X-Men Movie Rewatch: X-Men, X2, and X3

I decided to re-watch the 20th Century Fox X-Men movies. Since I’m old, I saw most of them as they came out and remember liking most of them, but it had been a while since I’d seen the first few, so with how much I’ve been enjoying the X-Men comics, it seemed like the time to revisit those movies.

X-Men

Unfortunately, to my surprise, X-Men actually isn’t a very good movie.

It’s also far from a terrible movie. The two I remember hating are X3: The Last Stand (because the story was a complete hash) and X-Men Origins: Wolverine (which was sort of mediocre until the last 15 minutes, when you see their version of Deadpool, which even I knew was horrible despite having never read a Deadpool comic), and nothing I saw rewatching X-Men brought it to the level of those two. But in a world where Guardians of the Galaxy, The Avengers, Captain America: Civil War, Thor: Ragnarok, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Black Panther, Wonder Woman, Logan, and both Deadpools exist, it’s easy to see the cracks in the first X-Men movie.

One of the weird things I wasn’t expecting to notice is how uncool the powers actually are as presented in this movie. Compared to the modern comic book movies, a lot of this movie is done with practical effects—stunts, wire work, physical stage combat—probably because CG was so much more expensive in 2000 than it is now. Normally I really like practical effects, but in this movie the limitations of the practical effects made a lot of the characters seem weaker and lamer than they are in the comics or the animated series, or even in later movies where the effects budget was bigger. Magneto’s big show of power in this movie is stealing everyone’s guns and pointing them back at their owners. Professor Xavier’s is taking over the minds of Magneto’s henchmen and making them talk to him. Storm struggles to defeat Toad, one of the lamest X-Men villains. (Jean also does, but Jean in the comics was weak and lame until she became Phoenix, so at least it’s in character. Storm in the comics would wipe the floor with Toad.) The fact that Toad is in this movie at all is probably a result of effects limitations; you can get the guys in the makeup shop to whip up some gooey spit, and a CG tongue is cheap enough compared to what you’d need to do someone like Pyro or Avalanche. But setting that aside, even the effects-light fights, like Wolverine vs. Mystique, seem boring and low-impact for some reason. There’s something about the way they shoot and stage the combat. No one ever seems to land a solid hit—they’re always grabbing each other and throwing each other across the room on wires. This might also have to do with the effects budget; they can’t really smash up an environment like the fights in newer comic book movies can because it’s mostly practical, so they would have to build and set up destructible environments, and they would have to do it again every time they need a new take for whatever reason.

Another weird thing I noticed: the color scheme is super dark, and everybody’s dialogue sounds ominous and weighty and a little bit emo. There are a few jokes, but they’re not very good; there were things I enjoyed in this movie, but I definitely never laughed while watching it. There really is a big difference between the “grounded” look and tone that it was felt comic book movies needed to have in 2000, and the more fantastical feel they’re allowed to have nowadays. From what I remember, even X-Men: First Class is a lot brighter and more lighthearted compared to these first two movies. Of course, this was only three years after Batman and Robin, and that was both a critical and financial failure, so it makes some sense that everyone involved would think that getting as far away from that as possible was wise.

The story feels rushed. Magneto’s plot is poorly developed and makes very little sense—he’s either risking death in the machine or risking death touching Rogue, so why bother touching Rogue?—and the mid-movie reveal that he’s after Rogue, not Wolverine, is only shocking because it makes no sense. Rogue traveled, probably via hitchhiking, all the way from Louisiana or wherever it was she lived up to northernmost Canada. If Sabretooth was able to find her so easily even though she was riding in a camper with a hobo, he must have known where she was. So why did he wait to grab her until she was with Wolverine? Why not grab her when she was alone in a dive bar in the middle of South Dakota? Or even as she slipped out of the dive bar in northernmost Canada to stow away in Wolverine’s trailer, before they’d met and he was there to defend her? The twist also led to a painful dialogue exchange between Sabretooth and Magneto in which both of them speak in clipped, vague, awkwardly worded sentences solely because wording them more naturally would have given away the twist. This is most obvious when Magneto asks, “Where is the mutant now?”, solely because he can’t say “Where is she now?” because that would reveal that he was after Rogue, not Wolverine.

We get almost no character development for anyone except Wolverine, Rogue, Xavier, and Magneto, plus some tiny bits for Jean and Mystique. Cyclops and Storm are just there; they have no backstory, play next to no part in the plot, and do almost nothing of consequence. During the final battle they and Jean pretty much just get beat up until Wolverine comes in and saves them. The two villainous henchmen, Toad and Sabretooth, have no personality at all and don’t seem threatening, so the X-Men just seem pathetic for not being able to beat them. Now that I’ve watched this movie again, I understand why modern superhero movies are all three hours long: even for a solo movie, you need all that time to fit in the story, character development, and action scenes without compromising any of them.

The casting is a mixed bag. Hugh Jackman is of course brilliant as Wolverine, as are Patrick Stewart as Professor X and Ian McKellen as Magneto. Anna Paquin’s teenage Rogue is pretty good too, and I think she could’ve been great if they’d done more with her character. Rebecca Romijn as Mystique is surprisingly good too. I always thought she looked the part more than Jennifer Lawrence, but she also acts it well, getting across the simple emotions she needs to with facial expressions and sparse dialogue. James Marsden’s Cyclops is disappointing. He doesn’t have the presence to stand up to Hugh Jackman, so Cyclops and Wolverine’s arguments always seem one-sided. He also gets essentially zero character development, which doesn’t help anything. Same deal for Storm, except I feel like Halle Berry is even less invested in her role than James Marsden is in his, based on how she delivers her lines. Also, movie Storm is a lot more jumpy and screamy than comics Storm. There’s a scene where she’s standing in the infirmary by Senator Kelly’s bedside as he’s dying, and he asks to hold her hand. She takes his hand, and then he turns into water and dissolves, and Storm screams and flips out and runs out of the room, which I don’t see comics Storm doing in the same situation. Famke Janssen’s Jean Grey is okay, but we don’t get much backstory on her either, and she and Cyclops don’t really have any chemistry. (Neither do she and Wolverine, though, so both sides of that love triangle are duds.)

Despite all the marks against it, there are still some pretty great things in this movie. The performances of Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, and Ian McKellen, of course. The movie does do a good job introducing their three characters and letting us know what they’re all about. I also liked the dynamic between Rogue and Wolverine a lot, and I would’ve liked to see more of them paired up in the second movie. The score was surprisingly good, too: it’s grand and orchestral in the style of John Williams, but there’s a bit of a modern edge to it, which not only fits the tone of the movie very well but also fits the X-Men themselves, who are a classic superhero team in a lot of ways but also innovated in others.

X2: X-Men United

Unlike the first movie, I found X2 to hold up very well. It has its flaws: Cyclops and Storm still do almost nothing and get no further development; they throw in two-minute cameos of lamer versions of several classic X-Men for no reason; the final battle drags on for too long; the way they introduce Phoenix is clumsy. But on balance I thought X2 had more good stuff and less bad stuff than the first movie did.

X2 makes up for all the good action scenes the first movie didn’t have by being stuffed with good action scenes: Nightcrawler attacking the White House; Wolverine cutting through a squad of commandos to defend the mansion; Magneto breaking out of his prison and later holding up the entire Blackbird; Pyro blowing up police cars with his fire powers. It also has good character development. Wolverine learns more about his past. Iceman admits to his family that he’s a mutant, and while they try to be tolerant, they certainly aren’t happy about it. Stryker, the villain, whose son was a mutant that Xavier tried to help, sinks to depths that shake even the optimistic Professor X. While I wouldn’t trade the sunny, fun-loving comics version of Nightcrawler for this movie’s version, he fits in to the dark, miserable, grave world these movies have established while still feeling like Nightcrawler, and the way he uses his powers is interesting and works well with the practical effects that this movie still mostly uses. Alongside Wolverine and Magneto, he’s one of the more successful translations of an X-Men character to the screen that these two movies have pulled off.

Speaking of the practical effects, while there’s still something off about some of the fight scenes—particularly the Wolverine and Lady Deathstrike battle—most of them work a lot better than they did in the first movie. The Nightcrawler fight at the beginning of the movie, for instance, and another scene during the final battle where Mystique fights off a bunch of guards, both have impact, speed, and a lack of cheesy wire work. The Wolverine fight in the mansion was so visceral and brutal that if you threw some blood in it, it could have been in Logan. This movie also uses more CGI than the first movie did, to good effect: the scene outside Bobby Drake’s parents’ house where Pyro blows up a bunch of police cars uses a great blend of CGI to depict the fireballs and practical effects to show the cars exploding. Some of the action scenes in this movie even start to surpass the MCU, because the practical effects make them feel more grounded and real.

