English Dub Review: Fire Force “Shadows Cast by Divine Light”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Benimaru and Joker continue their quest through the Nether and fighting the Holy Sol Shadows, the temple’s secret assassination team which Joker used to be a part of. Formerly known as Five Two, Joker was a promising member of the Shadows in his own right, though abused a lot by one member in particular and driven to escape. He tried to live with a normal family, but they were killed when the Shadows found them. From then on, Joker worked to save the Tokyo Empire from itself through uncovering why everything was so terrible. In the present, he’s able to defeat the Shadow who abused him in the past, though soon a new potential threat emerges to face him and Benimaru: Captain Burns of Company 1.

OUR TAKE

The anti-hero detour of the story continues with a closer look at the weirdness lurking within the Holy Sol Temple and a long awaited glimpse at Joker and why he might not be playing with a full deck. From near the beginning of the series, Joker has been a reminder that the system that the empire is built on is not quite right, though we never quite got a clear picture of why that is. Obviously he wasn’t the only one who sensed something was up, as Obi and his superiors put Company 8 together in order to gather information about defeating Infernals that they felt they wouldn’t have been able to gather without sneaking around. But here we learn that the church itself seems to be deliberately squashing attempts to truly understand the nature of the Temple’s origins. There seems to be a similar level of secrecy and weirdness going on with Haijima, but I think that’s getting looked at in the next arc. Either way, you don’t put together a team of nameless assassins who live in the shadows if you don’t have something to hide, which seems to what we’re learning here.

The seemingly sudden appearance of Burns may have also been hinted at before too. The fact that he and Joker both have eye patches on the opposite eye has certainly been a curious feature shared between them, but not something that I really noticed until the current OP drew attention to, so it’s likely for an important reason. In fact, there is a brief part of Joker’s flashback to his escape from the Shadows where he mentions that “Burns must feel it too” when referring to the Shadows facing a Demon Infernal, likely meaning the two of them share an Adolla Link. It’s that and this show’s tendency to have fake out cliffhanger endings (such as this week when Benimaru faked being taken out by that dart), which leads me to believe that Burns is probably not the two’s enemy but a secret ally. He’s always seemed suspicious in some way, to be sure, but even if he did turn out to be a puppet of the Church or Haijima, this doesn’t seem like the time to pull that cord. But we’ll be learning more about all of this next time when more truths are revealed, including one that cuts to the very heart of the church’s origins.