* cakewalk west of the Urals, compared to the deep Siberia.
Also if the screencaps are to judge by, Olivier’s base is in the freaking mountains for some reason. Those, if high enough, get pretty Arctic anywhere nevermind now up North.
That’s the thing though… barely anyone lives in Siberia. Most of the population of Russia lives in the warmer western areas, because you can’t grow food in the tundra. So really Drachma is either a nothing country of a few million people or it’s not really that cold and Briggs is just cold cause they are in the mountains.
Oh and I’m from Canada… we know a thing or two about winter
Fair enough, but simply the fact that them folks seem to be able to prance around out in the snow heads uncovered without having their ears and noses fall off would rather seem to suggest they’re not yet around the *really* cold parts. Plus dependent on what the grand geography is like the areas further north may be benefiting from milder coastal climates and warm currents too if they’re lucky – compare Scandinavia and Alaska, which are about equally far north.
And of course, merely being sparsely populated due to harsh climate and out on the fringe by no means makes a region strategically unimportant. It may well contain important natural resources and/or provide access to important transportation lines, and as for example Sweden so well demonstrated in the 17th century being piss poor and lacking a deep demographic base hardly prevents determined polities from punching quite a bit above their weight. Certainly carelessly dismissing the little guys on the periphery has rarely been a wise strategy, and has bitten quite a few major powers royally in the arse over the centuries.
Plus there’s also the little thing that the selfsame harshness of climate that makes them so small and poor also tends to make it awfully difficult to effectively prosecute wars against them, not in the least as the natives tend to know all the tricks to fighting effectively in the conditions inside out and the logistics of mounting an effective invasion tend to be a bitch…
your little sloth has been working a long time is true in episode 14 greed asked were sloth was and lust said he was still working that inplies to me that he has been digging for at least 100 years witch makes little sense why do you send a lazy person to digg holes
As lazy as Sloth is, he’s probably also too lazy to complain that he is stuck digging!
also oliver has no idea how to do alchemy and its a science you have to learn it any one can lots of people just don’t have the skill or disire to do it or just dont understand it
I remember in the manga one of the characters from the mining town said that he wanted to become an alchemist, but lacked the talent to be good at it/or get far…. something like that anyway. Maybe it is one of those things that requires both the knowledge/research and some innate ability
Hmmm interesting. So it’s not ‘the force’.
If you could do it just by drawing pretty circles, everyone could. I mean the Elric brothers were able to pull some pretty heavy-duty stuff – attempted resurrection, transferring a living soul into an inanimate object – already as snot-nosed bratty amateurs, mainly by drawing some pretty pictures.
But everybody *doesn’t*, no matter how obviously useful it would be, and alchemists seem to be considered a relatively uncommon and valuable human resource.
I’m guessing the bit where you have to have some kind of inborn “spark” is the bit where you need to provide the energy for the transmutation – you know, the part of the process that flatly kicks the “equivalent exchange” principle in the teeth. Not sure if it’s the same in this version (probably), but in the old one that juice was dragged from interdimensional faultline wormhole thingys….
For all intents and purposes that might as well read as “the wizard draws mana from the Higher Realms” or similar.
nope the energry for alchemy comes from the movement of techtonic plates in the earth some sientist discovered it and and each thing you transmute reqires a spacific formula to do some are very compalcated and take a long time to draw and the simplest mistake will cause the whole thing to not work look at this link.
Hahaha
Al losing his hair was really funny! You know my friend,I still feel Olivier is really hot,and I’m disappointed by how they have spoiled the cute Winry Rockbell.But none can beat Riza! Be ready to get goosebumps when you discover who’s Pride!
Honestly, I didn’t even bother to finish the episode >.>