I don’t have a lot to say about this one; it’s a good movie, and even though some of the social commentary is stupidly on the nose (like the famous line “Have you tried not being a mutant?” that Iceman’s mom says to him), it makes its point without being too annoying about it.

X3: The Last Stand

I remember thinking this was the worst thing ever put on film the first time I saw it, but rewatching it, it’s actually not as bad as I remembered. It’s still terrible, but not as bad as I remembered; the plot is full of holes, there are a bunch of unnecessary deaths, several things that I just found dumb, a lot of comics references shoehorned in badly, and the pacing is weird, but at least the characters seem mostly in character with the previous movies, and I could always follow what was going on in the plot, which for me put it above Suicide Squad. I liked some of the new characters and actors it introduced, like Kelsey Grammer’s Beast and Ellen Page’s Kitty Pryde. Some of the action scenes were pretty cool, although there was nothing as visceral as Wolverine trashing those soldiers in the mansion from X2.

Broadly, the major problems with this movie come from trying to do too much in too little running time. They’re trying to do a version of the Dark Phoenix Saga, with Jean coming back to life, killing Scott and the professor, trying to hump Logan, and going over to Magneto’s side. They’re also trying to do a version of the mutant cure storyline. I haven’t read this story in the comics but in the animated series the mutant cure was a plot by Apocalypse to prey on desperate mutants. Weirdly, it being a plot by an evil blue immortal being who was worshiped as a god in ancient Egypt feels more realistic than what this movie does with it: in this movie, it really works and you can just shoot a mutant with a dart and they’ll lose their powers. They’re also trying to introduce a new team of X-Men and a bunch of new villains, while explaining why the old X-Men and old villains aren’t around anymore, and have enough action scenes to keep everyone satisfied. They do all of these things poorly; for the most part, the plot mechanics make sense and fit together, but because it’s all squeezed together so much, none of it really has emotional impact or meaning. They’re just checking boxes.

It reminds me a little of The Dark Knight Rises. That movie was also too ambitious, large scale, and grandiose with its plot. In that movie, this also introduced various plot holes and things that did not seem to be given their proper due as major events. Some of the ones that people complain about in The Dark Knight Rises, I actually don’t care about. (How did Batman get from the middle of the Gobi Desert back to Gotham after he climbed out of the pit? Who cares, he’s the goddamn Batman!) But there are definitely some plot threads in that movie, like every cop in Gotham being locked in the sewer for six months, that feel weird, cursory, and not well enough explored or set up. And a lot of X3 feels similar.

The specific things I disliked about this movie mostly come in two flavors. There are plot holes, continuity breaks with previous movies, and things I just thought were stupid—things that make this movie bad even if you’ve only watched X-Men, X2, and this, and know nothing about the comics. Then there are things that were changed from the comics, in my opinion for the worse.

In column A we have the following offenses:

• Mystique: “I don’t respond to my slave name”. For anyone who thought “Have you tried not being a mutant?” was too subtle.
• I get why Phoenix killed Professor X—he was the one keeping her sealed away. Why did she kill Scott? Given that she killed Scott, why did she try to have sex with Logan instead of kill him too? (Out of universe, the reason is that James Marsden left the movie in the middle to be in Superman Returns as some guy who’s not Superman or Lex Luthor, and is therefore not important. Not that Cyclops was ever that important to these movies.)
• Making the mutant cure a dart gun that you can just shoot someone with and it immediately rewrites their DNA to take away their powers with no ill effect breaks even my suspension of disbelief.
• There was no reason for Angel to be in the movie. He doesn’t do anything. He only talks to the X-Men once. He goes to live at the mansion, but he doesn’t actually join the team; he just shows up at the final battle to save his father.
• Magneto shows up at a community meeting of mutants and just recruits them all to be soldiers. One of these mutants conveniently has the power of detecting mutants and their power levels from a distance, and also super speed.
• They introduce a class system for mutant power levels with no explanation. Its only purpose is telling us how powerful Phoenix is. We don’t need this; we can see how powerful Phoenix is. If the reveal of Phoenix’s power were going to be pushed to the end of the movie, I can see why this foreshadowing would be useful, but we’ve already seen a small demonstration from when she was a child by this point, and we see a bigger one about 15 minutes after this when she kills Professor X and raises her house into the air.
• Personally, I hate it when a character is a “good girl” and then develops a split “bad girl” personality. It’s hard to explain why I hate it in general, I just find it boring. It’s akin to the “all girls want to date bad boys” maxim, which denies the complexity of real people’s tastes and motives, ignores the variety of relationship dynamics that exist in real life, and has been done to death in fiction. In this specific case, I hate that it implies Jean had complete contempt for everything and everyone in her old life except for “bad boy” Wolverine, who spoke to her “bad girl” side, and was just suppressing a gag reflex as she went along with Professor X’s and Cyclops’s dumb square life of science and teaching and trying to help mutants until Professor X’s mental manipulation wore off and she was able to go have sex with Wolverine and join up with Magneto’s evil crusade. It makes her look like a terrible person in retrospect, and it invalidates every emotional scene we had between Jean and Scott, including the ones where Scott was mourning her earlier in this movie.
• There’s a subplot about Iceman cheating on Rogue with Kitty Pryde. It comes straight out of nowhere. Rogue acts like the hysterical woman characters from 1950’s TV who only care about holding on to their man and keeping his eyes off that hussy down the street. Kitty just goes along with it, even though the whole school knows Rogue and Iceman are together. In the end it’s entirely meaningless because Rogue gets the cure and she and Iceman get back together. It does lead to one good scene: Rogue decides to sneak out and get the mutant cure, and runs into Wolverine as she’s leaving. Wolverine gives her a little speech about responsibility and being able to make her own choices, and tells her to make sure that whatever she does, she does for herself, and not for some guy. Unfortunately the conclusion of the subplot undercuts this scene, because it looks like Rogue really did just do it for some guy who was going to cheat on her if she couldn’t have sex with him, and as soon as they could have sex he immediately ran back to her. It also makes Iceman look like an asshole; he was going to ditch her unless they could have sex and go shack up with Kitty, but as soon as she caves to his desires and gets the cure so they can have sex, he’s right back with her.
• Magneto abandoning Mystique after she got shot with the cure dart felt out of character. Mystique betraying Magneto after that felt even more out of character. The president actually says “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” when we find out she betrayed him.
• So the cure is a dart that you can inject into mutants, but it also comes from this kid who’s a mutant that can cancel the powers of other mutants (kind of like Mikan from Gakuen Alice or Touma from A Certain Scientific Railgun). It wasn’t clear what the connection between these two is. In the final battle, Magneto is trying to kill the kid. (At least, I assume he’s trying to kill him, since he sends Juggernaut to plow through the walls to get at him.) I don’t understand why. Would killing the kid magically make the cure darts stop working? Was he just planning to take the kid and do research on him to try and figure out how to reverse the cure? Where did he think he would be able to do that after declaring war on humanity on national television and tearing the Golden Gate Bridge in half so he could transport his army to Alcatraz?
• They have a mostly new X-Men team for the final battle—Wolverine (who is the leader, of course), Storm, Beast, Iceman, Colossus, and Kitty Pryde. They didn’t really set them up at all except for a single sequence in the Danger Room at the beginning. Colossus only has one line in the entire movie and does nothing of consequence in the final battle.
• After Jean goes full evil and joins Magneto, she spends the entire final battle just standing there next to him and doing nothing while the other mutants on their side get shot with cure darts, even though she’s powerful enough to wipe out the entire force defending the island, tear apart their plastic cure dart guns, tear open the prison, and take or kill the kid all by herself. At the very end, she decides for no reason to start fighting, and then Wolverine kills her.
• What happened to Nightcrawler? He’s just not here anymore.

In the much shorter column B:

• Storm sucks. The scene where Professor X tells her that she’s going to be his successor is the only time she does anything that doesn’t suck. It’s undercut when you realize that Jean is dead and Xavier has decided Scott was too broken by her death to take over, making Storm the only choice left. As in the previous two movies, she hardly does anything, has no character building moments, no backstory, and gets beat up in every fight without achieving anything. Unlike the comics, Wolverine has zero respect for her, ignores her orders in the Danger Room at the beginning, and just assumes leadership of the new X-Men team before the final battle, even making the inspirational speech.
• Juggernaut looks ridiculous and we never see him do anything cool or intimidating. The sequence where Kitty runs ahead of him in the Alcatraz lab is pretty cool, but it would have been better if I actually felt like he was dangerous and not just some idiot who says “I’m the Juggernaut, bitch!”
• Kitty has no personality. She cries over Professor X’s death, but that’s about it.
• Colossus isn’t Russian. What’s up with that?

