FMA’03 - episode 4: A Forger's Love
Dec. 18th, 2023 11:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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tori_reviewsFMA’03 - episode 4: A Forger's Love
I knew I wasn’t really looking forward to this episode, but I couldn’t completely remember why. I think I mostly ignored it when I watched it before, it wasn’t very good, but not paying very close attention it hadn’t left a solid memory of why I had that impression. Maybe I recalled that the plot’s pretty stupid, and I remembered the ending twist which doesn’t quite work, but I didn’t remember whether the whole story was bad.
Turns out, it’s…if not bad, at least a huge mess.
(Since I watched it with the subtitles I will spell it Majhal, but that would absolutely not be how I would have spelled it if I was going by ear. I suspect this is a translation glitch, that the two syllables fit together a bit more naturally in Japanese while in English everyone smooths it out by adding the extra sound between them to be Majahal.)
I think I’ll start by talking about how the alchemy in this episode doesn’t make sense. Majhal’s wrist-strap seems to have the transmutation circle for anything up to and including flame alchemy. I’m sure he’s ignoring equivalent exchange a few times (especially making the sword at the end). And he claims to have tried human transmutation multiple times but is clearly no worse for wear. In general I don’t really understand how what he is doing isn’t human transmutation or how it would work if it wasn’t.
But let’s steel man the last as much as possible, with the understanding that I don’t think the show writers could have or did put as much thought into it. Given that a single life/soul can be used as a philosopher’s stone, the women he’s killing may be his toll for attempting human transmutation. But that only allows him to perform the transmutation, not the equivalent exchange for a soul; also the fact that Karin’s soul is still alive may be involved in why he can’t summon it from the beyond. I can’t tell if the dolls at the end are alive, but clearly at least some of the time they are living bodies that can get out and wander, but one assumes they lack a soul to make them anything but dolls. Making them sort of an inverse of Al, living bodies without a soul compared to a suit of armor that has one. I guess they’re more like the Immortal Legion, but I always understood that to be Father’s work not something a regular alchemist could do, much less several times over (plus they’re not in this show as far as I recall).
So, I’m not sure the same soul bond rite used for Al would work on a human body, and probably not even as semi-permanently as it works for Al; and that’s even if it could summon the desired soul to be bonded with the transmuted body. As Al’s soul was only recently detached from his body when Ed managed to bond his soul to the suit that didn’t have biological processes to account for. But if Majhal was within a step or two of solving the problem of human transmutation, then I think the show needed to acknowledge that. Obviously our heroes would not be willing to go out kill someone who looked vaguely like Al, kill them and bond Al’s soul to that body, but there should have been an element of temptation to be rejected.
But then we get into Majhal’s motivations, and that’s a mess too. Alternating these episodes so that I just watched the Tucker episode of Brotherhood casts this episode in an even worse light than it would be on its own. Tucker may be a monster, but he is a character, even one that I find marginally more sympathetic than I’m probably supposed to. Majhal is just kind of there, doing all this terrible stuff, and then it’s just over and done. (There’s also the fact that ’03 Tucker will basically just be Majhal 2.0.) Ed and Al don’t learn anything from the experience here, they’re not traumatized that they were spending time being friendly with someone that is a multiple murderer, they aren’t made to see something of themselves in person who took things way too far.
Because I think someone should ask Majhal if he’d want Karin back if she could be bonded to a suit of armor. This is where the plot is between a rock and a hard place; they can’t have Ed and Al can’t get any deeper into what Majhal is doing, because he’s doing too much that’s awful; but it really needs something to echo in the ending. That Majhal thought he was doing this for Karin, he convinced himself he was doing it for her, but the truth was that it was always selfish and sociopathic. We also needed to see real Karin reject him when she found out the truth of what he was doing, but we don’t really see anything from her once the boys figure it out.
Majhal is also a mess as a parallel to Ed and Al. It seems like there ought to be one, but we’re not focused on them enough to explore it if it’s there. The obvious choice would be something along the lines of addressing their motivations in trying to bring Trisha back, how much they too were trying to bring back an idealized version of her that could have only been just a doll like these replicas even if it had worked. Although I feel like even that parallel would work better with the five year gap since Trisha died instead of one (especially as a parallel to Majhal’s work of years); that bringing her back was a vow they made as very young children and by the time they actually tried it they had cemented an idealized version of her in their minds that they were doing it for. Not that the show (either one) ever really makes Trisha anything but the idealized version, and I don’t think that’s a flaw exactly, but it would get in the way of any parallel here.
