Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood Part 5

Now that Part 4 has finally finished setting up all the dominoes, Part 5 starts knocking them down. It’s still a mixed bag compared to Parts 2 and 3, but as almost pure payoff, it’s pretty satisfying, with lots of great fight scenes, and its flaws are a lot less egregious than those of Part 4, and almost the exact opposite type: where Part 4 packed in too much story and became hard to follow, Part 5 drags out its story over too many episodes and starts to feel like it’s spinning its wheels.

The first major section of the plot in Part 5 is Mustang’s fight against Envy. After he and Hawkeye join up with Edward’s group to penetrate Father’s lair, the zombies pose a much smaller threat since Mustang can just burn through them. Envy, newly reconstituted after escaping from its jar, comes out to face them and brags to Mustang that it killed Hughes, which sends Mustang into a rage. Envy tries a few tricks against Mustang, but its luck has run out; he doesn’t fall for its attempts to manipulate his emotions, or its attempt to deceive Hawkeye, and it underestimates his combat abilities several times. Unlike the fight between Mustang and Lust, this fight is totally one-sided, but in an awesome way. The show does such a good job making me hate the Homunculi that it’s very satisfying whenever Mustang strikes back against them by repeatedly setting them on fire until even their regeneration abilities can’t keep up with being burnt into a cinder.

Unfortunately, the show ruins this awesome moment by having Edward come in and stop Mustang from killing Envy after Mustang’s fire has reduced it to its gross lizard fetus body again. Edward, Scar, and Hawkeye all refuse to let him kill it; they fumble around for arguments a little, with Scar ironically and hypocritically arguing that revenge is wrong, before Edward hits on the argument that vengeance isn’t a suitable thing for a future leader to seek. Hawkeye picks up on this too, and even holds a gun on Mustang to stop him from killing Envy.

Envy tries to turn Scar against the group by reminding him that they’re all filthy alchemists who destroyed Ishval. Edward tells Envy he’s realized that it looks down on humanity because it’s jealous, which Envy of course denies. Finally, Envy commits suicide by pulling out its own Philosopher’s Stone, and dies.

Envy has always been the least sympathetic of the Homunculi to me, and that’s a big reason why the way this played out rankled me so much. It never had a motive you could understand, like Greed or Wrath. It never had a humanizing moment, like Pride admitting to Alphonse that he cares about Mrs. Bradley. It never showed a personality, like the childish stupidity we saw from Gluttony when he guided Alphonse to Father’s lair. Envy’s only personality was being obnoxious and bloodthirsty. It murdered Hughes, murdered a child to start the Ishvalan war, sneaked around starting who knows how many other wars and directly causing who knows how many deaths. It was manipulative, arrogant, savage, totally without redeeming qualities, and it shouldn’t have been allowed to die on its own terms. It’s the sort of villain that you let the heroes kill off to give the viewers catharsis, to let us believe that yes, evil gets what it deserves. As soon as Edward saves its life, it immediately starts showing why it needs to die by attempting to turn Scar against everyone else—not only is it evil, it’s also dangerous, because of its ability to manipulate people into doing what it wants, just as it manipulated May to bring it back to Central so this fight could even take place.

But the scene also doesn’t work well because it’s so unclear why they’re actually letting Envy live. Scar argues that revenge is wrong; Edward seems to start out in his usual mode of “killing is never justified”, but then switches to “a leader should never seek revenge”; and I can’t remember why Hawkeye was against it. If there was a compelling reason why they were acting that way, I might have been okay with it even though I thought Envy deserved to be killed, but there wasn’t. Edward’s argument that a leader shouldn’t indulge in revenge was the beginning of a good reason, but given how dangerous Envy is, even reduced to lizard fetus form, it would have had more impact if they’d let Hawkeye kill it, as she suggests early on. Then there would have been a clear motive: sometimes a leader needs someone to die for the good of their people, but it should be for the good of the people, not for personal satisfaction. To be a good leader in this scenario, Mustang needs to kill Envy, because it’s dangerous to the people he hopes to lead (all of Amestris), and not because it murdered his best friend and he wants to see it burn. Instead, everyone proceeds to ignore Hawkeye, and she just drops the idea.

