Fire Force Season 3

Episode 10

The end of last week's otherwise Arthur-centric episode teased a fateful reunion for Shinra and his long-lost little brother, Sho. This is a much-needed development for the story, as I'm concerned since this is one of the show's few emotional throughlines that will be carrying us into this final act of Fire Force's narrative. At first, it seems like that is where “Advent” is headed, and we even get a neat bit of development for Sho and his bond with Arrow, his trusted White Clad guardian. As it turns out, though, Sho disappears from the episode entirely after that opening scene. The rest of the episode is all about making sure the audience is up to speed with a whole mess of table setting and exposition.

To be fair to Fire Force, there is enough at stake in this endgame phase of the narrative that an exposition-heavy episode like this one makes sense. The crew has to take stock of where they are at in their war against the White Clad; Hibana has to show up to make sure everyone knows that The Great Cataclysm is an imminent threat; and Obi needs to scrounge up whatever resources he can from his allies in Company 2 and 4. This final arc needs to feel desperate; enough is going on here to establish that tone well enough.

True to form, though, there are also plenty of hijinks, and it's a little cheeky of the show to take up so much time with a gag that is explicitly about a character delivering exposition that nobody cares about. I found Scop the Talking Mole's return pretty enjoyable, though, even if the extended chronicles of his fanciful adventure to Tokyo are only here to waste everyone's time with silly nonsense. It's all worth it for the joke about everyone who wasn't on that expedition being so shocked that Shinra and the gang didn't all just get high and hallucinate those talking animals. There's also some mambo jumbo about how deciphering pi is key to The Great Cataclysm's success in this cycle. Still, I'm not going to let too many of my brain cells sacrifice themselves for the sake of Fire Force's flimsy technobabble. I'm sure we'll get plenty of more opportunities to be told what pi and The Great Cataclysm have to do with each other in the coming weeks.

So, on the one hand, I can't complain too much about an episode that is as breezy and entertaining as this one is. The whole point is just to connect the dots on our way to the next big setpiece, which seems to be right on its way, what that giant pillar that the White Clad summoned up out of the ocean right before the credits rolled. Still, I can't help but wish that we'd gotten more of that emotional substance that Shinra and Sho's reunion could have delivered. Hopefully Fire Force doesn't tarry for too long. There are only so many weeks left to go before everything has to wrap up for good.

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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.