Even though I didn’t like X-Men nearly as much on rewatch as I thought I would, this was by far the worst of the original three movies.

Conclusion

These three movies were important steps for bringing comic books movies to where they are today, but they achieved it by giving up a lot of what makes the comics fun. They made a habit of suppressing or drastically re-envisioning anything from the comics that felt too colorful or not grounded enough. The black leather costumes and the “yellow spandex” joke are the most obvious examples, but there are a lot of other changes in the movies that I attribute to this attitude. This is probably why Colossus isn’t Russian (Deadpool, which had a comedic tone, was allowed to go back on that), and it probably contributed to us losing Storm’s and Cyclops’s backstories, which are very comic booky and weird, but work because of how they help us understand them as characters. It’s definitely why the movies’ main plotlines could never go outside the “mutants as metaphor for oppressed groups” narrative.

Looking back, it seems like the semi-grounded, semi-dark tone this Fox X-Men trilogy established was adopted by other studios as the generic “superhero movie” feel. The Sony Spider-Man movies are a little more colorful, but they have a similar tone and similar mopey plot points. The Ang Lee Hulk movie, aside from its weird habit of splitting the screen into panels, also adopts this kind of ponderous tone. Even Iron Man feels like it’s transitioning between this tone and what the MCU would become; it’s a lot more colorful and fun and less mopey than any of these X-Men movies, but it’s still more grounded than what we would get even a few movies later with Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger. The trailer for Sony’s Venom movie was interesting because the tone looks less like the MCU or the DCEU and more like this generic early 2000’s grounded feel. That could turn out good, like X2, or not so good, like the other two, but it’s definitely different from what Marvel and DC are doing nowadays. (Personally I’m a bit of an optimist on Venom. It’s not something I’m hugely looking forward to, but it doesn’t look terrible so far.)

There is, however, one corner of the MCU that I’ve realized has a tone much closer to these early X-Men movies: the Netflix shows. Luke Cage is a little more stylish and colorful, but Daredevil and Jessica Jones feel like these movies with better dialogue, and Iron Fist could practically have been directed by Bryan Singer. That’s part of its problem, I think: like Captain America and Thor, there’s nothing about the character of Iron Fist that lends itself to being grounded. The show was constantly dancing around essential parts of Iron Fist’s backstory, like how he received his powers in a wrestling match with a dragon, that didn’t seem grounded enough. It was trying so hard to be Daredevil that it ignored the kind of gonzo grindhouse kung fu movie feel that could have made an Iron Fist show fun to watch, the way Luke Cage plays on blaxploitation film tropes.

Digest: More X-Men, Adam Warlock, Wonder Woman

Uncanny X-Men #144 - #160

Uncanny X-Men continues to be great in this next run of issues. It also continues to be batshit fucking weird, and seems to be getting even weirder as it goes on.

There are lots of great stories from this stretch: Doctor Doom and Arcade taking on the X-Men; Storm and Emma Frost switching bodies, and having to learn to use the other’s powers; a battle against Magneto in a weird Cthulhu city in the Bermuda Triangle that ends with Magneto reassessing whether the ends really do justify the means; and a Shi’ar / Starjammers story where Cyclops finally finds out that his father is a space pirate with a 70’s porn star ’stache, and we finally find out how this happened. (Turns out it was a John Carter of Mars situation: his parents were abducted and ended up slaves on an alien planet, with his mother killed by a tyrannical alien lord. His father escaped and became a space pirate.) There are also some less great stories, mostly the single-issue fillers, like #153, where Kitty tells Colossus’s sister Illyana a bedtime story starring the X-Men, or #159, where Storm gets bitten by Dracula and nearly becomes a vampire, forcing the X-Men to tangle with the king of vampires, and also it turns out Kitty is Jewish.

Then there’s #160, which is so incredibly weird that I can’t even say if it’s good or bad. It comes straight out of left field with a bunch of time-bending magical pocket reality weirdness. It reminded me a lot of X-Men Annual #4, in which the X-Men team up with Dr. Strange and go through an illusory world based on the Hell of Dante’s Inferno, but even weirder. The story is kind of hard to follow, and it contains some distasteful material, but I have to give it credit for being so weird and ambitious, even if the scene of evil Nightcrawler feeling up Kitty was gross and creepy. (He’s evil, so it’s within his parameters to do something gross and creepy…but that might be a bridge too far for me.) I also love how well it immersed me in this weird world it had created, similar to Marvel Premiere #1 and #2 (discussed below), or the movie Labyrinth. It gets even weirder and more immersive in the Magik limited series, which is four issues showing us what happened to Illyana during the five seconds at the end of Uncanny X-Men #160 when Kitty lost her grip on her hand and then found it again and pulled out an Illyana that was seven years older than before. (I haven’t finished it yet, so I’m not discussing it here, but I love the art so far. Reminds me of George Perez’s Wonder Woman, also discussed below.)

The characters are what make Uncanny X-Men so great for me. Kitty and Storm are real standouts. Kitty keeps on maturing, learning, growing, and getting more able to help out the team, while still coming across like a real teenager. (One of the letters pages had a letter from a teenager complaining that she was too much of a good girl and asking for a story where she’s on drugs or knows someone who’s on drugs. This was a storytelling trend in late 70’s and early 80’s comics—Spider-Man and Green Arrow both had stories about teens on drugs, and people who actually know about comics can probably come up with a lot more—but not one I’m at all eager to see Uncanny X-Men get in on as I keep reading. I like Kitty as a good girl; to me that’s what makes her feel real.) As for Storm, we keep on finding new layers to her as she deals with being the new leader of the X-Men and a big sister for Kitty. She has doubts about herself as leader, but also a confidence in herself that Cyclops never quite nailed, which lets her command a respect that he didn’t always have, especially from Wolverine—he would bristle at Cyclops’s orders even when he followed them, but shows Storm a ton of respect and usually follows her without question. Speaking of Wolverine, the movies never got across his humanity the way the comics of this period do—they always focus on him as a bad-ass samurai warrior. Here we see him living a normal life, laughing and joking with the others, having fun, but also showing off how cool he is on missions. It’s surprising how well he fits in with this group if you’re used to him being the angry loner like he usually is in other media. It’s obvious that he likes and respects everyone on this team, and there’s been a lot less friction than there was before. The last big blowout was when Angel left the team because he couldn’t stand working with a loose cannon like Wolverine. I especially like Wolverine’s friendship with Nightcrawler. You wouldn’t think it would work; Nightcrawler is fun-loving, charming, and adventurous, while Wolverine is angry and snarly and abrasive. But their chemistry makes a lot of sense: Nightcrawler’s charm and sense of fun infect Wolverine and let him have more fun too, and they can go on adventures together and have friendly competitions without conflicting, thanks to Nightcrawler’s disarming personality. Colossus is the flattest of the main team, but he still has a bit of a hook: even as he’s going to weird Cthulhu cities and alien spaceships and fighting demons and evil magic mad scientists with metal faces, a part of him yearns to go back to the Soviet farm he grew up on and live a simpler life.

The characters and their relationships help ground Uncanny X-Men even when it gets extremely weird. I can deal with Storm being randomly bitten by Dracula because I like Storm so much as a character that I want to see that she comes out all right, even if the situation she’s coming out of is insane. This helped a lot when I was reading the Shi’ar / Starjammers story. I didn’t care about the politics of the Shi’ar empire or any of the other trappings of the plot, but seeing how Cyclops reacts to being reunited with his space pirate dad, and feeling bad for Kitty and Nightcrawler when they think Colossus is dead, and seeing an enraged Wolverine carve up the alien who injured Colossus, swept me through it.

Avengers Annual #10

I read this because it ties into the plot of Uncanny X-Men (and is written by Chris Claremont)—it shows how Carol Danvers, a.k.a Ms. Marvel, ends up living with the X-Men and taking part in some of their adventures. The Avengers are fighting the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, led by Mystique at this point. She’s recruited Rogue, who makes her first appearance here as a villain, to steal the powers of all the top-tier Avengers and break the rest of her gang (Avalanche, Pyro, Blob, and Destiny) out of the prison they were sent to at the end of Days of Future Past. Rogue screws up when she’s taking Ms. Marvel’s powers and holds on for too long, stealing Ms. Marvel’s powers permanently and also taking most of her memories. Jessica Drew contacts Professor X, who manages to recover them. The lower-tier Avengers on the team (Vision, Scarlet Witch, Hawkeye, Beast, and Wonder-Man) fight the Brotherhood, alongside Spider-Woman, who frees Iron Man. (Since Rogue can’t steal his powers, she stuck a device on him to immobilize him. She stole the powers from Captain America and Thor alongside Ms. Marvel, so they’re both out of commission for this fight.)