Even though that would have been a clear reason for not killing Envy, I would still have this problem with it: don’t take leadership advice from Edward. He’s incredibly selfish, self-righteous, and a moral absolutist who doesn’t understand nuance. In short, he’s not very smart. He might be an alchemic genius, but he doesn’t have good insight into the consequences of his own actions, and he tries to make up for his past mistakes by imposing rigid moral codes on himself and others instead of really understanding what happened. He would make a terrible leader. The few times in the series that people have followed his lead, it either turned out badly (Alphonse followed him into trying to transmute their mother back to life and lost his entire body for it), or it turned out well by sheer luck (Bebop and Rocksteady just happened to hate Kimblee, which freed Edward from the burden of what would happen if they destroyed the plan and got his friends all killed by snitching to Kimblee everything they heard). What happens at the end of the series (which we’ll get to in good time) illustrates my point about Edward exactly.

Anyway, while this is going on underground, the fight continues above ground. Armstrong manages to take down Sloth in an awesome battle of giant shirtless muscle men, with help from Izumi’s husband Sig, the butcher. Izumi herself also joins in. Outside the castle, Bradley returns and fights a tank on foot with a sword. He also kills Captain Buccaneer, the gigantic soldier from Briggs with the chainsaw hand. Ling / Greed fights him off alongside Fu, who is killed; with the help of a Briggs soldier, they mortally wound Bradley and knocked him off the wall into the moat. With Greed’s help, the Briggs soldiers retake the castle and declare victory. Meanwhile, Al is getting into all kinds of hilarious slapstick situations with Yoki, Marcoh, and Heinkel, like when their car gets a flat tire and they can’t be at the battle.

Ed, Mustang, Hawkeye, and Scar reach an underground room where the doctor who created Bradley is waiting for them. Ed, Al, and Izumi are teleported to where Father is. Father has turned into a weird purple eye-covered blog and stuck Hohenheim through his stomach for some reason. Hohenheim, Ed, Al, and Izumi are the sacrifices, but Father needs a fifth. The doctor tries to force Mustang to perform human transmutation by cutting Hawkeye’s throat. May and the chimeras barge in and the frog man grabs the doctor with gooey spit, but Bradley and Pride show up and force Mustang to open the gate, transmuting the doctor into a gross ball. Mustang pops out in Father’s lair, now blind as the price of opening the gate. During this whole ordeal, Al also passes out. He returns to the gate and meets up with his body. He has a chance to reunite with it, but he realizes that his body is emaciated and too weak to even stand, so he gives up the chance to reclaim his body and keeps the armor so he can help his friends fight. I really liked this: Al makes an actual sacrifice for the benefit of other people, not knowing if he’ll ever be able to come back and get his body. Of course, it means nothing, because he contributes nothing to the final battle, which is all Ed, as usual. Meanwhile, Scar and Bradley fight in the underground room and Scar kills Bradley, who gets a good long death scene to make a speech in.

Father enacts his ultimate evil plan, steals the souls of everyone in the country, and merges with God, becoming a blond-haired Adonis. However, due to some complicated jiggery-pokery involving another nationwide transmutation circle created by Hohenheim and using the shadow of the moon cast by the eclipse, as well as yet another nationwide transmutation circle from Scar, based on his brother’s notes, everyone is reversed and everyone gets their souls back. Father raises himself out of his lair to the courtyard at Central, planning to turn whoever he can find into another Philosopher’s Stone. Everyone else follows him except Ed, who is pulled back down by Pride. They fight, but just when Pride is about to win and steal Edward’s body, Kimblee pops out of Pride in his predicted ghost appearance and holds him back so that Edward can attack Pride and reduce it to its embryonic body, which looks like a tiny human fetus. As I predicted, they couldn’t bring any closure to Kimblee in a short ghost appearance with everything else that’s going on. I didn’t understand why he appeared, or why they took a side-trip for this Ed / Pride battle at all, since it ends up meaning almost nothing in the end.

