Well, that fatherly reunion surely turned out different from the first season. The Hohenheim there was like a burnt out businessman in need of retirement (but then again, who can blame him with the things he went through), but this visit was much shorter and businesslike. He just came to warn Piyoko to leave the country, and Ed happened to be there at the same time. You can see here that he regrets seeing what his son turned into, but at the same time you can see that he’s too busy with a lot of different things to be able to properly take care of his son.

And I think that that’s the biggest difference between the two Full Metal Alchemists: the first series was much more focused on the past, and how past events have influenced people, and how they’re still obsessed over them. It returned in just about every major character. The major villain there was just clinging too much to the past, rather than striving for world conquest. I guess that that’s why all of the characters were toned down in terms of strength: they weren’t of the type of a cast that simply goes forward and forward.

Brotherhood however is of this type, though. Even though the characters sometimes take detours, you can see that everyone is trying to move forward. Whether it is for Ed to find Al’s body back, the Humonculi to carry out whatever evil plan they are carrying out, Roy Mustang’s quest to catch the Humonculi. It’s much more straightforward.

Anyway, this episode was one for the character-development, with the biggest shock being that the “creature” that Ed and Al transformed back then wasn’t actually their own mother. It was just the body of a random guy. Who knows if the guy was actually alive at one point and the two brothers took his body from somewhere. Judging on how Al’s body was taken away, I’d say that it was, and there’s some sort of grown up Al walking around somewhere in the world. If that’s true, then what about Ed’s limbs? And Izumi’s baby? (that probably was the most emotional scene this episode: when she found out that she didn’t actually kill her own child).

Now, we all know why Hohenheim was involved with human transmutation in the first season, but Brotherhood still has a lot of questions lying around, the biggest being why the leader of the Humonculi looks like him. Is Hohenheim some sort of clone of this guy perhaps?

Anyway, when commenting, please refrain from mentioning events that happen after this point in the manga, because the spoilers have gotten a bit out of control recently and I’ve received a couple of complaints about them. It’s fine if one person gives off a subtle hint of what’s going to happen next. It becomes annoying when the twenty people next to this person get the same idea.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

This series just gets better and better doesn’t it? This episode probably featured some new record in terms of amount of subtle jokes and references for this series. There were about fifty hints throughout the episode about Kou’s feelings to Aoba’s childhood friend. On top of that, there were fifty more subtle plot points that ever so slightly developed Kou’s and Aoba’s relationship forward. Did all of that really just fit into 20 minutes?

Among the best parts between them in this episode was the way Aoba greeted her new “sempai” as she formally entered the baseball club, the point where the entire school found out that Kou and Aoba weren’t dating, and where the two of them used Akaishi to get each other to the infirmary when both of them sustained a small injury. What struck me the most was the surprisingly innocent way in which Aoba looked at childhood friend (yeah, forgot his name). Is he really going to be just a minor character? We’ve never even her even remotely similar up till now.

But yeah, this is really slice of life as it should be. Even without the subtle romance, those small scenes in which Kou and Azuma lived and trained together and the chemistry they have between themselves was really enjoyable to watch. The way they get on each other’s nerves when one of them slacks off is hilarious to see, not to mention how Kou succumbed to food poisoning in a certain part of this episode.
Rating: ** (Excellent)