English Dub Review: Fire Force “Advent”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Sho and his guardian Arrow go AWOL from the rest of the White Clad so Sho can speak to Shinra one last time, but preparations are already underway to finally begin the next Great Cataclysm. Meanwhile, Obi checks in with who in the Fire Force he can rely on, and Company 8 gets news from an old friend.

OUR TAKE

We now kick off the final arc of this half of the season, and fittingly, it is about leading into the much prophesied Great Cataclysm that everything has been building towards. The Eight Pillars have emerged (more or less) and now even literal pillars are starting to rise up from the ocean as a harrowing countdown to the main event. So, Sho picked a great time to want to be an actual character again! I don’t mean to undercut the intrigue of him and Shinra, two brothers drawn into this conflict by monumental forces and finding themselves on opposite sides, but we also can’t deny the fact that Sho has basically been in the timeout corner since the end of the first season, when him and Shinra had their first big confrontation and Shinra unlocked his Adolla Burst powers. To be clear, I am glad to see this be addressed now, but they’re cutting it pretty close and I don’t know how much time they’ll really have to do this subplot justice. Also, on the subject of the White Clad, we meet yet another new central member of the White Clad, Commander Faerie. And if Dragon felt like a late addition, Faerie feels just plain unnecessary, especially at this late stage. More on him as he becomes more prominent.

On the hero side of things, Company 8 finally gets to hear about Hibana’s report and get caught up, though not just through her. Scop, the talking mole Shinra met when he and some other soldiers went to the Chinese Peninsula last season, arrives to inform them that the Lady in Black has passed and that her last words to them are more information about the first Great Cataclysm. As it turns out, the last one failed because Pi had not been fully calculated (Pi had also been shown in the ruins of the Tabernacle in China in that same arc) but now I guess it has been this time, so all bets are off. The inclusion of Pi is one of the aspects that doesn’t feel like it was fully thought out and might have just been the author throwing in some real life concept that he thought was fascinating but didn’t quite fit with everything else he mapped out. Which would honestly describe a fair chunk of other things in this story, but it has somehow not managed to take me out of the immersion or enjoyment, so props to them! So, next week is the penultimate episode of this chunk of the season, and things shall continue to escalate. And it turns out we won’t even be seeing the end of this arc until the start of the second half in January, so there’s that!