Everyone fights Father up in the courtyard. Even Mustang gets a few shots in, with Hawkeye spotting for him. Eventually it just comes down to Edward fighting while everyone else watches for some reason. After Ed’s automail is crushed again, Alphonse realizes that if he sacrifices his soul, Ed can get back his arm back, and he does just that. With some help from Greed, who sacrifices himself despite Ling’s attempts to stop him, Ed defeats Father and he crumbles into dust. We find out that Father came from inside the Doorway to Truth, making it some kind of heavenly rebel, so it’s basically Satan.

Hohenheim offers to sacrifice his own body to bring Al back since he’s been alive for so long, but Edward refuses to let him. He apologizes for leaving them alone and admits that a lot of the bad things they went through wouldn’t have happened if he’d been around. Ed actually cries, and then he opens the Doorway to Truth again and sacrifices his ability to do alchemy to get Al back, because ever since Shou Tucker fused his daughter Nina with his dog to create a chimera, Ed’s realized that alchemy sucks and friends are the real magic. He gets Al back, in his human body, and in 50,000 fanfics they fuck, but in the actual show they just make eyes and then go back to the real world. We then see Hohenheim die, kneeling in front of Trisha’s grave, but the moment is ruined because they play the opening, which, as I mentioned when I talked about Part 4, is weird boy band music. Imagine if Peter Jackson had decided that the appropriate soundtrack to accompany Boromir’s death scene in The Fellowship of the Ring was “Bye Bye Bye” by NSYNC, and you have a good idea of how ruined this moment was. It’s not quite the travesty it would be if we were talking about Aeris in Final Fantasy VII or Han Solo in The Force Awakens, but it still sinks what should have been an emotional moment.

In the epilogue, we get to see Ed and Al reunited with Winry. Winry jump-glomps Al, which probably should have killed him, given how emaciated he was. Al heads off on a journey with Bebop and Rocksteady to go to Xing and learn more about alchemy so he can help them get their original bodies back. Ling, Lan-Fan, and May headed back there after the battle with Father. Ling had a Philosopher’s Stone, so he was convinced he would be the next emperor, but he promised to protect May’s clan. May evidently does fine, because we see her later in a big family picture with Ed, Al, Winry, and Ed and Winry’s children. We find out that Mustang healed his sight, as well as Havoc’s legs, with a Philosopher’s Stone that Marcoh had left over, and became some kind of high-ranking official heading up a project to restore Ishval, which Major Miles and Scar worked together on. Olivier Armstrong returns to the north to put things in order there, and General Grumman, the weird old sexual harassing general from the east who may or may not have been plotting against Mustang and Armstrong but that might have just been Major Miles’s conjecture, becomes the Führer. Pride’s fetus grows into a version of Selim with a plug on his head who doesn’t seem to be a murderous shadow monster, and Mrs. Bradley raises him as her son, believing that her husband was on the side of right. We are led to believe that they all lived happily ever after.

Part 5’s Villain Problem

As an epilogue for the story we’ve been following up to this point, Part 5 is fine. It drags on longer than it needs to—I think the writers could have easily cut a few episodes from Part 5 to flesh out Part 1 or Part 4 more, but they seemed to think Part 5 was a lot more interesting than I did. Still, it does pay off a lot of storylines developed over the series, and mostly in satisfying ways.

