#BUT HE ABSOLUTELY RIPPED INTO HERO DURING THAT ONE SCENE WHERE HE AMBUSHED THEM THE FIRST TIME

[fujii-draws]

@s1nn0hh THANK YOU ONCE AGAIN FOR THE UNWELL TAGS I WILL NOW ELABORATE ON IN MY OWN TAGS

Ultimatum

[fullmetalirin]

FMA Brotherhood: Episode 19

FMA Brotherhood Episode 19: "Death of the Undying"

Kain Fuery manages to save Hawkeye, with Mustang coming to defeat Gluttony. Alphonse meets up with the group and they pursue Barry, who chases his body into the depths of the third laboratory. The group splits into two teams. Mustang and Havoc are ambushed by Lust, resulting in both men being grievously wounded and left for dead. Lust then confronts Barry, slicing him to pieces. Hawkeye, believing Mustang to be dead, desperately shoots Lust repeatedly with minimal effect. Before Lust can kill Hawkeye, Mustang appears, having cauterized his wounds, he repeatedly incinerates Lust until her philosopher's stone is depleted. No longer able to regenerate, she crumbles to ash. Barry's soul survives, but his blood seal is scratched out by his human body, which kills both of them. Edward returns to Resembool and heads toward the Rockbell residence where he sees his father Van Hohenheim at the grave of his mother Trisha Elric.

Mustang flashes back to Hughes' death when Riza doesn't respond and freaks out.

Then we cut back to Ling expositing. Oh joy.

Gluttony is strangling Riza. She's emptied her clip into his head but he's not dying. It's pretty gruesome, we see his wrecked eyeball. She empties another clip and pushes him back a little, but they're out of ammo again. For some reason, they just stand there like idiots instead of running. Fortunately, Mustang steps out of his teleporter and uses magic to generate force out of nothing to throw Gluttony out the window.

Riza yells at Mustang for saving her because lolwomen. Later she does thank him and then he's the one telling her to keep in professional, because women are just crazy nagging hags who don't say what they mean and need strong manly men to keep their heads in the game.

I really don't like the cracked-skin effect on the homunculi. It looks so fake, like a low-res CGI model.

How did Alphonse know where they were? Did Ling tell him?

Al informs them about homunculi's powers. Despite this they're going to continue to waste all their ammo shooting Lust later, because they're idiots.

Mustang uses Barry's rampage as an excuse to investigate the laboratory, which is clever. Barry doesn't kill anyone because serial killers are such polite people. Al has cartoon face during this, which I guess is appropriate since he really doesn't fit in here.

Lust shows up and Havoc gets distracted by her jiggle physics when he looks at her tattoo. As Tumblr helpfully explained to me, this is actually groundbreaking feminist representation because while it looks indistinguishable from normal anime objectification see it's actually making fun of Havoc for being a pervert and no, Tumblr, it's pandering. Perv pandering doesn't stop being perv pandering just because a woman drew it. But okay, sure, it's not that bad by the very, very low standards of anime, so maybe I can put up with it as long as it doesn't…

…do… that.

Guys, this is not making fun of perverts. Havoc is a hero and Lust is a villain. This is letting perverts be in on the joke. Tumblr, please for the love of God shut up about Brotherhood being so tasteful in its depiction of boobs, because it's not.

Anyway. Lust taunts Mustang about Hughes' death and then… looks actually pained when he shoots her (where Gluttony barely flinched). Why did she do that if bullets actually hurt her.

There is some gross banter about getting Lust on her knees. I'm sure this has also, through some strange Tumblr alchemy, been transformed into groundbreaking feminism.

Then Lust shows off her Philosopher's Stone because the author needed a way for the characters to learn a homunculus' weakness and couldn't think of a way to do it that didn't involve handing Lust the idiot ball. I've heard this is slightly less stupid in the manga and she only does this after Havoc gets injured, is that true?

Like I said before, this reveal utterly baffles me. So after all that buildup, the homunculi are just... monsters powered by magic. That’s so boring. They can no longer be used to ask questions about personhood and humanity -- I mean, maybe they could if the show actually committed to them being alien and different, but it doesn’t. What this comes down to is just that Philosopher’s Stones and rulebreaking magic is cool, so the homunculi have them so they can be cool boss monsters. Except they’re not cool. In OG, they were puzzles that required special knowledge and preparation to defeat; that’s cool. In Brotherhood, as we’re going to see, you beat the homunculi by just punching them in the face until the author decides they’ve run out of HP. They’re just damage sponges. And just as I revile damage sponges in video games, I revile them in TV shows too. Characters just throwing the same attacks at each other for five episodes is not interesting.

