Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood - Episode 11

After the sadness and shock of Maes Hughes' death in the last episode, we were arguably in need of a rather lighter pick-me-up for this eleventh instalment of Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, and that's basically exactly what we get here.

This entire episode takes in the Elric brothers and Winry's stop-off on the way to Dublith at the behest of the latter so that she can take in the joys of Rush Valley - The Automail equivalent of Tottenham Court Road. Or something. Naturally, Ed's own Automail gets more than a little attention from the locals... A little too much attention, as he soon realises that the pocket watch which denotes his status as a State Alchemist has been stolen. Our trio soon take off to try and catch the culprit, a young girl with some nifty Automail of her own named Paninya, and before they know it they end up in this hospitality of a family including an Automail mechanic genius and a pregnant wife. It's the latter that causes all of the problems however, going into labour in the middle of a storm and leaving Winry having to rely heavily on what little she remembers from her upbringing amongst parents who were doctors.


While this probably can't strictly be labelled as filler episode (it brings us a few important smidgens of character development, not least for Winry), it's hardly hugely vital to the story at this point, although as I mentioned at the start of this entry the need for something a little happier after the goings-on in episode ten should probably be most welcome. I do worry sometimes that Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood is almost laying on the humour a little too thick in recent episodes (and certainly its joke to outright laugh ratio is pretty small), but then again perhaps it would all be too despresingly dark without it. At the end of the day though, this isn't really an episode that you'll kick yourself for missing in the grand scheme of things, although it has been nice to see a bit more of Winry in recent episodes.