Considering where this show specifically goes with her as Sloth, I guess there’s a bit of comparison with Majhal recreating the body but not the soul. But then I end up thinking all over again how much more weight this episode should have had. Because if what Majhal is creating is basically homunculi that don’t get the fuel to keep living on, then that has huge relevance to the overall plot (especially since I think that was Lust I saw hanging around for a couple seconds) but it’s barely explored in this ep.
I guess that could work if the show had been really well planned. But I don’t think this show was that well planned to introduce a hugely important part of the lore without the protagonist having any idea how important it was at the time.
But I think maybe the simplest fix to this episode (ignoring the practical ways that it fails at presenting alchemy) would be to have real Karin get to say her piece to and about Majhal. Something about how he’s not the man he once was, that he’s got no more soul than the dolls he created, so he can have his dolls, she’d want more of him. The show doesn’t even let us hear her story from her, Ed gets to be the one to tell Majhal without us knowing how she told him all of it.
The other small change I think would…well it would help if the show was actually doing something to develop Ed and Al on this adventure. But if at the beginning Ed said he would do whatever it took to get Al his body back, and then this episode had presented him with how high that cost could be, and that neither he nor Al was willing to go down the road Majhal took. It’s a simple enough arc that it’s annoying that it would practically be cliché, but the show does even less than that.
There are a couple things about the beginning of the episode that bother me. The train station scene has the ring of being rooted in the manga, but having been transmuted and repurposed for use here. I don’t see how Ed and Al could have drawn such a large transmutation circle so quickly, or made sure that the purse snatcher would happen to stop on top of it. (It has the ring of being rooted in the manga as either an Al scene, hence why he’s the one who does the transmutation where in the manga Ed would have had clap alchemy; or as an Ed scene where the timing would have been less suspect and been another example of how powerful and useful clap alchemy is.)
But before that, I took issue with the boys talking about becoming State Alchemists. They’ve clearly done nothing to look into what it is to be a State Alchemist. Say what you will about Bro-Roy deciding to convince traumatized children to join the military, but he at least gave them some information; and they met for long enough that they can reasonably assume that he meant for the offer to be taken seriously. I don’t think ’03-Roy even left a calling card. The moment here may be meant to show how young and stupid Ed (and to a less explored extent Al) is to assume he’s all that and a bag of chips, especially when he hasn’t even realized he can do clap alchemy yet; but whatever it’s starting didn’t have any relation to the rest of this story.
I knew I wasn’t really looking forward to this episode, but I couldn’t completely remember why. I think I mostly ignored it when I watched it before, it wasn’t very good, but not paying very close attention it hadn’t left a solid memory of why I had that impression. Maybe I recalled that the plot’s pretty stupid, and I remembered the ending twist which doesn’t quite work, but I didn’t remember whether the whole story was bad.
Turns out, it’s…if not bad, at least a huge mess.
(Since I watched it with the subtitles I will spell it Majhal, but that would absolutely not be how I would have spelled it if I was going by ear. I suspect this is a translation glitch, that the two syllables fit together a bit more naturally in Japanese while in English everyone smooths it out by adding the extra sound between them to be Majahal.)
I think I’ll start by talking about how the alchemy in this episode doesn’t make sense. Majhal’s wrist-strap seems to have the transmutation circle for anything up to and including flame alchemy. I’m sure he’s ignoring equivalent exchange a few times (especially making the sword at the end). And he claims to have tried human transmutation multiple times but is clearly no worse for wear. In general I don’t really understand how what he is doing isn’t human transmutation or how it would work if it wasn’t.
But let’s steel man the last as much as possible, with the understanding that I don’t think the show writers could have or did put as much thought into it. Given that a single life/soul can be used as a philosopher’s stone, the women he’s killing may be his toll for attempting human transmutation. But that only allows him to perform the transmutation, not the equivalent exchange for a soul; also the fact that Karin’s soul is still alive may be involved in why he can’t summon it from the beyond. I can’t tell if the dolls at the end are alive, but clearly at least some of the time they are living bodies that can get out and wander, but one assumes they lack a soul to make them anything but dolls. Making them sort of an inverse of Al, living bodies without a soul compared to a suit of armor that has one. I guess they’re more like the Immortal Legion, but I always understood that to be Father’s work not something a regular alchemist could do, much less several times over (plus they’re not in this show as far as I recall).
So, I’m not sure the same soul bond rite used for Al would work on a human body, and probably not even as semi-permanently as it works for Al; and that’s even if it could summon the desired soul to be bonded with the transmuted body. As Al’s soul was only recently detached from his body when Ed managed to bond his soul to the suit that didn’t have biological processes to account for. But if Majhal was within a step or two of solving the problem of human transmutation, then I think the show needed to acknowledge that. Obviously our heroes would not be willing to go out kill someone who looked vaguely like Al, kill them and bond Al’s soul to that body, but there should have been an element of temptation to be rejected.