I also hate that this means Philosopher’s Stones are absolutely everywhere in this continuity instead of something actually special, a theme that will continue.

Lust says homunculi still have human feelings. Wow, what a dumb idea that no one would ever want to read about. It sure is a good thing Brotherhood decided to completely forget about this and just make homunculi boring boss monsters, huh?

Then, despite Lust using her claws as instant-kill ranged attacks in every prior fight scene, she now switches to sloppy, easily-dodged melee swipes, because Lust is really hogging the idiot ball today.

Mustang says he can decompose the water into hydrogen and oxygen to create an explosion even with wet gloves. This is totally inconsistent with what we're previously told, which is that creating oxygen is the easy part for him. He shouldn't need a spark to manipulate the air content, that should be a separate thing. This just seems like the author showing off a trick she remembered from chemistry class. It sure would be interesting if alchemy actually worked like this all the time, but Mustang never needs to do anything like this elsewhere.

Then despite having just been told that homunculi don't die when they are killed they walk right back into the room, because the idiot ball's really getting around today.

Cartoon when Mustang complains about being treated like a match. Because a climactic battle is definitely the time for that.

Then Lust FINALLY uses her spear-claws and stabs Havoc through the spine which, in a rare appearance of consequences, actually does paralyze him until the epilogue when Dr. Deus ex Machina heals him because consequences are for losers. I'm also a bit unclear on how she severed his spine without also severing his aorta.

Mustang realizes he can use Lust's Philosopher's Stone to heal Havoc and rips it out of Lust's chest. Lust screams in agony, implying this does actually hurt her, so again, why did she show it to him?

Lust's body disintegrates, but she's able to reform around the Stone. It's really gruesome. Somehow this does not crush Mustang's hand in the process, but she does finally stab him… nonfatally, because she's got the idiot ball again.

Bradley shows up outside.

Lust says Mustang was a candidate for sacrifice but she's killing him anyway. Uh, did she run this by the others? She then leaves him for dead instead of finishing him off because the idiot ball is strong this episode.

We then catch up to Barry, who tells us souls reject incompatible bodies. Al freaks out at this, but fortunately this will never matter for him.

Lust shows up to whine about how she has to kill Al. No, you don't. Just leave. You control the government. Bradley can give you another hideout at a moment's notice. The most important thing hiding here was you, and you just blabbed all your secrets anyway. Just cut your losses. You idiot.

Lust once again taunts someone into shooting her and once again staggers and screams in pain, because the idiot ball's terminal now. Shouldn't she also know she's running out of lives and this is maybe not the best idea right now?

Al vows to protect Riza because he’s tired of watching people die. It’s a nice moment that also happens way, way too early in his character arc. I like Al as the childish, out-of-his-depth foil to Ed’s easy confidence. This moment works better as a climactic ending reversal than as an offhand detail a third of the way through the story. If he’s just another noble heroic alchemist, he’s redundant with all the others we already have.

Meanwhile, Riza is hysterical and ineffective because she's a woman in a shonen anime.

You know, more seriously, I would like to point out that giving a female character awesome gun skills doesn't actually mean anything in a story about how non-guns are really awesome. We see a lot of great gunplay from Riza, but it's always alchemy that actually saves the day and gets all the focus. It's moving the goalposts. Sure, we'll give the woman a cool skill… that we will then choose to make useless in the context of the story. It's such tedious faux-feminism, going through the motions so you can say, technically, that you have a "strong female character" without actually doing anything to respect them or integrate them into the narrative. For every "strong female character" in Brotherhood, there's a male character who's stronger. Women are still, fundamentally, supporting characters – they're awesome because part of the male fantasy is an awesome support staff, but the boys get to be more awesome and the boys get to be who the story's actually about.

I really want us to start being more critical of representation like this. Treating strong female characters like a list of checkboxes is so totally wrongheaded. Characters don't exist in a vacuum. A skill that's impressive in one narrative or one power level may be completely meaningless in another. We need to look at characters within the context of the narrative they inhabit, relative to other characters and the framing of the work.

To prove my point, our resident Gary Stu has just appeared to show Riza up and beat the boss fight literally without moving a single step.

