Episode 3 - City of Heresy

The Liore episodes from the '03 anime rank as some of my least favorite episodes from the original anime. Mainly, I think the science vs religion stance annoyed me. This is a personal thing for me. Anyways, Ed gets fairly preachy about it, so I'm pretty sure the Liore episode from Brotherhood is going to stay at the top of my least favorite episodes. ... Moving on...

 Look, here's Ed being a jerk to Rose. Maybe another thing that kind of rubs me wrong about this episode is that Ed argues here how "cheap" human life really is, when they spend a lot of time discussing how priceless it is, like how it cost him a leg and Al his whole body to attempt to return life to their mother. Basically the value of human life is something no one person could truly pay. But then, given the form Al has taken, maybe this isn't too contradictory if you consider a person's body as a separate entity from their soul. Anyways, I still think Ed's a jerk for mocking Rose.

And here's another jerk. Lol. This episode is full of them. Squinty-eyed bastard disguised as a loving father-figure.

Squinty eyes and slanty eye-brows... starting to show his true colors.

Yep... there they are. The lighting gradually gets darker around Cornello so that there are more shadows on his face, you know, in case we weren't sure this guy is supposed to be sinister. =P

And here's Cornello showing off his "power" by manipulating a Rose. Brilliant.

Yep... that went well. Now she's even more traumatized.

And to show that Cornello really doesn't care about his followers, in case having Rose try to kill the Elrics wasn't enough, he opens fire on her. The whole scene was really stuipd of him, imo, considering she is probably one of his most devoted followers. Really, though, as far as villains go, Cornello belongs on the level of Scooby Doo. He's cliched and makes obvious mistakes. He isn't clever. He's just an arrogant and greedy. Moving on...

First picture of one of my favorite additions to Ed's character for Brotherhood. Gotta level Ed's style. He doesn't just create an opening in the wall; he creates an elaborate set of double doors. Ed's style is over-the-top. It's excessive to the point of being tacky. At the same time, I think it's brilliant, because if you've gotta do something like that, why not make it look awesome too.

This is really just beautiful.

More of Ed's style. He's going for intimidation here because I'm pretty sure that wouldn't be useful for much of anything. I especially like that one serrated edge. It's kind of like an over-large can-opener.

The episode concludes by getting Cornello to monologue because that's what bad guys do...

And the cliched trap. Yep that was on for the entire monologue. But then, like I said, Cornello's not a very clever villain, so he was super easy to beat.

And here's Ed being a jerk again (personal opinion). I mean his over-all message is good, but his communication is insensitive. Or maybe it's just puberty rearing it's ugly head. I do live with a pair of teenagers and they can say some completely inappropriate things and think they're being either sensitive or funny when they're really not. Anyways.

Aside from setting up discontent in Liore, introduce a few characters like Rose, and show off that the Philosopher's stone can be faked or used up (this was shown in episode 1, but Ed didn't see that one disappear), this episode does not contribute much to the development of the story. Bonus: it only took one episode in Brotherhood. It's the little things.

And then there's these guys at the very very end:

Yeah, I bet that symbol's important, given the lovely slobbery up-close we get of it.