It’s a pretty good read, but the best part is the final few pages, where they retcon the widely detested Avengers #200. You can watch this video if you’re not familiar with it, to get an idea of why it’s so hated. I actually haven’t read it, so that’s not why I liked this. I just thought the scene where Carol describes how frightened and alone and powerless she felt during that time was really well written and visceral.

Marvel Premiere #1 and #2

Marvel and DC used to do anthology books, where they would introduce new characters to see how readers responded before they gave them their own series. This was how Spider-Man was introduced—in an issue of the anthology Amazing Fantasy, #15. Marvel Premiere is a Marvel anthology from the 70’s that introduced Iron Fist, among other characters. These two issues are the ones that introduce Adam Warlock as a hero (he’d previously appeared as a villain to the Fantastic Four and Thor). I’ve been getting curious about the Marvel Cosmic stuff since I enjoyed the Guardians of the Galaxy movies and Thor: Ragnarok so much, and I’ve been finding that, when it comes to the more traditional heroes (i.e. not Squirrel Girl or She-Hulk), I actually enjoy late 70’s and 80’s comics more than modern stuff. The continuity tends to be simpler; the stories tend to be easier to follow; the takes on the characters are more classic.

That said, I wasn’t expecting to like these issues as much as I did. They’re grandiose pulp sci-fi space opera weirdness, but they’re so good at being that. A highly evolved former human, appropriately called the High Evolutionary, finds Adam Warlock’s sarcophagus (which appeared in a post-credits scene of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2) in space and brings it inside his ship just as he begins an experiment. He creates a copy of Earth called Counter-Earth and tries to evolve it in such a way that it becomes an exact clone of regular Earth, except without war or suffering. A former creation of his, the Man-Beast, who is a space wolf-man in gold armor, manages to corrupt the process and introduce violence to Counter-Earth. Adam Warlock pops out of the cocoon and stops Man-Beast from hurting the High Evolutionary, but Man-Beast escapes down to Counter-Earth to wreak further havoc. The High Evolutionary is going to give up and wipe out Counter-Earth, but Warlock argues against it, saying he will go hunt down Man-Beast to protect the spark of goodness that exists in the humans there. The High Evolutionary gives him the Soul Gem and sends him down, which leads into his own series, Warlock, that I haven’t started reading yet but intend to.

As much as I enjoyed these issues, I can’t say I recommend Warlock for everyone. He’s a weird character. He looks like a Flash Gordon villain, his powers are indefinite, and I can’t say I have a good grasp on his personality or any really strong connection to him on a human level. For me, though, I found enough to enjoy in these two Marvel Premiere issues that I’m willing to keep going and hopefully learn more about his powers and personality.

Wonder Woman, Vol. 1

I’ve been wanting to read more DC for a while. I’ve always liked Marvel a bit more, but I do like DC as well, I just don’t read DC comics as much because of Marvel Unlimited. Comixology had a Memorial Day sale where most of the DC trades were down to $5, so I bought a bunch of them: some Flash, some Green Lantern, some Justice League Dark, All-Star Superman, and this, Volume 1 of the post-Crisis reboot of Wonder Woman, drawn and largely written by George Perez. I tried reading the New 52 run of Wonder Woman, but I had trouble getting into it, and as I said, I’ve noticed that 70’s and 80’s comics tend to be easier for me to get into when it comes to the traditional heroes, so I gave this a try.

I’ve only made it through four issues so far, but I’m really into it. The art is an especial standout for me. The lines are so clean, the figures so precise, and the coloring is more subdued, which seems to have become more common in the late 80’s and the 90’s. We get a detailed origin for the Amazons and for Wonder Woman herself before Diana leaves the island to come into the modern world and meets her allies, Harvard professor of classics Julia Kapatelis and Steve Trevor, who’s in the middle of a plot by Ares that slowly unfolds as we get further into the book. So far it feels like a Clash of the Titans-esque epic running up against a modern spy thriller. One other thing that stands out to me is the use of language: the language used for the Amazon sections feels legendary and exalted without going into cheese like comics so often do with this kind of material, and the language used for the modern day sections feels natural without being obnoxious or dated.

If I had any criticism of this, I’d say that it’s kind of a slow burn. After four issues, the story still hasn’t quite blossomed yet. Diana and Steve Trevor didn’t even meet until the end of #4. From what Wikipedia says there are only three issues left in this story arc, but it feels like a lot of it has been setup. I could see someone finding this a bit boring, although the art and the desire to learn more about the character and world has kept me interested so far.

A lot of DC fans seem to regard the post-Crisis era as the best era of DC, and so far I like this book a lot, so I might try going back to the post-Crisis reboots for other DC characters too.

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.

Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood Part 4

Unfortunately, after all the praise I gave Part 3 for working out its story structure problems, Part 4 starts to fall back. It’s not quite the mess Part 1 was, but because there’s so much going on it’s even more confusing and hard to follow. There was so much packed into these thirteen episodes that I keep being amazed that things that happened early in Part 4 weren’t in Part 3, or maybe even Part 2. Things just keep on happening. Part 4 throws a million plot threads at you and then only follows up on maybe half of them. It sends characters off on pointless side quests in order to set things up ten episodes later. It’s so packed with plot and yet so loosely connected that it’s really hard to keep track of what’s going on. I had to start writing notes. Then my notes weren’t enough, so I had to go to the FMA wikia, which has excellent full synopses for every episode, to fill in my notes. And there are still things that I missed. Since I never read the manga that covers this part of the story, and none of this was in the 2003 anime, I’m pretty sure this is how people who aren’t familiar with Full Metal Alchemist would feel when watching Part 1.

Part 4 begins by showing us where Father came from and how Hohenheim became immortal. He used to be an inexplicably blonde slave without a name in Xerxes, the FMA counterpart to Persia. Father was a black blob in a flask who talked him into a plan that used all the people of Xerxes to create a Philosopher’s Stone, which in fact was Hohenheim. He is a Philosopher’s Stone. That’s one of those insane late-series reveals that I expect from anime. Father also created a body for himself, which is a copy of Hohenheim’s, and set about creating the Homunculi and enacting his plan to do the same thing with Amestris, founding it and then using all its people to create a Philosopher’s Stone again.

Back in the present, Al manages to reach Winry and Scar’s group, but he blacks out as his original body tugs on his soul. They find him half-buried in snow and he’s able to warn them that Briggs isn’t safe anymore. May and Marcoh discover a secret message hidden in Scar’s brother’s journal that shows the nationwide transmutation circle Father is building, but also reveals a second, similar circle that uses alkahestry.

Meanwhile, Ed and Major Miles are arguing about whether to kill Kimblee and the men he has with him. They try to snipe him, but Ed goes up to him to try to talk to him on purpose so they can’t take the shot. Kimblee figures out they’re trying to snipe him, and he and Ed fight. Ed also fights his two chimera buddies, Darius and Heinkel, a gorilla man and a lion man. These two are still cheesy, but they’re not as bad as Bebop and Rocksteady. Their designs are more restrained—they look like a guy who’s part gorilla and a guy who’s part lion, but not in the same over-the-top Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles way. They don’t have insane weapons like gooey spit and quills that shoot out like darts, which are perfect for replicating on action figures that no one buys because they want Raphael, and when he runs out they’ll settle for Michelangelo. Plus, lions and gorillas are just cooler animals than weird spitty frogs and porcupine rhinos. Kimblee defeats Ed and escapes, putting his chimera buddies in danger in the process, so Ed saves them and convinces them to help him so he can heal his injuries.

Kimblee escapes and meets Pride in the tunnel that Sloth was digging. This seems like as good a time as any to warn you that a lot of things in Part 4 don’t make sense. Or at least, the weight they’re given doesn’t make sense. Among these is the next major event, when Pride sends Kimblee north to Drachma to lead an army to attack the wall at Briggs. He tells them there are traitors inside that will let them in, but it’s a lie and they just get obliterated. I assume the purpose of this was more lives for the transmutation circle. We see wars going on in the south and east too. But the show gives it so much weight by showing Kimblee, who’s been built up as a major character, going off to effect this attack. Then it comes to nothing, narratively.

