Rin is nothing if not a woman of her word, the minute she sees Shirou without his servant she attacks. She did say if she caught him not acting like a proper master again she’d kill him. Of course, this is only one of the many things that happen in this episode. So the episode starts with a flashback of Kiritsugu before the credits, one we’ve seen before with Shirou’s discussion of his dream to be a hero. We cut back to present time to see that Taiga ditched on them to do a favor for the teacher from the last episode. Shirou gets ready to head off to school and leaves Saber home….
So yeah, that’s a thing. We cut to school where Shirou is talking to his friend the student council president and we learn an important thing to note in this episode is Shinji and the fact he was the last one seen with a girl who went missing. Who went missing you ask? The head of the archery club, yeah, that girl who was getting a suspicious amount of screen time. I was wondering why she was getting such a strange amount of focus for a side character and now I have my answer.
Rin come up to Shirou with a point to make, the point is that he’s being an idiot that’s going to get himself killed at this rate. The fight between Rin and Shirou holds a good amount of time in the episode, and then when they hear a scream they cut the battle short and find a girl almost dead from having her mana drained.
Shirou saves Rin’s life and then runs off to fight the servant he knows is in the area. This is something the original anime did cover, it pissed me off the first time I watched it. Perhaps it’s because Studio Deen really did play Shirou up as incompetent, but this time since he seemed to actually know what he was doing it didn’t bother me as much. This time he actually seemed to know what he was doing.
He manages to hold Rider off until Rin can catch up to them and save his ass. I love Rider, She pretty much in not so many words says that her Master has no balls [and if you know who her master is, this is just fantastic.] Also, dang Shirou cocky much? Saying that she isn’t that strong compared to Berserker? I mean, it’s sort of true but still…anyway this might teach him however that leaving the house without Saber is a dumb idea. Rin saves him from Rider and they return to the Tohsaka mansion, where she patches up his bleeding arm. [Not that he really needs it, we learned earlier in the episode he has amazing healing skills. We won’t know till later on why.]
They make a cease fire between the two of them to locate the other master that is hiding in their school, stealing the life force of students. They also discuss Shirou’s father and his lack of training in magic, now don’t get me wrong. I totally understand why Kiritsugu didn’t train Shirou the proper way and why he never passed the magic crest on to make Shirou a true successor. I get his fear of magic after what happened in the last grail war.
However, he really hindered Shirou. I know there is no way he could of predicted the grail war would happen again in Shirou’s lifetime since it’s supposed to be fifty years and not ten. It’s just unforunate for Shirou that Kiritsugu left him with no real means of defending himself. Rin gets mad and says that Kiritsugu wasn’t a real mage, you can tell she’s hurt by the loss of her own father. If only she knew the truth behind her Dad’s death.
I loved this episode, it had a lot of action in the first half of the episode between the fight with Shirou and Rin around the school and Shirou and Rider out in the woods but it also had a lot of emotion. In particular with the ending talk of their fathers, you can feel how much Rin misses her father and then you remember what came of her mother after her father’s death. It’s just so sad to think about her growing up like that, while she says mean things about Shirou and Kiritsugu you might guess that she is jealous of him from this line “He prioritized being a father over being a mage.”
Maybe I’m reading too much into it, everything in this adaptation continues to be amazing from the animation to the pacing. I haven’t really been paying attention to the music score past the opening and ending, perhaps I’ll keep an ear open for that in later episode but it’s not distracting in any way so that’s a good thing.
This really is the adaptation this series deserves.
~Midnight