The way the villains are handled contributes a lot to my feeling that Part 5 drags on for too long and doesn’t have enough content for its runtime. So far, the show had been excellent at setting up villains and antagonists. Greed, Scar, Kimblee, Lust, Envy, Wrath, all of these are great foils for the heroes who challenge them in different ways. They each have a distinct personality and all of them made me feel some kind of emotion—hatred, pity, fear, empathy, something. The villains most devoid of personality and understandable motive, the ones I left out of that list, are Pride and Father himself. Thus, it’s a problem that so much of Part 5 focuses on Pride and Father himself.

By Part 5, Lust is dead, Kimblee is dead and absorbed into Pride, and Greed and Scar have turned to good. Envy, Wrath, Pride, and Father are left. Of these, only Father, the one I cared least about seeing go down, had an ending that was at all satisfying. I stated above my problems with how Envy’s story ends. Pride’s end is not only too quick, it’s very poorly set up. We don’t get the slightest hint that he can steal people’s bodies or that he needs to do so before he decides to drag Edward back in to attempt it. Then Kimblee pops out and holds him back for no well motivated reason, and he’s gone. Wrath’s end is pretty good, though they did trade the rivalry with Mustang they’d set up for a rivalry with Greed that they’d later done a pretty bad job of trying to set up. Still, he got a cool final battle with Scar. That’s something.

As for Father, there was no personality there, no humanity, nothing to make me feel any emotion toward him or care at all about what he was doing. The episodes where they fought against him in his final god form were kind of a slog for me, because I already knew Ed was going to win in the end, and since I wasn’t interested in Father at all as a character there was nothing to get me invested in this long fight scene. I wish they’d just offed him immediately after Hohenheim reversed the polarity on his countrywide transmutation circle.

The Problem of Edward

I’ve been slowly losing respect for Edward ever since Part 3. Whatever I had left really evaporated during Part 5.

As I mentioned earlier, Edward has developed over the course of the show into a self-righteous moral absolutist who is always proven right when things just magically go his way because the series is published in a weekly shounen magazine and there are editorial policies on this shit. He doesn’t really earn any of his moral positions. Nothing we see him go through in the show justifies his belief that killing is always wrong, even when it’s a Homunculus. In fact, early on in the show, he won’t even consider making a deal with original Greed because original Greed is a Homunculus and therefore definitely evil, yet later on he bends over backwards to save Envy.

Given how holier-than-thou, inconsistent, and naive he always is with his moral positions, it bugged the crap out of me that Parts 4 and 5 constantly had older characters who should already have well-established moral compasses and not be taking moral guidance from a fifteen-year-old boy, like Mustang, Hawkeye, Olivier Armstrong, Scar, and Major Miles, capitulating to his beliefs and ponderously saying things like “Maybe his naive ideals will win the day after all”.

The limits of science was the big theme that Full Metal Alchemist started out with. Edward begins the series as an atheist alchemical genius who believes in the idea of progress. His belief is tested over the series by the ways he sees alchemy abused to make others suffer. Or at least, it was in the 2003 series and presumably in the manga. In Brotherhood he admits in one of the final scenes, where he gives up his ability to do alchemy in exchange for Al’s body, that he’s lost faith in alchemy ever since the incident with Nina Tucker. So for pretty much the entire series, he’s secretly thought that alchemy was futile and would only lead to pain. When you combine this with the religious imagery that a lot of “deep alchemy” stuff has, it starts to look like maybe the show’s actually a gigantic metaphor for why science is bad, written from the perspective of an anti-science religious person.

