Epi on January 19, 2010 · in Full Metal Alchemist 2

Summary:

While the new guy in charge of Fort Briggs (does he even have a name yet?) is busy figuring out what happened to Raven, Olivier reports to Central where she bumps into Roy Mustang. After some acerbic banter, Olivier reports to King Bradley about the disappearance of General Raven. Realizing that there is no way to hide it, Olivier instead goes on the offensive and tells Bradley that she killed Raven who talked too much in order to assume his spot. Bradley happily accepts Olivier into the inner circle.

Meanwhile at lunch, Roy bumps into Riza who decides to talk to him in code so as to hide her true words from Pride. Decoding her message in the washroom, Roy realizes that Selim Bradley is a Homunculus and wonders what to do next.

The episode then switches to serious flashback mode, where we see a young Hoenheim (aka slave Number 23) cleaning up a room where an experimental dark being (looking mysteriously like a certain character from Xam’d) is housed in a glass container. Apparently, it was created in some sort of weird research involving Hoenheim’s blood. The being calls itself a Homunculus, and decides to name Number 23 ‘Van Hoenheim’ and also decides to impart upon Hoenheim knowledge. With his newfound knowledge and over the period of years, Hoenheim eventually becomes an apprentice alchemist for the court alchemist of the king of Xerxes. The king is searching for a way to make himself immortal, and the Homunculus tells the king what to do.

After creating a huge alchemy circle around the entire country (disguised as irrigation channels) and killing off the requisite people at the corners, the King activates the transmutation with a drop of his blood. But he was tricked. Instead of imparting immortality upon the king, the alchemy reaction actually ends up sucking the souls of everyone in Xerxes including the king and inserts it into Hoenheim.

When Hoenheim awakes, he’s greeted by the dead bodies of everyone in the country. As he walks outside, a voice calls out to him and he is surprised to find that a copy of himself is staring at him. Apparently the Homunculus used the information in Hoenheim’s blood to give itself a human form, and also split the souls of Xerxes between itself and Hoenheim, giving them both immortality. As the Homunculus tells Hoenheim to listen carefully within himself he hears the souls of the dead calling out inside him.

Flash forward back to the present, as Hoenheim runs into Izumi Curtis and her husband randomly on the street. After seeing vomit up blood, Hoenheim decides to use some clever alchemy to fix her up. He explains that while he can never return the organs that were lost in her sin, he was able to reroute her internal organs to prevent further blood loss.

The episode ends as the Elric brothers discuss with Miles about philosopher’s stones, and how they hope that they would never see a stone so big to be human sized ever in their lives.

Reaction:

As expected, this week’s episode of FMA was a huge, huge plot episode. We’ve finally got a pseudo answer to who exactly is Father and what his relationship to Hoenheim is. While we will probably never know any more about the original experiment that created the original Homunculus, this episode did neatly tie in everything which we’ve known for a while now into a coherent narrative.

For one, it is important to note that Hoenheim may actually have just as much Philospher’s Stone power as Father, and maybe even more (assuming that Father’s been using up a lot of power lately, and also divided up his power somewhat by creating the ’7 deadly sins’ Homunculuses). Of course while Hoenheim is hobbled by the fact that he is ‘just’ a human, Father has some kind of innate unattainable  knowledge that no one else seems to have.

It is important to note that now that we have a very good story of how exactly Xerxes was destroyed, and we get to see exactly how events during that time mirror events in Amestris now. The fact that everything was so plainly presented likely means that whatever is happening in the FMA story is more than what happened before. When I say more, I mean more than the fact that there are more people living in Amestris (and thus more souls). Last episode we had some idea that Ed, Al, Hoenheim and Izumi were all candidates for something, and as ‘special’ sacrifices were never used in Xerxes, Father is likely planning something different this time around. What could it be though? That’s hard to say. One theory relates to the conversation that Hoenheim has with the Homunculus about how having family makes everyone happier. Perhaps Father is trying to create an immortal and truly equal companion to himself?

The other important ‘reveal’ in the episode was Riza relaying the information about Pride to Mustang. Although there was no doubt this would happen, and likely Pride probably knew she’d leak it anyway it will be interesting to find out how this knowledge actually changes things around if at all.

Finally we get to see Olivier being super badass. Always the one to go on the offensive first, she dives head-in into the inner circle. We shall see how she plays that to her advantage.

Just a few questions:

1) If Father is immortal and started looking exactly like Hoenheim, why does he have white hair now?

2) If ‘Van Hoenheim’ is that guy’s full name, where does ‘Elric’ come from?

Oh and this past episode, I realized that:

is quite reminiscent of: