Sousou no Frieren – Episode 09

Episode Synopsis:

Frieren and Aura begin to fight.  Stark and Fern bring Duke Granat to a safe location, and then go looking for Frieren.  On the way, they are ambushed by Lugner and Linie.  Stark engages Linie and kills her after a difficult fight.  Fern engages Lugner and kills him by using her superior spellcasting speed.

Episode Review:

Episode 9 is an unusual one for this show, as nearly the entire episode is action (or at least characters engaging in combat; there are numerous pauses for chats or flashbacks).  I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, when there is action, it is beautifully animated – characters move fluidly, there are complex changes in perspective, the spell effects look great.

Heck, even the death scene of one of the demons looks incredible.

Even out of combat, this episode in particular seems to be animated with some loving care.  There is a scene, otherwise unremarkable, of Stark putting on his jacket, but the attention to detail, the motions he makes to straighten the fabric to put his arm through – you can tell someone really practiced this or modeled it by watching someone do it.  Here’s a .gif.

On the other hand… the episode doesn’t flow well, and suffers from trying to focus on too many things.  Going into this episode, I (and probably most of the audience) were expecting the showdown between Frieren and Aura to take center stage.  The lead-in to the episode literally has Frieren floating above the demonic army as Lugner describes her as “Frieren the Slayer.”  Yet by the end of the episode, Frieren and Aura have done little more than exchange greetings and tried a few opening feints.  Instead, we keep cutting between Frieren, Stark, and Fern, plus flashbacks and internal monologues. 

The net effect is that you feel like you’ve spent 25 minutes watching 2 minutes of action, and it’s more than a little frustrating.

Another problem is that it seems like the demons keep leaving their human enemies alive long enough for the humans to figure out how to kill them.   Stark is fully knocked out or down twice, and each time Linie walks off and sits down to watch Lugner fight Fern, only to be surprised when he stands up again.  Lugner literally has Fern pinned to a wall with a strand of his blood magic piercing her body… but she manages to get her staff back, escape restraint, and fight back because Lugner was apparently too busy monologuing to notice?

The demons have been built up as fearsome, inhuman enemies that have learned the most efficient ways to kill humans, but instead they excessively toy with Fern and Stark until the pair turn the tables and annihilate them.  It’s like they exist as a learning opportunity for the young duo rather than real adversaries, which feels like a letdown.

So a mixed bag this episode, but still a visual feast, and I remain invested in the overall story.

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