Fire Force Season 3

Episode 12

At first, I thought that “The Madness of the Distant Past” was going to function as a straightforward followup to the kaiju battle that began in last week's episode. We begin with Sho battling Faerie to rescue Shinra, complete with all of the high flying moves and explanations of Faerie's gravity-based powers that you would expect. The kaiju is indeed destroyed, though it's almost something that happens in the background while everything else is being set up. After that, the episode takes a pretty hard turn into providing a bunch of juicy expository tidbits and setting up a major shift in the show's status quo. It's a mid-season finale that certainly leaves the audience with a lot to chew on, but the plot we were already smack in the middle of does not get enough of a chance to meaningfully resolve.

Still, those lore morsels (lore-sels?) are pretty tasty. The first major detour from the kaiju fight takes us back to Yona of the White Clad, who is reminiscing about the days immediately following the Great Cataclysm. He encounters the original Raffles, who is merely the bedraggled leader of a meager caravan of survivors, and proceeds to manipulate humanity into creating the Holy Sol church. These are cool details to see unfold, even if they are not exactly revelatory, seeing as we already knew that the Church's official history is a sham. We do get a much more direct link between Amaterasu - or, rather, the powerful young girl who has been made to power the Amaterasu reactor for the last 250 years - and Iris, and it is awesome to see this long-foreshadowed story thread start to take center stage. Between all the talk of Doppelgangers and the flash of Iris' latent powers back in the fight against Dragon, I can't help but suspect a major turning point for Iris' character is right around the corner.

Speaking of major turning points, the entire series takes a huge one when Shinra comes into contact with Inca, the purple-haired White Clad girl who has been oh-so excited for something of great importance to happen soon. To be honest, Inca is a character that had completely slipped my mind prior to this episode (another casualty of the ridiculously long break between Seasons 2 and 3), so I'm a little fuzzy on how much of her role in the story has been laid out up until now. Either way, though, she makes a grand entrance this week, since she's the one who convinces the unconscious Shinra to use the power of metaphysical superspeed to travel back in time to explore the world that existed before the Great Cataclysm and uncover some kind of lead for how to put a stop to the next one.

Do yourselves a favor and don't think too hard about how all of this is meant to work on the level of physics, since Fire Force isn't going to bother with any specifics beyond “go fast equals time travel, okeedoke?” What really matters is the consequence of Shinra's little trip back into a world that looks very familiar to our own. It looks identical, in fact, because the show makes the inspired choice to frame Shinra's monochromatic point-of-view against filtered photos of real-world Japan. It's an eerie and very effective shift in style that helps give this overstuffed episode a bit of the emotional punch it needs to stick in our memories until the show returns.

The most fascinating turn of this finale is the one that comes right as we're about to smash to credits, because of course it does. Whatever Shinra got up to in the abstract meta-space that sent him back in time ends up shooting him forward in time, as well; or, at least, his consciousness makes the journey. When he awakens, he's sporting a crazy blond haircut and has seemingly been restrained by force for who-knows-how-long. In the months that have gone by, another four Pillars have emerged from the ocean. Neither Shinra nor we have any idea what the hell is going on, but it's safe to expect that our hero is going to have a hell of a time playing catch-up when Fire Force's final season returns next year.

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Fire Force is currently streaming on Crunchyroll on Fridays.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on BlueSky, his blog, and his podcast.