Scar and Winry’s group lure out Envy by having one of Kimblee’s chimeras call in a tip to Central that Dr. Marcoh is there. They set a trap and Marcoh uses a new technique he developed to destroy Philosopher’s Stones to reduce Envy into a weird gross lizard embryo thing, which they put in a jar and give to May so she can return to Xing and use it to find the secret to immortality. Envy tells them that Ed is missing and Al decides to move on, heading for Lior, since he thinks there will be a tunnel there like the one at Briggs that he can destroy to impede Father’s plan. They meet Rose and Hohenheim there, and Al hears the whole story from his father about what they’re fighting against. Hohenheim tells Al not to go into the tunnel because Pride is guarding it, and they still have time before the Promised Day when it all goes down. Envy convinces May to turn around and go back to help the people of Amestris.

The Gecko man who worked for the original Greed way back in Part 1 and whose only role was to lure Al into the alley where he was captured is still alive and he sees some soldiers show up at Izumi’s house to look for her. She and her husband are on vacation. They ran into Hohenheim earlier, who rearranged some of Izumi’s guts so she would have less trouble with coughing up blood. Hohenheim told them about the Promised Day. After that, they went to Briggs and attacked it so they could relay the message about the Promised Day to Major Miles and Captain Buccaneer. The Gecko man ends up finding the sewer entrance to Father’s lair, where is killed by new Greed / Ling, which triggers some of old Greed’s memories and makes him go crazy. He tears off and attacks Bradley at the Führer’s mansion, then runs off, where he runs into Ed and his two chimera buddies outside of town at the house where Lan Fan was treated after they captured Gluttony back in Part 2. They team up.

Olivier Armstrong fights her brother for control of the Armstrong family and somehow wins, even though we see later that Alex Louis Armstrong can fight Sloth, a being capable of taking a blast from a tank, hand to hand. They smash up the mansion during their fight. Olivier later uses the repairs as a pretext to smuggle in a bunch of weapons along with the building supplies.

Mustang and Olivier are both gathering forces for the Promised Day. Mustang has coordinated with his buddy General Grumman, who it turns out is a sexual harasser when he grabs his adjutant Rebecca’s ass. Rebecca is a stereotypical working woman who can’t land a man, except in a fascist country’s military. Rebecca and Hawkeye are friends, so they relay messages by having Rebecca go to Central, where the two of them shop up a storm, because that’s just what women do, even when they’re military sharpshooters, amirite? Hawkeye was earlier able to slip a note to Mustang about Selim Bradley being a homunculus, so he’s all in on that too.

Several months later, a train arrives at Resembool with Winry, Al, and the Briggs men on it. Winry finds Ed and his buddies staying at her house and after a “hilarious” scene where he almost sees her naked, they have a little reunion and then part again as Ed leaves. The Briggs troops end up in the east, where they team up with General Grumman’s troops and betray Bradley, who came to watch the joint military exercises. He gets a fake call back to Central and they blow up his train on a bridge. Al somehow (I can’t remember how, and the wikia is not enlightening me) ends up going on to Central, where he’s taken captive by Pride and Gluttony.

Ed’s group arrives in Kanama, a slum outside Central, and meets Hohenheim, who explains everything to him. They meet Al outside the city and Pride and Gluttony attack. There’s a protracted battle during which Fu and Lan Fan show up to help fight the two Homunculi. They realize they can neuter Pride’s shadow powers either by making it completely dark or by setting off flash bombs that make too much light. Ultimately, they rescue Al from Pride’s grasp. Pride eats Gluttony to gain extra power, and Al and Hohenheim trap him in a giant dome that looks like an orange, where it’s dark so that he can’t use his powers. Al gets himself trapped inside with Pride for some reason. He says it has to be him because he doesn’t eat or get tired, but I didn’t catch why it had to be anyone since Pride stood there yakking with Hohenheim for like five minutes, during which Hohenheim could have easily created the dome without anyone needing to be inside with him. Greed runs away sometime in the middle of the fight and heads for Central, figuring that Father is now only guarded by Sloth and this is his chance to kill them off and take over the country for himself.

Mustang meets up with his flunkies again through an elaborate series of events involving his foster mother, Chris Mustang, the madame of the brothel that Mustang has been visiting for information for a while now. In the end, he’s in the sewers with Hawkeye, Breda, and Fuery ready for action. They kidnap Bradley’s wife, Mrs. Bradley, who we found out earlier Bradley actually loves. We’ll also find out later that Pride actually loves her. A group of soldiers surround them and show no regard for her life at all, their leader saying they can shoot everyone except Mustang. The eastern soldiers come in and save them, and with the arrival of the united eastern and Briggs forces there’s a full-out battle in the streets. A bunch of characters I didn’t really care about, including Rebecca, Maria Ross, Havoc, and Sergeant Brosh, return to be involved in this.

Scar, Marcoh, and Bebop and Rocksteady meet up with Ed, Darius, and Heinkel at the battlefield where Pride is trapped. The four chimeras have a little powwow about their choice to work with Ed, saying they knew they were expendable to Kimblee and respect Ed for his regard for their lives even when they were enemies. I’m pretty sure this is going to set up a big “Ed was right about not killing” moment, which I am not looking forward to because this series is already stuffed with so many moral questions that it had to start just dropping them and deciding not to address them. The group heads off for Central to try and reach Father and stop the Promised Day. They go down through the entrance in the Third Laboratory that Al and Mustang found back in Part 2 when they fought Lust. Hohenheim and Lan Fan split off from the group, and Hohenheim tells Lan Fan to go look for Ling on her own like she wanted, while he does something or other that we don’t see in Part 4. Meanwhile, Olivier Armstrong makes her move and kills off the last few generals on the council, except for one who goes down into the secret chamber and unleashes the alchemy zombies, which surge out to attack Ed, Scar, and the chimeras.

Heinkel the lion man, who stayed behind in the slums due to his injuries, goes to the dome to talk to Al. He hears Pride beating on Al’s head with a stick and realizes that it’s Morse code. Somehow, Kimblee was able to hear this from wherever he got to in the many months of the timeskip, and he shows up and frees Pride. Al fights Pride and Kimblee with a Philosopher’s Stone that Heinkel apparently picked up when Kimblee dropped it back when he first joined Ed. He and Pride fight to a standstill. Kimblee still has one Philosopher’s Stone, but Heinkel is able to get the drop on him and rip his throat out. Marcoh and Yoki, who also remained behind, drive up in a car and cart out Al and Heinkel. Pride gloats over the dying Kimblee for a minute and then eats him.

Olivier Armstrong teams up with her brother to fight Sloth. Just when they think he’s dead, he comes back to life.

May has reached Central and is in the sewers going to Father’s lair. She runs into the alchemy zombies. Envy escapes its jar when one of the zombies inexplicably eats it, and is able to take over that body and absorb all the other bodies to reform its original body, a gigantic green Cocker Spaniel with ugly faces coming out of its back, which we first saw back in Part 2 when Envy was trapped inside Gluttony’s stomach with Ed and Ling.

Mustang and his group drive a truck around Central for a while and then they send Ross off with Mrs. Bradley to go to a secret hiding spot. Mustang then busts in to help Ed, Scar, and the chimeras fight the alchemic zombies.

A State of Confusion

My synopsis above might have looked like a strange, disjointed series of events. That’s because Part 4 is indeed a strange, disjointed series of events. My synopsis might have instead looked fairly coherent. That’s because I did a surprising amount of work to glob up each individual event following a group of characters into scenes with beginnings, middles, and ends. In the actual show, most of these events are cut up into five minute slices and then alternate with slices from other storylines across four or five episodes. The fight with Pride and Gluttony that ends with Pride and Al trapped in a dome, which I summarized in like one paragraph, actually took place over three episodes. It was sliced up into five-minute segments and then a few were sprinkled into each episode alongside five-minute segments showing us what Mustang and Olivier Armstrong were up to. It would have been so much less confusing if each episode just dealt with one group’s storyline and left it off at the point where they were about to meet up with another group.

It’s also confusing to keep track of all these characters, where they are, what they’re doing, and why they’re doing it. As I was watching the episodes, I kept forgetting which group Marcoh was with. I kept forgetting why Edward was doing what he was doing. I kept forgetting what Scar’s plan was. I’m still not sure what Mustang’s plan was. (Maybe they’ll explain it in Part 5?) I couldn’t be bothered to keep track of the tag-along characters like the chimeras and Yoki; from my perspective, they would just show up somewhere and do the thing when the plot required it. I don’t know which parts of the story we haven’t been told yet and which parts were slipped into some five-minute scene that immediately left my mind once the next five-minute scene, involving entirely different characters, started assaulting me with information and noise and philosophical questions. The months-long timeskip exacerbated this problem early on; it completely reset where everyone was and what they were doing and why, and the show was very unclear about reestablishing it. Even with the help of a blow-by-blow plot synopsis from the wikia, I couldn’t remember what happened to Al after the train left Resembool that led to him being captured by Pride.

