Rating: B+
After taking a week off, Frieren is back, but it’s not back to what has been the status quo for the season – i.e., shorter vignettes about various experiences Frieren and her companions have while continuing to travel north. No, even if I hadn’t seen the upcoming episodes advertised as a story arc, that would have been evident within this episode’s first couple of minutes. There’s a threat lingering out on the Northern Plateau, one that’s enough of a challenge that even Frieren’s group might not be able to tackle it alone when called into service. (Apparently one consequence of being a first-class mage is that Serie can order you around.) And that provides a golden opportunity to bring back a couple more characters from the First Class Mage Exam arc.
To be specific, the cuteness-obsessed Methode appears again, and this time she’s working with Genau, the administrator of the first exam of the first-class mage exam, in a “pair the rookie with the veteran” situation. It’s a sensible pairing in both pragmatic and storytelling senses; Genau seems to be a combat-focused mage who has either suppressed or discarded outward displays of emotion but clearly still cares more than his words indicate, while Methode is a much more empathetic individual who is a jack-of-all-trades magically but seems to specialize in analysis. (And she still has the running joke about how cute she finds elves to provide the humor angle.)
That results in the episode mostly being an analytical one, as first Genau and Methode, later joined by Frieren and crew, try to reconstruct what happened at the village and what foe or foes they’re up against. But that’s both fine and perfectly in line with the series’ normal modus operandi, and the way it’s done is still interesting. That an autopsy spell actually exists makes such perfect sense (especially for this setting), yet I cannot recall another magic-using anime series which uses something equivalent. Examining wounds and damage to get a sense of the kind of foe the party it looking for or to solve some mystery is a fairly common element in tabletop RPGs (computer RPGs tend to not bother with it), to the extent that I’ve even used it as a significant plot point in Dungeons and Dragons adventures I’ve written in the past, and I’ve seen other fantasy series where a skilled warrior will reconstruct a battle scene to get a sense of a target’s movement ( the live-action version of The Witcher immediately comes to mind), but neither commonly gets such attention in anime. Pinning down that an opponent had to be using four blades because even two would have required unrealistic movements is a neat touch, and good to see that Stark wasn’t useless on that front.
The other interesting detail here is what Genau explains about burial practices on the Northern Plateau. Graveyards aren’t practical unless they’re in walled cities or behind magical barriers, as apparently even buried bodies attract monsters, so bodies are either cremated or shipped to common graves farther south. Unsurprisingly, religion can be a sticking point on the former options, but it is interesting how Genau acknowledges both the spiritual and practical viewpoints on the issue as legitimate.
One other interesting observation here: at least four of the five individuals present for this investigation have lost their homes to battle and three of the five lost them to demons. (Fern is a war orphan but demons were never described as being a factor in that.) The only possible outlier is Methode, and we simply don’t know anything about her background at this point.
Six-armed demons wielding six swords have been a staple element of Dungeons and Dragons throughout all its incarnations over the years, and now it seems we have a variation on that afoot. It wasn’t the only powerful demon around, either; there was also the lizard guy, the one who seemed to be carrying a Buddhist-style monk’s staff, and at least one other. Not sure exactly where this is going plot-wise at this point, but the time for more relaxed adventures certainly seems to be over for a while.
USA Anime 