Definitely the better looking side of the family...

Summary:

Hmm from the granule distribution, this was surely from the late Cretaceous period, but judging from the depth of the soil and...

After running a bit short of money BONES decides to begin episode 33 with a short recap of the previous episode. We start off with a bit of detective work as Kimblee searches out the area where he assumes Scar made his move. After running into the forest and with a bit of deduction, Kimblee realizes that Scar went off to the north.

I am the snowman... OF DEATH! Fear my skull buttons!

Meanwhile Ed and Al arrive at North City to be greeted by light flurries. Excited at the snow, they recall that it rarely ever snowed in Resembool except for that one time when they were kids and Ed decided to make an alchemy snowman… OF DEATH.

One shall stand, and one shall fall.

As the Elric brothers run off to explore, we flash back to Kimblee who has confirmed Scar’s whereabouts. Intel managed to track down Scar as hitching a ride on a train going north. Intent on launching a surprise attack on Scar, Kimblee hatches a plan. Using the second train track he runs a parallel train to catch up to Scar and jumps from train to train to meet Scar in mortal combat. Scar manages to sense Kimblee’s train just seconds before Kimblee arrives and uses his companion (who turns out to be his minion dude) as a decoy as Scar jumps in to fight Kimblee. As Kimblee thinks that the minion dude is Dr. Marcoh, Scar jumps in suddenly to fight. After a few kicks, the two of them recognize each other quite suddenly with Kimblee recognizing Scar as the one kickass priest from way back who killed a lot of people and whom he tried to kill, and Scar recognizing Kimblee (by face AND name) as the man who killed his family and his brother.

A short but pretty awesome but not so awesome fight later, Kimblee finally realizes that he’s at a disadvantage. While Scar has been fighting alchemists all this time, he has been rotting away in jail and not in top physical shape. Before he is able to take that thought any further though, Scar pins him down with a metal pole. But before Scar can give the finishing blow, Kimblee blows up the train and leaves Scar behind as his front half of the train speeds away. The train engineers stop the train to find out what’s going on before being threatened by a defeated and bloodied Kimblee to continue onwards.

This dude was totally awesome

Back at Rush Valley, Winry attempts to contact Ed but is unsuccessful. When she realizes that he’s headed north she suddenly gets worried. We then go to Ed and Al who are dropped off at the path to the Briggs Wall by a cart driver. Before he heads off to Mongolia to find Reiji, the driver asks if Al’s armour is automail and is relieved when Al tells him no. This foreshadowing is quickly revealed as the brothers suddenly meet up with a giant man with a giant automail arm out in the snow. Ed soon realizes that neither his automail nor his alchemy is working right and only manages to stop the giant man by using Al’s helmet to clog up his chainsaw. Unfortunately the victory is short lived as the Elric brothers are soon held at gunpoint by troops looking for their stolen Tauntauns.

Captured, the brother soon realize that they are actually at Helm’s Deep Fort Briggs and that the troops belong to General Olivier “KUMA” Mira Armstrong who soon addresses them. Scared-as-a-rabbit, Ed quickly tells everyone that he’s the Fullmetal Alchemist and gives Armstrong the letter from Alex Louis Armstrong. After confirming its authenticity, she quickly rips up the letter and decides to judge the brothers for herself without reading its contents.

As the episode ends Dr. Marcoh and May Chang find Scar’s lost hut and his brother’s long lost research. As Marcoh holds the book he wonders if the book will bring hope or despair.

Reaction:

Much like the previous week, I was not so impressed with this week’s episode. The much hyped battle between Kimblee and Scar turned out to be a bit of a dud and was kind of short. Obviously the entire battle was set up so that Kimblee would have a really cool battle later on using his philosopher’s stone, but still I didn’t like how played out. The episode starts by showing just how smart and perceptive Kimblee was in his hunt for Scar. Although no Tommy Lee Jones, Kimblee was really quite good at tracking down Scar, and he even had a nifty plan to surprise Scar. But the problem was, he had absolutely not thought about how he was going to kill Scar. It wasn’t until midway through the battle until he actually thought to himself “wait a sec, this dude’s killed a bunch of state alchemists already and I was doing nothing in jail, I’m sort of screwed!”. I used the term ‘battle’ loosely as Kimblee hardly put up a fight at all.

It just wasn’t very believable that a guy whom they’ve tried to hard to portray as a smart villain could screw up so stupidly. I mean at least James Bond villains have elaborate plans that just don’t work… Kimblee had NOTHING. To top it off, Kimblee didn’t even bother to use his philosopher’s stone. It was as if he wanted to get his ass kicked, except he didn’t cause he almost died and he had to retreat which was emo-face-distortion-inducing shameful to him. They could have played it off like Kimblee was really arrogant and felt that he didn’t need the stone, but they didn’t even bother to do that… so for one of the first times in this whole remake… I give the show a poor grade for writing.

Meanwhile the rest of the episode really just finished off journeys that we have been waiting for a while to complete. Namely the finding of Scar’s brother’s book and Ed and Al arriving at Fort Briggs.

The one bright spot about this episode was Captain Buccaneer and his super awesome chainsaw automail arm. Maybe I’ve been playing too much Left4Dead 2 this past week, but it was totally awesome. I’m always really happy when I see an exceptional but ‘normal’ person beat supposedly ’super power’ heroes though sheer grit and awesomeness. Sure he’s no Mu La Flaga or a newly underpowered Hei, but still!

Next Episode: Will we finally learn about THE BOOK’s contents? Or will next episode suck too?

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