If you have read the visual novels then you know that this episode was not going to end well.

This episode has a hard act to follow. It basically goes on right after we got a pretty powerful episode that was mostly new material. New material that was intriguing for new fans but mind-blowing for the older fans. Instead this episode knows it is got a boatload of feels surrounding the tortured life and horrific death of Illya. So in that regard it is safe. But it also gives us some new information about Illya and Berseker although it would be near impossible to beat what we learned about Caster. It still had enough to be a worthy successor to the last episode. It just hits different parts of the emotional spectrum. It also ties things a little more to Fate/Zero which I think will give this a little more kick to anyone who has only watched the Ufotable productions.

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Holy Shit.

There have been a few new scenes that were not in the visual novel before this point. They were pretty impressive and I talked them up when they appeared. Rin vs Illya made it into my Top 7 Type-Moon Moments for 2014. There was the much improved fight in episode ten. But overall this were minor tweaks and visual improvements. They were more signs of a good adaptation as opposed to clear indicators that this would be something more than the original. But I held out hope that this season would give us something more than that and did it ever. If nothing else it did hear a bit of grumbling about what they were going to do with this season. It seemed like they were over half way done with the story but still had a little less than half the series to go. What could they do other than the worst case scenario of dragging things out to fill in the time?

This episode is almost entirely new material. It is not radically different scenes. It is not totally going off in a new direction. Stray Servant was not introduced and Zouken Matou summoned True Assassin in the middle of Unlimited Blade Works. But everything here is either important scenes that happened off-screen or answered questions the fanbase always wondered about but were never fully answered in the visual novel. It is enough that I will have to change my Themes of Fate/Stay Night panel now that we have seen Caster’s original master.

If nothing else convinced visual novel purists that this was worth watching it would be this episode. It also makes anyone watching wonder what is coming next.

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