The protracted action scenes in Part 4 didn’t help any of this. Part 4 had a lot of confusing plot dumps, but when it wasn’t dumping plot, it was all action. It’s easy to lose the thread of the plot during a long action scene, especially when that plot is confusing and boring to begin with. If an action scene spanned multiple episodes, I was done; good luck remembering anything that happened in the plot last time.

In the end, I don’t believe all this confusing plot spew advanced the actual story in a significant way. The first part just summarily wraps up the Briggs storyline so we can be done with that. Then Hohenheim tells everyone that the Promised Day is coming and they’d better all get ready. The entire rest of it is just setting up all the action figures so they can knock each other down in Part 5. There’s no character advancement. Ed and Al haven’t had their views challenged. Scar magically decided last time that he’s going to try to pursue peace between the races and stop murdering people, so he’s lost his character arc. Everyone else is also just continuing with whatever they were doing at the end of Part 3. Finding out that Bradley and Selim actually care about Mrs. Bradley is the only thing close to character advancement we get here, but it’s just more setup for Part 5—maybe. They might just never go anywhere with that. They’ve done it before.

I’m Not Laughing

The humor continues to be a sore spot. Most of it just isn’t funny. The show has made me laugh on rare occasions, but it’s like a 1:50 ratio of hits to misses. It still has a terrible habit of shoving in slapstick at serious moments. It was such an anticlimax when the huge battle against Envy, where Marcoh unexpectedly got to be awesome, basically ended with Fozzy Bear popping up and going “Wakka wakka wakka!” Envy’s real body looks ridiculous. I made jokes about it above. But Envy was treated as a serious threat up to this point. You can’t just ruin that by turning it into an object of slapstick humor. Especially if you’re planning to bring it back as a real threat later on, as the show does in the final episode of Part 4. And now the humor has gotten even worse, adding tired jokes about lovable sexual harassing bosses and their stereotypical working woman who can’t get a man subordinates. Not that many, thank goodness, but they were so bad that they stuck out to me even though they only occupied about three minutes of total screentime.

This sort of humor is par for the course in anime, and in my opinion it’s one of the worst legacies left to us by the massively overrated Rumiko Takahashi. Not all anime use this kind of dumb humor. The humor in Bakemonogatari is infinitely more clever. The humor in One Punch Man is infinitely more clever. Hell, the humor in Yuru Yuri is infinitely more clever. The characters in Full Metal Alchemist are so well developed that there are definitely opportunities for real character-based humor. Ed being insecure about his height is a good basis for jokes, but having him constantly yell and throw things at people who call him short wasn’t the way to capitalize on it. And I refuse to believe that there was no way to make funny character-based jokes about a character as dark and tormented as Scar, once he joined the heroes’ side. Adam West’s Batman is even more hilarious today because we have Christian Bale’s Batman and Ben Affleck’s Batman. Taking a tortured antihero down a peg can be hilarious, but the show never even attempts it.

Wasted Opportunities, Pointless Scenes

Last time I complained that the Winry / Ed romance is uninteresting, and it would have been a lot more interesting if Winry were in love with Al. I think this was a big wasted opportunity, but at least I understand why they went the way they did: Ed is the actual hero, the one who does all the cool things and drives the plot. Al ranges from damsel in distress to a good excuse not to draw backgrounds, since he fills up the entire backdrop when he’s standing behind Ed and the camera is positioned to get both of them in frame. I wish it weren’t this way—I kept waiting for him to get his chance to be awesome, and he never did. (Though the fight scene where Al uses the Philosopher’s Stone against Pride and Kimblee is amazingly cool. That’s one of my few compliments for Part 4. If that becomes a pattern, maybe I’ll rescind those words. But one fight scene where he’s dependent on a glowing red rock isn’t enough at this point.) Why would the damsel in distress cum background extra get the girl? That’s just silly. Of course Winry is in love with Ed. Of course Al only gets the joke romance with May that can’t go anywhere because she’s a child.

In Part 4 there are three character arcs that the show went out of its way to set up earlier on which we can now say are not going to go anywhere and were entirely pointless: Scar’s crusade against alchemy; Kimblee’s entire history and personality; and the tension that comes from innocent little boy Selim being the Elrics’ biggest fan in the world when he’s also the son of the Führer who’s also a homunculus, their most deadly enemy.

I’ve already ranted about Scar. It makes practical sense for him to team up with Ed and Al the way he does, and the end of Part 3 really sold me on it. But Scar in earlier stories was a zealot, and possibly not right in the head. He strongly believed that alchemy was evil, and he was willing to murder for that belief. I can buy him teaming up with alchemists as a practical matter, and to stick it to the people who initiated the Ishval massacre, but there were still alchemists on the ground in Ishval slaughtering people, and his enemies are still using alchemy to kill and torture the innocent, so I can’t believe he would just decide after one five-minute conversation that his entire way of looking at the world was wrong and he needs to work peacefully to overcome racism. And that’s pretty much where his character sits during Part 4; he says as much to a group of people he meets in the forest on his way to Kanama, who react with alarm to the news that Ishvalans are massing in Central.

I was interested in Kimblee after Part 3. He had a different way of looking at the Ishval massacre, a way that maybe is closer to what a soldier in that situation would actually think than the moral hand-wringing of Mustang, Hawkeye, and Armstrong. He seemed genuinely horrified by what happened to Winry’s parents. We never get any sign that he was lying when he told her that story, and she already trusted him completely so he had no good reason to make up a lie anyway. He was a great villain for about five episodes. He was powerful enough to go toe-to-toe with Scar, and smart enough to outmaneuver the heroes, and he looked cool and was a snappy dresser. Then he disappeared, did a few things that didn’t make sense, and died. We never find out anything about Kimblee. We never find out why he was in prison other than some vague hints that he killed some officers. We never find out why he would have done that, given that he doesn’t seem to be a psychotic killer in this version like he was in the 2003 series. When he’s first freed from prison he gets the mandate from the Führer to hunt down Scar, who at that time is a fugitive, murderer, and terrorist. At some point he just kind of slips without any trouble into this new world where everyone is a homunculus and the plan is to vaporize all of Amestris into a Philosopher’s Stone. He goes and leads the Drachma army to its death, and then he drives around the country for several months until he hears Pride knocking on Al’s head with a stick in Morse code and shows up to save him. Then he dies, and Pride eats him. I have a feeling some sort of ghost Kimblee is going to come out of Pride later, but you can’t develop someone’s character when they only exist as a ghost that comes out of another character who’s a villain.

And then there’s Selim. We spent half an episode seeing Ed and Al meet him in a library, go to his house, learn that he’s their biggest fan and the Führer’s son. I assumed this was leading to some scene where he finds out that the Elrics and his father are actually enemies, and is torn apart because his beloved father and his beloved idols hate each other. Nope! He’s a homunculus, and that whole setup was completely pointless. It pretty much only existed so that when Hawkeye passes Mustang a note that says “SELIM BRADLEY IS HOMUNCULUS”, we know who the hell Selim Bradley is.

My hypothetical Winry / Al romance was fan-fiction; I looked at the show and said “This would be more interesting and daring than what you’re doing”. These stories are things the show actually went out of its way to set up, and then just threw away. With how little actually happened in Part 4, I’m positive some of these things could have been developed more. Scar pretty much does nothing and Kimblee is MIA, so there was room for a Scar / Kimblee story that could have told us more about both of them while also driving forward the main plot.