Scar’s decision to start using alchemy muddies the waters on that. He was originally opposed to alchemy on what he made out were religious grounds, even though I’m sure that alchemy being used to slaughter his people had a lot to do with it. But even so, we can still interpret Edward’s arc over the show as the opposite of Scar’s—where Scar decided that alchemy wasn’t inherently evil and that it could be used to make people’s lives better, Edward decided that it was evil and was willing to give it up because he wanted to abdicate responsibility for using it. This is exactly the sort of extreme, poorly thought out moral position I’d expect from him, given his previous actions in the show. Sure, he had to give something up to get Al back, and it had to be something big to be worth an entire human. But the way the dialogue is written in the scene where he gives up his alchemy makes it sound like this isn’t a real sacrifice for him, that he doesn’t care anymore if he can use alchemy because he doesn’t think it’s worth having. That’s not a character moment that makes me like Edward at all. We already knew how torn up he was about what happened with Nina Tucker. But instead of suggesting something sensible to directly address what happened there, like a code of ethics for alchemists, or a psych screening on state alchemist candidates to make sure they aren’t fucking psychotic, or, like, actually talking to the talking chimera that your state alchemist candidate is presenting you so that it can tell you, “Hey, I’m actually his wife, he combined me with a dog, he’s insane, don’t hire him”, Edward decides alchemy as a whole is no good and he’s just not going to do it anymore.

Just like his moral positions on race and on killing, Edward’s ultimate stance on alchemy is way too simplistic, ignoring a ton of factors that come into play in practice. You can’t just opt out of science in real life. Maybe you can decide to stop being a scientist, but you can’t stop other scientists from making weapons and genetic horrorshows and other things that make the world a worse place by deciding not to be a scientist anymore. Edward doesn’t even really stop being an alchemist; in the epilogue Alphonse mentions that he’s still doing research to help Bebop and Rocksteady get their original bodies back, while Al goes to Xing and does all the real work, which of course happens offscreen because God forbid we see Al do anything cool ever, no, all glory to Edward. He’s still living in a world where war and suffering can happen, and where alchemy has the potential to amplify that suffering, but instead of using what he’s learned to try and do anything about it, he just gives up the ability to do alchemy and retires to a cabin.

None of this would bother me as much if the show itself didn’t constantly conspire to make Edward right about everything. But all the way up to the bitter end, reality rearranges itself to make him right. After Father’s demise, there are still a couple Philosopher’s Stones floating around out there—there’s the one Ling takes back to Xing with him, and there’s the one Marcoh uses to heal Mustang and Havoc. That felt like a lead-in to something, a sour note to the upbeat ending, a hint of future trouble. Nope! Edward’s done with this, so we are too, and Philosopher’s Stones are just hunky-dory now.

Why was Al even in the show?

I mean, I know why. It’s because he was in the manga. But he does nothing at all vital in the entire show. Even his stints as damsel in distress usually aren’t important enough to justify his presence in the series. The show could have worked just as well if his entire body and soul had been sucked into the Gate of Truth and he wasn’t there for the entire show, and then Edward just pulled him out at the end.

Final Thoughts

For all my complaining, I enjoyed Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood. But given how many flaws it had and how deep some of them were, I can’t say I loved it with the same passion I used to have for the 2003 series. It definitely had better action scenes and more interesting arcs for some of the characters than the 2003 series, including Mustang, still probably my favorite character. (It’s still so satisfying to snap your fingers loudly and make a whooshing noise as if a gigantic ball of fire had just appeared. Especially if you imagine that the ball of fire incinerated a murderous Homunculus.) It was a lot less dark and more hopeful than the 2003 series, which worked in some respects, but in other ways I felt that it lost a lot of the depth that the 2003 series had. It was closer to being a shounen action series, which I think will make it more forgettable in the end. A lot of the interesting themes, like the ethnic conflict represented by the Ishvalan massacre, the potential for science to be abused represented by the Philosopher’s Stone, and the questions of what a leader should be that Mustang brought forward, were never developed and written off with some pat answer like “Just treat everyone equally!” so we could just pretend it was all the work of some scheming magical black blob.

I usually don’t watch serialized stories of any type that are this long, so it was interesting just to have that experience again. I don’t think I’ll be repeating it soon, though. I only gave this show that kind of regard because it’s Full Metal Alchemist, and I only managed to keep it up because, despite how frustrating it could be sometimes with its many storytelling flaws, it was always interesting. If nothing else, I kept watching because I wanted the chance to write about where it had gone wrong for me, to examine what mistakes it had made.