Fire Force Season 3

Episode 24

For as satisfying as Arthur's battle against Dragon was a few weeks ago, it just wouldn't have felt right if Fire Force ended without the Knight King getting one more chance to knock some sense into our hellacious Hero. I'm not even going to question how Arthur managed to regrow all of his obliterated body parts so he could fly back into the atmosphere of the decimated Earth and thwack Shinra with his impossibly giant sword. Literally every other human on the planet is apparently dead, the surface of the world has been swallowed in a thick sea of despair made manifest, and the moon has transformed into a grinning monstrosity straight from the pages of a child's coloring book (or maybe a popular fantasy manga from 20 years ago). The point is, the rules of reality have already been shot like Old Yeller and buried in the backyard. We have to take whatever wins we can get.

When it comes to the parts of this penultimate episode that are trying to pay off the story's Big Ideas and Extra Special Feelings, I have to wonder if they would be playing better if the first three-quarters of the series weren't such a jumble of vague recollections by now. The vision of Shinra's happy childhood alongside Mari is sweet enough, but all the business about her being the Evangelist's Doppelgänger feels more like Atsushi Ohkubo is getting some last-minute narrative housekeeping out of the way before closing up shop instead of dropping major revelations that have been years in the making. Even Shinra and Sho barely seem concerned about their family ties to this grand apocalyptic scheme, though that is at least in character for our hero. Solving the meaning of life, the universe, and everything has never been Shinra Kusakabe's bag. He just needs to know where the nearest crisis is and whatever he needs to hit really freaking hard to make things right.

At the end of the day, “Answer” really is just the inevitable conclusion to the battle that we left off last week. Before, Shinra and Sho couldn't muster up the strength to beat Haumea. Now, they can, mostly because the arrival of their Monster Mommy has given them enough of the Power of Love to beat the abstract concept of Despair to death with their bare hands. I don't know if Fire Force could have come up with a more straightforward conclusion if it tried.

The Rule of Cool prevails, however, especially since the imaginative power of creation is literally the thing that allows Shinra to remake the world and bring life back to the planet with little more than a flick of his wrist. The only thing left to resolve at this point is how to free humanity from the supposedly inevitable cycle of suffering and death that has plunged it into despair since time immemorial. Shinra has to pause time and rebuild reality a few hundred times before he can settle on a solution, but that mischievous grin he gives Haumea means he must have some pretty wacky ideas for what comes next…

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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.