Other Random Complaints

• When Al and Winry’s group reaches Lior, Rose offers Winry a bath. Winry gets in the bath, and the camera pans lovingly over her breasts and thighs while she gets jealous about the way Rose talks about Edward. If I wanted to see this stuff, I’d be watching To-Love-Ru, guys.
• During the Briggs / East City joint military exercises, General Grumman has a long inner monologue about how he’ll withhold help from Mustang and Olivier Armstrong so he can let them die, then sweep in with his forces and take over, becoming Führer himself. It ends with Major Miles looking at him and thinking, “That’s probably what he’s thinking.” So was he thinking that or not? And given that Briggs and East City forces do show up to help Mustang in Central, what was the point of ever casting doubt on Grumman’s intentions in the first place?
• Gluttony has gotten really fucking annoying. Something about his voice and the fact that he only has three different lines of dialogue (“Can I eat them?”, “Lust!”, and “Otousama!”) just grates on me. He was creepy at first, but he’s been overused. I was surprised that they brought him back after his death in Part 3, and glad when Pride chomped him down and got rid of him.
• Fu has chi-based kung fu homunculus detection. I accepted this weird mixture of magic, technology, religion, and martial arts in Negima because that world was incoherent anyway. Full Metal Alchemist has such a cohesive world that it takes me out of it when they reveal the existence of kung fu-based homunculus detection methods.
• Finding out that the brothel madam is Mustang’s foster mother added nothing to anything. It already made sense that Mustang would be gathering information from a brothel madam; he’s interested in stuff going on in the military, and soldiers like brothels, so of course she would hear a lot of stuff going on in the military.
• The eyecatches where they show a picture of a character and some random dude says “Full Metal Alchemist!” are weird and annoying. They’ve been that way since Part 1, it was just especially annoying this time.
• Bebop and Rocksteady are still lame.
• The music is, in my opinion, terrible. I’m qualifying with “In my opinion” even though this entire rant is in my opinion because music is even more subjective than things like story and character and even humor. I’m sure a lot of people love the music in this show. But I don’t enjoy it. The background music sounds like it’s from the most generic Playstation 1 JRPG ever, but the openings and endings are really the worst part. The openings all sound like mediocre boy band music. Whenever I listen to them, I imagine five Japanese guys with perfectly tousled hair thick with product, on stage in white leather pants gyrating their hips, while hordes of schoolgirls scream in the audience below. The endings are a little bit better but sound a bit like hip hop dance mixes of the most generic J-Pop songs ever. I wish they could just steal the soundtrack from Last Exile and transplant it onto Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood. That was a good soundtrack. (I wouldn’t complain if they wanted to steal Range Murata’s art, either; the art style in Full Metal Alchemist isn’t terrible, but it’s pretty uninspiring. The manga had a bit more character, but translating its style directly to the screen probably would have created the wrong tone.)

Actual Compliments

• Al with the Philosopher’s Stone vs. Pride and Kimblee was awesome. Too bad the budget ran out.
• Olivier and Alex Armstrong vs. Sloth was also pretty cool, but the budget had already run out so we didn’t get as much dynamic combat.
• The scene in Resembool where Ed almost sees Winry naked was terrible (again, I’d be watching To-Love-Ru if I wanted to see that, guys), but the part afterwards where they talk was pretty good. It was the usual “I want you to leave so you won’t be in danger” / “No, I’m not letting you face that alone” sort of thing, but it felt in-character for both of them, and they came sort of close to acknowledging their feelings for each other without having to make a big deal about it. Plus, I liked that we see Ed is taller than Winry now. Back in Part 1, we found out that when they were kids, Winry said she couldn’t marry Al because she didn’t want to marry a man who was shorter than her. Now that Ed isn’t shorter than her anymore, she’s free to be with him. (I still think it would’ve been more fun if she were in love with Al, and it was pointed out that he’s now taller than her.)
• Last time I complained about how stupid it was that Bebop and Rocksteady are all emo about getting their original bodies back so they can see their families, since they can turn back into human form whenever they want. This time Heinkel and Darius say they don’t care that much about getting their original bodies back, which makes more sense. Sure, if you’re single and trying to date, it might be a problem that you can turn into a lion. But if you’ve already got a wife and children who thought you were dead, they’d probably be glad to see you, even if you can turn into a lion now. (Or even a frog with gooey spit powers. Maybe. Some women might divorce a man, yelling at him that he couldn’t even get the lion powers. But I think most would be glad to see him.)
• The black coat and white shirt that Ed wears for most of this part looks cool. I don’t think he should have gone back to his weird red hoodie coat with the caduceus on the back.
• This show has tons of bad-ass female characters—Hawkeye, Olivier, Izumi. Even Winry; not every chick can whip you up a robot arm or come up with an amazing plan to trick a dangerous guy like Kimblee. And despite all the crap going on in Part 4, we got to see a little of each of them. Olivier was probably the standout. She’s ruthless, terrifying, and brutally effective. There’s no way that woman hasn’t spent a tour in the world of Attack on Titan. There was a great joke (one of the ones that did make me laugh) back in Part 3 where she pretended she was just a soft woman who loves children and whose biological clock was ticking to get General Raven to open up to her, and Ed couldn’t stop cracking up as he listened to her lay it on. Sadly, Part 4 can lay no claim to it. That joke belongs to Part 3.
• Rose didn’t get raped, have a rape baby, and become a cult leader. Brotherhood overall has been a lot less dark than the 2003 series, and I thought it was nice to see her and Lior recovering and doing well. One of the (many, many, many) themes of Brotherhood has been the resilience of the people of Amestris, even in the face of homunculus plots to keep them at war all the time, and Lior getting past its troubles and rebuilding was a great way to illustrate that theme.

Am I dropping the show?

No. I might take a break before Part 5, but I do want to finish this show.

Unlike Last Exile, I care about the characters in Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood. Maybe I don’t care that much what’s happening with Denny Broush or Captain Buccaneer or May Chang, but I do care about Ed and Al and Mustang and Hawkeye and Winry. I do want to see Father’s plans defeated. Until their stories were cut off in Part 4, I was interested to see what would happen with Scar and Kimblee.

Also, Last Exile felt confusing for no reason. To my knowledge it was anime-original, so there was no source material they were trying to condense. They did an unspeakably bad job of teaching us enough about the world and the characters that we would care when things happened to them. There was no apparent aim to the story.

Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood is more a victim of source material distillation. The manga was very long and had like fifty characters. They’ve tried to squeeze the entire story into one anime series. That would be challenging just due to sheer length, but adapting a manga to an anime is always structurally dicey. The rhythms of the story are so different between the two media. If it’s badly done, you can see the seams where they stitched together multiple manga chapters to make one anime episode. There isn’t time to do justice to like fifty characters unless you adapt the manga frame by frame, and making anime is expensive, so even for one like this that was popular and brought in good returns, there weren’t enough resources to do that. Even though I complain a lot about the story structure and pacing, I understand all of that, and I do cut the show some slack. The adaptation has a lot of problems, but the story being adapted is a good one, with a creative and original concept; well-developed, likeable characters; and a world that feels real. Those good qualities do still shine through, even when the thread of the plot is totally buried under confusing noise and information overload like it was for me through most of Part 4.

So no, I’m not going to drop it. I want to finish this.

Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood Part 3

By this point, the story structure of Brotherhood is pretty unimpeachable. It’s not perfect—nothing is—but it’s not the major problem it was back in Part 1, or the continuing minor problem it was in Part 2. The show has also gotten a lot better about not putting in “I’m not short!” jokes at inappropriate times.

We finish out the story from Part 2 with Ed and Al fighting against Envy, Gluttony, and Father. Gluttony dies, but the fight goes against them when Ling decides that Father has the path to immortality he wants and agrees to become the new Greed, taking in the Philosopher’s Stone that the original Greed was boiled down into. Scar and May crash in and help them, but Father has a way of disabling alchemy inside his lair that he uses to take away their ability to fight. Ed and Al notice that May’s Xingese alkahestry isn’t affected by this, however, May is injured and Al gives her to Scar to get away.

Meanwhile, up on the surface, Mustang trusts the wrong person—General Raven—and ends up dragged before a council of corrupt generals and the Fuhrer himself. After Ed and Al’s capture, they too are brought before the Fuhrer and hear from Mustang what’s happened. The Fuhrer doesn’t kill them since they’re valuable sacrifices, but he does tell them they’d better behave themselves and not try to recruit anyone else to their cause, because he’s got men watching Winry, ready to kill her if the brothers go against him.

Edward goes to visit Hawkeye and return the gun she gave him way back in the forest before he was sucked into Greed’s belly. He didn’t end up using it due to his aversion to killing. She tells him about what happened during the Ishvalan massacre, where she was a sniper. We also see how she and Mustang met—her father was Mustang’s alchemy instructor, and asked him to look after her when he died. They happen to meet up coincidentally later on during the war. Hawkeye also casually mentions that it looks like Ed has feelings for Winry, which he denies, even though he’s starting to think he might (and Winry has also been thinking that she has feelings for Ed).

Ed and Al decide to start looking for May, since her alkahestry still worked inside Father’s alchemy cancelling field, and also because alkahestry might be useful for restoring their bodies. May has headed north with Scar and Dr. Marcoh, whom Scar found in a holding cell in the sewers when he was escaping from Father’s lair. He wants Marcoh’s help deciphering his brother’s research notes. Armstrong gives the Elrics a letter of recommendation to his sister, Olivier. (Which is a man’s name. Whatever.) Before Ed and Al leave, they run into the Führer’s son, Selim Bradley, who idolizes them as well as his father and wants to be an alchemist when he gets older. After this, they head north.