BUT TELL ME AGAIN HOW THIS SERIES IS GOD’S GIFT TO FEMINISM.

Mustang is using Havoc's lighter for a starter, despite explicitly establishing that it was busted earlier.

Mustang fireballs her again.

He also drew a perfect transmutation circle in his own blood and perfectly cauterized his internal bleeding despite explicitly saying he doesn't know medical alchemy. Now that his jacket's opened, we also get to see he's been hiding a Superman physique this whole time. You could put this in a parody of male power fantasies and I'd say it was too unbelievable.

Mustang fireballs her again. We get a gruesome close-up shot of her skin burning off.

Mustang fireballs her again.

Mustang decides he can kill this regenerator monster powered by the thing that supposedly has infinite energy by just killing her enough times, because he's read the script.

Mustang fireballs her again.

We get a closeup of her Philosopher's Stone, and coincidentally also a closeup of her tits.

Mustang fireballs her again.

And again.

I'd like to point out that every single one of these fireballs is ENORMOUS. Alphonse has to create a stone wall to hide behind so Riza isn't charbroiled too. We can see the entire room lighting up. I'd also like to point out this is in a SEALED UNDERGROUND ROOM, and FIRE REQUIRES OXYGEN. OXYGEN IS NOT INFINITE. If he lights the whole room on fire, he is DONE. HE USED UP ALL THE OXYGEN IN THE ROOM. HE CANNOT KEEP SPAMMING FIREBALLS. And I don't care what fanwank you can pull out to justify this, because the bottom line is that someone winning a fight by endlessly spamming the same move is terrible writing. This is not a climactic boss fight, this is just the Gary Stu showing off how awesome he is.

And through all of this Lust has done absolutely nothing except writhe and scream in agony, because Mustang is a Gary Stu therefore fire stunlocks everything. Only at the very end does she actually try to attack him, remembering she can spear people through the brain just in time for him to kill her while her spear is INCHES away from his face, because he's very awesome.

Also, HOW IS HE NOT BURNING HIMSELF HERE. HOW. HIS ARM IS IN THE EXPLOSION. HOW.

Meanwhile, Lust can still talk but somehow not extend her spear one more inch. Her Philosopher's Stone disintegrates, so the woman has nobly died to teach us that you can kill homunculi by just hitting them until they run out of HP, because that's so interesting.

And then Mustang collapses from his wound now that it no longer matters, invoking the very important power of the Not-Sue: see, he did all that while he really was one step away from death, that totally makes him less sueish and not more!

Mustang ignores Riza to praise Al for protecting her.

Bradley, our other resident Gary Stu, is revealed to have been watching the whole thing. He for some reason does not kill Mustang, thus establishing who has the greater Sue power.

Winry is sulking and hoping the man comes back safe because that's her purpose in life.

Then we end with more Barry, because we really needed that. His body is somehow still not dead, and erases the seal on the one part of the armor that stayed intact, killing them both. What was the point of this?

Then the show remembers Ed is supposed to be the protagonist. We cut to him for five seconds to discover Hoenheim has conveniently returned to Resembool at the same time as him.

Conclusion

A lot of people tell me that OG was misogynist garbage and Brotherhood is super progressive.

I don't know what anime they watched, but I just saw the sole female antagonist – and let's take a moment to reflect on the fact the sole female antagonist is Lust – die a gruesome, disgusting, sexualized death less than a third of the way through the story because she was too busy flashing her tits to actually fight, for no other reason than to show how awesome a dude is.

This is my breaking point. There is no coming back from this. I don't care how awesome Olivier is. Anyone who recommends this show as full of ~great female characters~ without thinking this content deserved even the teensiest of caveats is not anyone whose judgment I trust.

And sure, let's be real here, I watch anime, I'm willing to put up with some misogynist crap if there's something else worth my time. But this has established, very definitively, that there absolutely will not be anything worth my time. Lust, as we will see when we continue with OG, was an incredibly important and complex character in the original anime, absolutely crucial to the narrative of the homunculi and many of the things I loved about the story. And this is what Brotherhood does with her.

And that's not even the only awful thing about this episode! Ed wasn't in it at all! Mustang's takeover of the narrative is complete. He's the one who got to solve the mystery, fight the villain, and save the day, pretty much singlehandedly. And I'm sorry, but even if he wasn't an insufferable Gary Stu, Mustang just doesn't interest me as a character as much as Ed. I like him as a deuteragonist to Ed's protagonist, not the other way around. So no. This episode really hammers in that there is absolutely nothing here for me.

