We return to what I feel Apocrypha does best, action, and what an episode to kick off the final confrontation. We have the black team approaching the hanging Gardens of Babylon in a group of airplanes. This kicks off a fights between Atalanta and Joan, as well as Achilles and Chiron. This fight is great, thrilling and for once the animation and sound design don’t ruin it. It’s an explosive confrontation between these servants as they jump from plane to plane trying to take each other out. Quite frankly this is what I came to this show for, to see historical figures duke it out in the more over the top ways possible. Of course learning about these figures and seeing how they interact and are characterised is a personal draw in this franchise for me but it’s clear we won’t have time for that. Still I do lament its absence even if signs of deeper characterisation are present. For example, we know that Achilles cares a lot for Atalanta but as a matter of fact the reason for this is because Atalanta was his first crush. When he was trained, Chiron used to tell Achilles stories about Atalanta which caused Achilles to gain a schoolboy crush on her. His caring for her in this series is actually his leftover feelings from that period. Though this requires clarification as while I seen it mentioned, I cannot find anything referencing it. There is also the nice detail that Achilles deeply regretted killing an Amazon Queen during his life and because of that he swore to never unleash the power of his spear on a female opponent. I really do wish that little details like this were included and utilised in the anime. Likewise i can’t really find anything about Chiron having a degree of precognition but hey, Achilles never had a flying chariot and it makes the fight more interesting.
It’s nice to have a little Shakespeare and amusing as hell that Shirou knew that Shakespeare would prefer to write the ending of this story as a tragedy rather than allow a happy ending. In other words Shakespeare actually wants Shirou to fail cause the tragedy of it would be far more interesting. So why does Shirou have to force Shakespeare to not turn his recount of this story into a tragedy? That is because Shakespeare’s writings have power, in fact he can pick up a pebble off the ground and turn it into a E rank Noble Phantasm. He can create up to C rank noble Phantasms just by writing about the object. As such there is a very real possibility that what Shakespeare writes about Shirou’s plan could affect it and Shirou cannot take that chance. Thus like a forceful editor, he must order Shakespeare to not write such an ending. It’s funny that in a way Shakespeare could have saved the world from Shirou’s plan but only done so because it would be more interesting to him. I really do love his character and the way in which he manages to get Semiramis to reveal more of her character goes to show how much more of a boon he could have been to the story if he was given more screentime. Just having Shakespeare running around inquiring into the servants characters could have given so much development to them.
So time for Nasuverse 101. In the Nasuverse there is magecraft and there is true magic. Magecraft is the kind that mages in this series use and it is magic but it has it’s limitations. True magic on the other hand, has no limitations. Bring back the dead, time travel to the past, enter alternative dimensions, even achieve true immortality. These are the things possible for true magic. There are five known true Magic’s but for simplicity sake we shall only talk about the one that is relevant here, that being the third magic, Heaven’s Feel. Heaven’s Feel is materialisation of the soul, essentially removing the soul from the body and allowing it to interact with the real world. What this would accomplish would be to give a kind of immortality as souls would never die and live forever. In fact the manner in which servants are summoned into the real world is a kind of third magic. This magic is actually the main goal of the Holy Grail War for the Einzberns as well as Zoukens main goal. This is also the reason that the Holy Grail War can be alternatively called “Heaven’s Feel”, in case this wasn’t confusing enough. Thus in the after credits scene of this episode we have Shirou’s goal be to use third magic on all humanity, hereby making humanity immortal and rendering death obsolete. In truth this isn’t the best solution as while it may work in theory, i believe there are Nasu works in which humanity has obtained immortality and it lead to the problem of humanity stagnating. It’s unlikely that he will succeed giving the current narrative but I hope we see some good fights till then.
