OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)Arthur, Vulcan, Lisa, and Yu head into the Nether to complete Arthur’s “quest”. Meanwhile, Shinra tries to connect to Sho through their Adolla Links.OUR TAKEThat is a wrap on this little detour arc about Arthur, and probably the last side story stuff before the shit properly hits the fan and we begin the build up to the next Great Cataclysm. And as that last little calm before that storm, it is…more or less sufficient. It develops Arthur’s character, though not in the sense that he is changing or growing, but rather in the way that we are learning more about him and how he processes information into his rather warped worldview. His pyrotechnic abilities are fittingly unique due to him being able to form plasma, but they are also proportionally impacted by how immersed he is in his own fantasy of being a knight, as we saw with his last fight against Dragon. This is why Vulcan felt the need to make this into a “quest” to obtain a new weapon when really he could have just made one without the pretext. What I did NOT expect was seeing Arthur’s unnamed parents again after they abandoned him as a child. And as it turns out, for not a terrible reason, as it seems Arthur’s dad was somehow able to figure out everything with the Evangelist and the secret of Human Combustion on his first guess, with no resources or connections or nothing.However, as funny and absurd as that is, what is NOT a good thing is that he and his wife (also without name) ended up having three more kids and never bothered to tell Arthur about it. Not that he ever ends up minding, leaving Yu to feel second hand anger and sadness for him, but…that’s just Arthur I guess. In adding that, the episode ends up making a possibly unintended theme about estranged family suddenly coming together, as Shinra finally manages to use the Adolla Link he and Sho share in order to speak. Shinra and Sho haven’t had a scene or dialogue together since their last fight in Season 1 if I remember correctly, and that was nearly a half a decade out of universe, but since we’re getting close to the end, it’s time to reestablish that. Both of them are Pillars, so a future interaction is inevitable, and based on the preview for the next episode, it seems Sho wants to see Shinra again one more time before he has to help the world burn to death. And that just leaves us three more episodes in this part of the season, so get ready for a rather steep incline.