But lucky you, I read a plot summary of all the episodes after this, and I know the very next one is something I want to complain about too! So we'll keep going for one more episode. One last nail in the coffin.

[anotherwhorewatch]

The Daleks

The Dead Planet

In so many ways, this is Doctor Who. Landing on an alien planet, exploring and getting into trouble… This is why the show is still going today. No time has passed for the travellers since last week’s escapade, but the tension between the Doctor and his travelling companions is already down to much more bearable levels - Of course Ian and Barbara are still scared and want to get home, but we also see Ian getting curious about the petrified forest, and touching scenes in the TARDIS as Barbara has a bonding moment with Susan (and, to an extent, the Doctor).

In fact, it’s surprising, particularly when compared to the last three episodes, just how much business The Dead Planet gets through in its 25-minute runtime. The TARDIS crew explore the forest, hang around in the ship and get to grips with the city, and not once does it feel rushed. If I hadn’t already known what the cliffhanger was (Ah, that cliffhanger. Not sure how effective it really is, but god bless Jacqueline Hill for the way she puts her all into overselling the floor manager waving a sink plunger around), I’d have been wondering if I’d missed the end of Episode 1 by mistake.

But the biggest positive about this episode is that the TARDIS crew - all four of them - are front and centre, driving the plot rather than reacting to it from the sidelines. This is what episode two of story one needed to be. Daleks or no Daleks, it’s a change without which the series wouldn’t have seen out the year, let alone the century.

The Survivors

The Daleks, then. They had to turn up sometime, especially on a DVD called The Daleks. I have a complete and total unashamed love for Skaro’s finest, and they’re on fine form from the beginning - the fact they’re so quick to paralyse Ian and threaten him with death just shows, in case there was any doubt, that they don’t mess around. There’s still one or two kinks to be worked out, though - not least the fact that giving them long scenes where they’re chatting amongst themselves is a pretty dreadful idea. Everything. Takes. So. Long!

As for the TARDIS crew, once again they find themselves incarcerated - Doctor Who isn’t Doctor Who without a prison cell. But unlike when they were dumped unceremoniously into the Cave of Skulls, there’s a sense of peril and urgency here as they realise that their radiation sickness is killing them and that the Daleks aren’t likely to help. But they do send Susan off into the forest to pick up the Thal drugs - and it’s a wonderfully atmospheric bit of television, with lighting, sound and various film techniques combining to make it genuinely scary.

The Escape

Something they’ve got right about the Daleks from the beginning (and that gets a bit lost at times as the series goes on) is that they’re cunning. Sure, the offer to the Thals may not be the cleverest evil scheme ever committed to film, but there are several points in this episode - such as allowing Susan to keep the other set of drugs - where they’re a lot more than just “Exterminate!”. And it’s not too hard to side with the Daleks a little bit - Alydon aside, the Thals come across here as a group of boorish lads and their token woman, who happily joins in with their banter and casual sexism. Would their loss really be the worst thing in the universe? No. No, it would not.

The rest of the episode is devoted to a spot - or rather, a long and grimy streak - of good old-fashioned working things out. It’s like a scene from a point-and-click adventure game (scrape mud off shoe, use mud on camera, examine metal floor, talk to Doctor Who), but the protagonists are about as bad at it as I usually am, and it takes sodding forever. Still, for the slow build it’s a satisfying conclusion, and it’s pleasing to watch our heroes escape using nothing but their brains, a cloak and some mud.

And the episode ends with the partial reveal of a Dalek, which is exactly how it should be - the Kaled mutant (or at this point, the ‘Dal’) is a thing of mystery, an unimaginable horror represented by a single grasping claw. Brilliant.

The Ambush

This is the one that should probably be called The Escape, as the majority of it deals with the TARDIS team’s attempts to leave the Dalek city rather than the titular ambush. And how they don’t get killed as they bumble through the corridors is an absolute mystery - for the Daleks not to see through their ruse suggests a serious lack of intellect on the part of the Doctor’s oldest foes. There’s a neat bit of false jeopardy with Ian not being able to escape from the Dalek, though; the scene in which the viewer is left for a moment to wonder if he’s been exterminated is a fun example of a well-worn trope.  

