English Dub Review: Fire Force “The Investigation of the 1st Commences”

 

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

With Company 5 (or at least Hibana) now their ally, Company 8 moves on to their next target: Company 1. Apparently, the Infernals that Hibana noticed were man-made were first spotted in Shinjuku Ward, which is the 1’s jurisdiction. The plan is to make use of the “Rookie Training Reassignment System” to send Shinra, Arthur, and a member of Company 5 to spy on them and figure out who among them is turning humans into Infernals. They meet at the Holy Sol Obelisk, Company 1’s base, and meet with Captain Leonard Burns. Shinra remembers him from the fire that killed his family twelve years ago, so it’s possible he might know something.

To get a better sense of their abilities, Shinra suggests a sparring match with some of their members, and if he wins he’ll get to ask Burns some important questions. One of the matches gets a bit too hot, with the flames converted into sound and then cold by Karim Flam, who uses a special instrument to do so. The next match has Shinra and Arthur fighting Burns directly, with him blocking Arthur’s lightsaber and Shinra’s fire feet barehanded before knocking them both out easily. They’ll be trained under Karim while they’re here, but plan to learn as much as they can.

OUR TAKE

The next arc begins, but it seems that this will be a slower burn than the direct confrontation with Company 5. As mentioned, Company 1 is tied to the church, so Burns is subtly shown to have more of an affinity to religious greetings than usual ones. That doesn’t mean he’s a pushover obviously, as he has a major show of force later on in the sparring match. It’s expected that the next Captain wouldn’t be so easy to beat in a fight like Hibana was (and probably harder to seduce too), so attacking head-on isn’t the strategy here. Instead, this is more of an undercover mission, allowing the audience to see more of how the system between the companies works and meet more characters while facilitating a way for Shinra to investigate.

But that ends up being this episode’s most notable downside, as we’ve hit a bit of a lull in the momentum as a result of starting a new arc. I get that things aren’t going to go back to being exciting right out of the gate, but that does lessen my interest in the story, at least for the moment. I can’t imagine we’ll be going that long before things start heating up again (pun intended), it’s just that things right now simply aren’t very exciting. We’re introduced to a bunch of new characters with their own respective quirks and special abilities, though they all feel pretty boring at the moment. That said, considering the name of the game is to find out who amongst them is contributing to the creation of Infernals, being boring and unsuspecting might just be what the intention is. Anything’s possible, I suppose.

Also pretty hard to imagine that we’re just about a third through the season. It’s really sprung upon us, which I would say is a pretty good sign that this show is flying by and keeping me from keeping track of that until we’ve already made considerable progress. We’re on our second (or third) major arc and we’ve already seen that this series can make a change in story type and structure to benefit the plot that’s happening at the time. This was a perfectly sufficient episode in displaying the show can keep the consistent effort going…but it just isn’t wowing me like some of the last few episodes did. Early shonen usually isn’t very remarkable, but hopefully, we can get to the key points sooner rather than later.