But then we get into Majhal’s motivations, and that’s a mess too. Alternating these episodes so that I just watched the Tucker episode of Brotherhood casts this episode in an even worse light than it would be on its own. Tucker may be a monster, but he is a character, even one that I find marginally more sympathetic than I’m probably supposed to. Majhal is just kind of there, doing all this terrible stuff, and then it’s just over and done. (There’s also the fact that ’03 Tucker will basically just be Majhal 2.0.) Ed and Al don’t learn anything from the experience here, they’re not traumatized that they were spending time being friendly with someone that is a multiple murderer, they aren’t made to see something of themselves in person who took things way too far.
Because I think someone should ask Majhal if he’d want Karin back if she could be bonded to a suit of armor. This is where the plot is between a rock and a hard place; they can’t have Ed and Al can’t get any deeper into what Majhal is doing, because he’s doing too much that’s awful; but it really needs something to echo in the ending. That Majhal thought he was doing this for Karin, he convinced himself he was doing it for her, but the truth was that it was always selfish and sociopathic. We also needed to see real Karin reject him when she found out the truth of what he was doing, but we don’t really see anything from her once the boys figure it out.
Majhal is also a mess as a parallel to Ed and Al. It seems like there ought to be one, but we’re not focused on them enough to explore it if it’s there. The obvious choice would be something along the lines of addressing their motivations in trying to bring Trisha back, how much they too were trying to bring back an idealized version of her that could have only been just a doll like these replicas even if it had worked. Although I feel like even that parallel would work better with the five year gap since Trisha died instead of one (especially as a parallel to Majhal’s work of years); that bringing her back was a vow they made as very young children and by the time they actually tried it they had cemented an idealized version of her in their minds that they were doing it for. Not that the show (either one) ever really makes Trisha anything but the idealized version, and I don’t think that’s a flaw exactly, but it would get in the way of any parallel here.
Considering where this show specifically goes with her as Sloth, I guess there’s a bit of comparison with Majhal recreating the body but not the soul. But then I end up thinking all over again how much more weight this episode should have had. Because if what Majhal is creating is basically homunculi that don’t get the fuel to keep living on, then that has huge relevance to the overall plot (especially since I think that was Lust I saw hanging around for a couple seconds) but it’s barely explored in this ep.
I guess that could work if the show had been really well planned. But I don’t think this show was that well planned to introduce a hugely important part of the lore without the protagonist having any idea how important it was at the time.
But I think maybe the simplest fix to this episode (ignoring the practical ways that it fails at presenting alchemy) would be to have real Karin get to say her piece to and about Majhal. Something about how he’s not the man he once was, that he’s got no more soul than the dolls he created, so he can have his dolls, she’d want more of him. The show doesn’t even let us hear her story from her, Ed gets to be the one to tell Majhal without us knowing how she told him all of it.
The other small change I think would…well it would help if the show was actually doing something to develop Ed and Al on this adventure. But if at the beginning Ed said he would do whatever it took to get Al his body back, and then this episode had presented him with how high that cost could be, and that neither he nor Al was willing to go down the road Majhal took. It’s a simple enough arc that it’s annoying that it would practically be cliché, but the show does even less than that.
There are a couple things about the beginning of the episode that bother me. The train station scene has the ring of being rooted in the manga, but having been transmuted and repurposed for use here. I don’t see how Ed and Al could have drawn such a large transmutation circle so quickly, or made sure that the purse snatcher would happen to stop on top of it. (It has the ring of being rooted in the manga as either an Al scene, hence why he’s the one who does the transmutation where in the manga Ed would have had clap alchemy; or as an Ed scene where the timing would have been less suspect and been another example of how powerful and useful clap alchemy is.)
But before that, I took issue with the boys talking about becoming State Alchemists. They’ve clearly done nothing to look into what it is to be a State Alchemist. Say what you will about Bro-Roy deciding to convince traumatized children to join the military, but he at least gave them some information; and they met for long enough that they can reasonably assume that he meant for the offer to be taken seriously. I don’t think ’03-Roy even left a calling card. The moment here may be meant to show how young and stupid Ed (and to a less explored extent Al) is to assume he’s all that and a bag of chips, especially when he hasn’t even realized he can do clap alchemy yet; but whatever it’s starting didn’t have any relation to the rest of this story.
