I don’t have much to say about the previous two episodes which have already been nicely covered by Zyl in my absence, please refer to my comments if you wish. Well I guess I do have one thing, which is that I never realized before, but Envy looks like a certain body part (well minus the teeth anyway).

Summary:

We flash back a few thousand years in the aftermath of the destruction of Xerxes as Hohenheim collapses after aimlessly wandering the desert but is saved by some passing Xing merchants. As they carry him away, he mutters something to himself about being sorry to someone for ‘not being able to stop him’. We flash forward back to the present day as we return to the end of the previous episode with Hohenheim confronting Father. He explains to Father that he has spent all his time talking with each and every one of the 536,329 souls contained within him and has promised to use their souls to defeat Father. In fact, he even knows exactly which souls Father absorbed, and it is those souls which promptly work to eat up Father’s ‘flesh’ (aka the copy of Hohenheim’s body) in an attempt to destroy the container of the Homunculus and thus destroy Father.

The souls manage to destroy the body but Father manages to stay alive even with it’s destruction as he sheds his skin to reveal his true self (looking like a cross between the Truth guy at the GATE OF TRUTH and Pride). A stunned Hohenheim looks on as Father taunts him that he can not so easily destroy he who is destined to be a perfect being.

Back on the surface, King Bradley returns and makes short work of the Briggs soldiers guarding the rear gate. Easily slicing up all of the bullets and the soldiers shooting them, Bradley runs into the gate as the tank reverses up the ramp into headquarters in retreat. After easily defeating the tank, he reaches the top of the wall where Buccaneer and his group are waiting.

Despite his best efforts Buccaneer is defeated and Bradley recognizes Falman who refuses to step aside. Before Bradley kills Falman GreedLing suddenly appears to challenge Bradley.

Back at the radio station, word has arrived that Bradley has returned, and his wife lets down tears of joy at the news. Realizing that their gambit in using their support for the missing king to legitimize their coup d’etat has failed, Mustang’s group quickly distance themselves from the Briggs soldiers and blame Olivier for the battles in the city as Fury and Maria Ross realize that their plan has backfired on them.

Back at HQ, the Greedling/Bradley battle goes into full swing as Bradley unfurls his all-seeing-eye and explains that the power of his eye let him easily escape Gundam SEED: Destiny the train wreck. Buccaneer intervenes and takes Bradley’s sword in his abdomen in an attempt to disarm the Furher, but all is for naught as Bradley picks up some blades from a nearby fallen soldier.

With the return of Bradley, the Central troops which have rallied back defeat the leftover Briggs troops from the rear gate (who were not killed by Bradley earlier) and advance upstairs. Realizing this, Falman decides to go World War I on them and keeps them at bay with heavy machine guns.

As the pinned down Central soldiers radio their compatriots inside HQ to defeat the Briggs soldiers and open the front gate, they radio back that the dolls are still amuck and cannot let them out. While the garrison commander tries to make sense of what this means, he’s suddenly taken down by a mysterious warrior.

The mysterious warrior easily runs past Falman’s guns and attacks and disarms Bradley and is revealed to be RAN FAN’s grandfather. He is back to protect Ling’s body from being hurt. Wondering why he could not defeat this man even with the two of them, GreedLing tells him it’s King Bradley and grandfather’s eyes light up in anger at the man who took RAN FAN’S arm.

Reaction:

I was pretty impressed with this episode overall as it contained two major things: one being the revelation of Hohenheim’s inner Dr. Phil, and the other of the awesome battle. After last week’s appreciable drop in animation quality with the Sloth scenes, it was good to see that the animation A team was back once again with this episode being spectacularly animated.

First of all, with respect to Hohenheim’s talking to his Philosopher Stone, this was a pretty interesting bent. We’ve been shown how the mass of souls completely overwhelmed Ling when he accepted Greed into his body. The fact that Hohenheim was able to talk to and convince every single one of the souls in his body to help him shows the true depth and compassion of his character. I’m kind of sorry that I originally wrote off the guy as a Gendo redux way back.

Another interesting fact is that since he has actually recruited the souls within him to help him, this does open up a way for the Elric brothers to truly reconcile with him, as they realize that he’s not using any souls in vain. It also opens up the possibility of Ling doing something similar as well with his Greed souls, although I’m sure they would be less willing to help him be a king rather than just go and kill Father.

What I do wonder is which one of the many souls volunteered to give their power for Hohenheim’s various usage of alchemy powers throughout the years. I mean fixing Izumi’s innards isn’t exactly directly getting revenge on Father. Perhaps Hohenheim is simply siphoning off a little bit of each soul instead of using them one at a time.

As for Father remaining ‘alive’ even with his flesh container destroyed, my theory goes out to the greater container’ that his Homunculus children have produced for him. Sloth dug a pretty huge circle for him, and as we could see how Pride could at the very least navigate the circle, it’s not inconceivable that Father could as well. Furthermore, the issue of using his Homunculus children as his Harry Potteresque horcruxes remains a potent possibility. It also appears that the population of ancient Xerxes is similar to that of the Early Egyptian kingdom (~550,000 x 2).

As for the fight, it was pretty incredible. Although I’m a bit leery at Bradley’s Matrixesque abilities (isn’t he just supposed to be a really skilled human with an all seeing eye?) which almost begin the breach the limits of what non-superpower characters should be able to do, it was none the less quite awesome to see just how powerful he is. Previously we’d only seen him fight peons and others who were able to somewhat match him, but considering how incredibly easy it was for him to defeat Buccaneer who is clearly better than almost everyone out there shows just how powerful he really is.

One last thing about this episode. When the grandfather guy first returns, my heart skipped a beat as I thought that RAN FAN had finally returned, but alas that is not so.

Next episode looks set up for grandfather’s death, and perhaps RAN FAN returning to defeat Bradley in revenge. At the very least RAN FAN must return!!!

P.S. Here’s a pic I took on vacation… I transmuted some humans and was thus summoned to the GATE OF TRUTH:

Oh yeah, this was across the street:

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