This is an episode with an inordinate number of dying women resting on floors. And Waver is also resting on the floor. Draw from that what you will. But since Kiritsugu‘s flashbacks are done it means that the normal opening and closing have returned. And so have the deadly battles of the Holy Grail War. You can feel the tension as each Master and Servant is eliminated as the remaining teams know that they are fighting the best of what remains will less and less resources. It is quickly becoming a question of who can survive the long game. As soon as you run out of aces up your sleeve you are done. And it is clear that some teams are running low on everything while others are just getting started.

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And we enter into the second part of Kiritsugu‘s back story. He clearly already started down the road towards being a complete unfeeling killing machine when he killed his father. But a gentle hand could have easily pulled him away from his monstrous path if he were placed in an environment where he was immersed in the positive things in life. But this is a Gen Urobuchi novel. That is not going to happen. By they way, It seems like Gen Urobuchi has a fetish for murdering children. I know that infant immortality is sometimes a strong trend in fiction and people like to play with it for shock value. But this goes a little above and beyond.  With Caster is was a little creepy but made sense for the historical character involved. After this episode I think it might have passed into the minor fetish category.

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I said it was a good title for this post last week and I stick by that fact. But it seems the lesson of why Kiritsugu is a ruthless assassin apparently is going to take more than one episode. But I guess you don’t turn into a mechanical murder machine from one incident in your life. It takes a bit of time and wear to fully kill a person’s soul. You have to be involved with the deaths of all the people you have ever loved for one reason or another. We flash back to Kiritsugu’s origins that made him into the Mage Killer of the 4th Holy Grail War. And so the journey of a thousand miles begins with a few significant steps in this episode. Interesting note: They did not use the standard opening in this episode. They just play the credits over a conversation while driving to get the maximum story in this episode.

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