Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood - Episode 60

With Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood fast rolling towards its climax, there are still plenty of conflicts going on scattered throughout its world, and thus episode sixty of this series makes the most of skipping between them as the so-called Promised Day enters its critical phase.

While Scar's continuing battle with a wounded King Bradley becomes ever-more bloody, and those loyal to Mustang find themselves with another ally as they remain trapped in the radio station surrounded by the military, our real attentions need to turn to what is going on within Father's "stomach", as our four human sacrifices (plus May Chang) spot an opportunity to fight back, although in the case of Mustang the shock of his incapacitation renders him useless.


This means that it's up to May and the Elric brothers to lead the fight against Father and Pride, making for a difficult and pitched battle on both sides as the Homunculus balance not being defeated with not injuring their sacrifices while the human side of the battle was never liable to be easy against such formidable foes. In the end, even the combined efforts of our heroes prove to be futile, and even the late appearance of Greed isn't enough to stop Father from unleashing his plan, which he reveals as an attempt to open the gate of the planet itself. Grandiose plans like that can never mean good news for the rest of us, and so it goes that the opening of this gate brings about Third Impact... Well, okay, it wasn't actually Third Impact, but it might as well have been given all of the End of Evangelion-esque undertones of proceedings towards the end of the episode.

Despite those Evangelion comparisons (and lets face it, nothing is going to compare favourably to Evangelion) this was another top-notch episode, that made the most of its pitched battles early on before maintaining the right balance of intensity and impending doom as the gate was opened and everything goes almost literally to Hell in a hand basket in a visually impressive way that brought the scale of what we were seeing to life quite impressively. However, the most interesting question of all is - what happens now? With this episode leaving us on the brink of some kind of Armageddon and what seems to be utter defeat for the Elric brothers and company, it's hard to imagine how they can turn things around... and that's exactly why I'll be waiting even more impatiently to find out.