The Führer releases Solf Kimblee, the Crimson Alchemist, from prison to hunt Scar. I barely remember anything about Kimblee from the 2003 show, except that he was a crazed serial murderer. In Brotherhood, as we’ll see going forward, he’s a brutal and ruthless adversary, but nothing about him strikes me as unhinged. Mustang and Hawkeye had a run-in with him during the Ishvalan war when he criticized them for their moral hand-wringing, but interestingly, he kind of had a point; he tells them that ultimately a soldier’s job is to kill, and asks Hawkeye if there isn’t some small part of her that feels satisfied with her skill when she makes a kill, and wonders why they became soldiers in the first place if they had such a problem with the carnage of a battlefield. Brotherhood’s Kimblee so far reminds me of Watchmen’s Comedian: as a soldier, he’s a killer, and he knows it; he doesn’t particularly enjoy it, but it’s part of the job, and he’s good at it. This makes him a good foil to Scar, who’s also an unflinching murderer, but where Kimblee is pragmatic about it, Scar is passionately ideological. With Ed and Al now unable to directly fight the Homunculi, Kimblee was exactly the villain we needed to move the story along.

The Elric brothers go the wall at Fort Briggs and meet General Olivier Armstrong, a hard-ass commander charged with securing Amestris’s northern border against Drachma, the large nation bordering them. Her men are equally hardcore and include Buccaneer, who’s like eight feet tall and has a chainsaw for a hand, and Major Miles, her adjutant and an Ishvalan. (There’s some convoluted story about him being a quarter Ishvalan, but he looks exactly like all the other Ishvalans, so he’s basically just Ishvalan.) After Sloth bursts through a tunnel in the ground and has to be covered in tank fuel and frozen, General Armstrong claps them in irons and throws them in the brig until they tell her the truth about why they’re there. They end up telling her everything, so that she’s in the know when General Raven shows up, accompanied by Kimblee, freshly healed after a battle with Scar on a train, and wielding a philosopher’s stone. General Raven orders them to unfreeze Sloth and put him back in the hole, then seal the hole with concrete. General Armstrong tricks him into telling her about the Homunculi and offering her an army of immortal soldiers and eternal life herself; she then cuts him open and throws his body in the concrete.

The Elrics are horrified to find that Kimblee brought Winry with him, under the guise of replacing Ed’s automail with a special alloy that won’t give him frostbite where it touches the skin, like Buccaneer’s chainsaw hand. Kimblee gained Winry’s trust on the car ride over by telling her that he knew her parents in Ishval, how much he respected them, and that he was the one who found their bodies after Scar killed them. (Edward discovered this all the way back in the beginning of Part 2 when he ran into a group of Ishvalans in the ruins of Xerxes. Winry happened to stumble on their battle with Scar during the plan to capture one of the Homunculi, and in a moment of panic, Ed spilled the beans. Winry pointed a gun at Scar and tried to get herself to kill him, but she couldn’t, and Ed stopped her.) Winry is horrified to find out that Kimblee is keeping her to threaten Ed and Al. She helps them come up with a plan to get out of it: Ed will pretend to help Kimblee hunt Scar and look for an opening to get her away. They also need to find Scar because they now know that May is with him. In the ruined mining town of Baschool, they manage to slip away from Kimblee’s men and find Scar and Marcoh.

After rescuing Scar from Bebop and Rocksteady from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (a pair of chimeras that Kimblee brought with him), they decide to team up. Winry isn’t quite able to forgive Scar, but she does get over her desire for revenge and comes up with an ingenious plan: she’ll pretend that Scar broke free and abducted her so that she can run off with his group and get free of Kimblee, while Ed and Al will act furious and pretend to help Kimblee hunt Scar down. Scar’s group will head through the mines back to Fort Briggs, where General Armstrong will protect them. However, after they leave, Major Miles gets a call that General Armstrong has been called to Central, and the base is no longer under her command. With a snowstorm rising, there’s no way they can reach Winry and Scar’s group to get the message to them—unless Al, who doesn’t feel cold, goes alone. Part 3 ends here.

“Interlude Party”

Part 3 is, for the most part, great. I was absorbed in the story and fascinated with everything we learned about the characters. There were only two blights on Part 3 that came to mind, and one of them was “Interlude Party”.

“Interlude Party”, which is the first episode of Part 3, is a crappy recap episode interspersed with footage of Hohenheim drinking by a bonfire with a younger Pinako Rockbell (Winry’s grandmother). It’s even crappier than your standard clip show because they don’t even recap the story, they just show tiny clips from Parts 1 and 2 with no context. Then Hohenheim and Pinako will come on for two minutes, and it’s pretty clear this is in Hohenheim’s head since young Pinako knows about things that are going on in the present. They have some nonsensical pseudo-philosophical back and forth, and then it’s more clips.

I used to watch clip shows because I was so eager to see anime that I would even sit through crappy supercuts of everything that had happened already. I skip them nowadays, mostly. I didn’t skip “Interlude Party”, but I didn’t watch it either; I fast-forwarded all the clips and watched the scenes with Hohenheim and young Pinako. Which were shit. Don’t do that. Just skip this episode. I watch this show in the morning, before I go to work, because doing something I enjoy early in the morning helps set up a good tempo for the rest of the day. Except when the episode is a crappy clip show that I have to fast-forward most of, and which is crappy even when it’s not clips. Then it sets up a day where I do things I’ve already done in the past again, interspersed with some really nonsensical new things.

Heroes in a Half-Shell

Nothing in Part 3 broke the mood like all those out-of-place short jokes and hatcheted-together stories in Part 1, but Bebop and Rocksteady sure came close. (I can’t be bothered to find out what their real names are.) The fight against them was cheesy and way too comedic for this point in the series. It wasn’t as bad as the “turn into chibis and beat up everyone offscreen” fight from the Lior story, but it was very slapstick, as it must be when you’re fighting a guy whose power is gooey spit. Scar is a bad-ass antihero; for a serious fight, he needs a bad-ass anti-villain like Kimblee, not these rejected Skeletor minions.

After they’re defeated, everyone lets them hear Winry’s entire plan to let herself be taken captive by Scar so they can go back and tell Kimblee what’s really going on. Major Miles wants to kill them to prevent this, but Ed won’t let him. Conveniently, they decide they never liked Kimblee anyway and they want to switch sides so they can get their old bodies back and see their families again. The kicker, the thing that makes this really dumb and not just a lazy way of letting Edward be right without any consequences, is that they can transform back and forth at will between Bebop and Rocksteady and human forms. So what the hell do they need their original bodies for anyway? It’s not like Al, who can’t even eat or touch someone in his current state. They can just turn into humans and go home to their families.

This is lazily repeated early in Part 4 when Edward saves two more of Kimblee’s chimera henchmen, who also decide that they never liked Kimblee anyway and they’re on Ed’s side now. What is this, Yu-gi-oh?

The Question of Race

Edward wants you to know that he doesn’t see color. Everyone’s blood is red just the same as his.

Seriously, the way Edward addresses race when he finds out Major Miles is Ishvalan is way too naive. I know he means well, but it felt like the show was saying that solving racism is really quite simple: we all just have to stop seeing race and get along. It makes sense that Edward would think this way—he’s not Ishvalan, he wasn’t in the war, and no one he knows died in it. But Major Miles, whose grandfather died in the massacre, acts like this is some profound truth that he never thought of before, even telling Scar later that Edward drastically changed his opinion on the whole matter.

I hope this isn’t just the show’s way of shoving aside the whole ethnically-motivated genocide thing so everyone on the “good” side can team up to fight the evil Homunculi.

Winry’s Heart

I have no particular feelings either way on Winry and Edward’s budding romance. It doesn’t annoy me, but it doesn’t interest me at all either. I don’t think they really have any chemistry, and their occasional Rumiko Takahashi-esque screaming matches neither amuse nor anger me; I just kind of tune out until it’s over.

There is someone Winry could have fallen in love with that would have made me interested: Scar. That would be insane, though. But there’s also Al. She’s known Al just as long as Ed. She and Al are always the ones worrying together when Ed pushes himself too hard and gets hurt. There was some actual drama between them back in Part 1 when Al was worried that he might be a fabricated personality and Winry got angry at him. There’s no reason why she couldn’t have loved Al instead of Ed. Then the romance would’ve had real pathos, since Al doesn’t have a body and may never. They wouldn’t be able to touch or kiss until his body was restored. Al keeps on mentioning that Winry’s apple pie is the first thing he wants to eat when he gets his body back; that would have even more meaning if they were in love. Falling in love fits Al’s gentle personality more than Edward’s. I like Al, and I don’t think he gets enough to do to get out of Edward’s shadow; a romance with Winry would be a big step towards that.