Not that there was ever much danger of Ian being killed off even at this early stage, as once again it’s his show. It’s still rather distressing to see the Doctor trying so hard to ignore the plight of the Thals and run away, because it’s so out of keeping with the intergalactic do-gooder he’ll eventually become. Fortunately, his companions have more scruples than the old man and Ian goes back to warn the Thals - or does he? It’s hard to understand why he waits for so long on the sidelines before actually warning them, like an actor waiting in the wings. Perhaps he didn’t know he was being filmed? Whatever the case, you have to wonder if more of the Thals (laaaaads) could have been saved if he’d emerged from his hiding place sooner. Naughty Ian.

The Expedition

Wow. I take back everything I said about the Doctor’s companions having scruples - what an utterly selfish bunch! They start the episode by standing around talking about how they must make the Thals fight and die so that they can get their fluid link back and leave this godforsaken planet - and it takes far, far, far too long for the time travellers to decide that actually this probably isn’t a very nice thing to do. They still get the Thals to fight, of course, but not before justifying it to themselves with the idea that the Thals should fight in order to not die. Or something. The travellers aren’t aware of any immediate threat to the Thals at this point, so it still all feels rather self-serving. At least it’s Ian, not the Doctor, who manages to goad the Thals into violence - it’s difficult enough to rationalise the Doctor’s behaviour in some of these early episodes as it is, without putting that one on his shoulders.

Of course, Daleks being Daleks, the Thals are in immediate danger, but it’s for good reason; we’re used to the Daleks wanting to exterminate and subjugate for the hell of it, but this episode brings them as close as they’ll ever get to a tragic twist with the revelation that they can’t exist without radiation (We’ll gloss over that one later, along with the whole static electricity thing). Sure, they plan on nuking the planet’s surface, but it’s only so they can go outside and play in the forest.

Ian and Barbara reach the swamp of death, and once again the production team have done a surprisingly good job of realising its horrors. It’s not as atmospheric as the forest in the second episode, but it’s still pretty tense stuff.

The Ordeal

Never a truer word spoken… With most of the pieces already in place for the final episode, the ‘action’ slows right down and we’re treated to the lacklustre adventures of Barbara and Ganatus. It’s hard to pinpoint whether the actors playing the Thals are at fault or whether Terry Nation simply wasn’t interested in his Aryan creations (It’s probably a bit of both), but the story certainly doesn’t make it that easy to care about the plight of any individual Thals. The subplot that falls especially flat is that of Antodus, the cowardly Thal who pops up only to suggest turning back and then kills himself at the start of the next episode. RIP Antodus. You’re not missed.

The stuff with Susan and the Doctor is good, though; the grandfather-granddaughter dynamic has got a bit lost in the mix since the first episode, so it’s nice to check in and see that they still care about one another. I also like that the Daleks make a point of bringing up the lift that the Doctor and friends destroyed during their escape from the city; there’s just not enough alien species willing to present the Doctor with an invoice for damages as the series goes on.

The Rescue

This episode is fascinating, because deliberately or otherwise there seems to be a single concrete moment where the Doctor goes from being the man who ran away from Gallifrey to the defender of the underdog. William Hartnell reacts with such horror and anger to the Daleks’ plans to irradiate the surface of Skaro and render it uninhabitable that it feels like his “no more” moment, the one in which he goes from being a passive observer to a meddling hero. Perhaps I’m overselling it - after all, the Doctor’s role in the story’s resolution is still fairly light, aside from his refusal to help the Daleks as they beg for mercy - but the Doctor is not the same man at the end of the story; he’s in no rush to replace the fluid link and get away anymore - though that’s an easy position to be in once the Daleks are dead…

The story’s climax itself feels weirdly slight. It has all the makings of something big - a lengthy countdown to a massive explosion, a ragtag army of Thals in hotpants… But the Daleks’ defeat ends up being rather low key - though the bit where Ian gives a Dalek a kick is fun.

Final Thoughts

This is the story that saved Doctor Who and guaranteed its future for at least the next year, and it’s not hard to see why: it’s intelligent science fiction, a tale of good versus evil, with the protagonists actually taking the initiative and driving the story forward. Oh, and did I mention it’s got Daleks in? Raymond Cusick’s design is instantly iconic, and it combines with the grating voices to produce something truly alien and quite unlike anything that’s been seen before or since. It’s a story that runs out of steam an episode or two too early, but by that point it doesn’t matter - the spell the early installments weave is such a powerful one that the crimes of the last few episodes are largely forgivable.