Episode Synopsis:
Sense introduces the second test – a dive to the bottom of a monumentous nearby tomb. Despite the lack of any explicitly rivalrous conditions – everyone who reaches the bottom will pass – the remaining test-takers splinter off into small groups, with Sense herself accompanying Frieren and Fern to validate the results (without aiding or interfering with their descent). This takes somewhat longer than she expected due to Frieren’s dungeon-crawling instincts, honed by years of travelling with Himmel, to comb the levels for obscure loot.
The tomb is supposedly unmapped by the current civilization, and the reasons why are gradually discovered by the test-takers – deadly traps, powerful animated gargoyles, and perhaps the most dangerous deterrent of all: conjured copies of the delvers themselves…
Episode Review:
While the set-up for this one is a little wonky, there’s some good stuff in here, and the dramatic reveal at the end makes me very excited for the next installment.
I’ll admit that I have a couple of questions about the basic premise of this episode. How does there exist a tomb that has not yet been explored by anyone with both the desire and the ability to find the secrets within – and yet, Sense believes that first-class mages should be able to plumb it in less than twenty-four hours? Denken asserts that there are patterns to how tombs of the era are laid out, and he’s unconcerned about choosing an incorrect entrance – only a sub-optimal one. I suppose this means that what little they know (or will find out) about the labyrinth can be used to infer things about the rest of the layout, but still.
Second, how do so many mages consider the possibility that they’ll be thrown under a metaphorical bus by one of their peers – who have no hard incentive to do so – smaller than the chance that they’ll encounter an obstacle that they don’t have the expertise to overcome themselves? Like, if you think there might be something down there that the fastest way through is sacrificing a teammate, what’s your plan for if you encounter it alone? Everyone except for the one guy at least paired off, but… the dungeon is unexplored! Because people that have tried have either bounced out or never returned! Aauugh
As an unrelated aside, I also have to nitpick the Crunchyroll translators for a line near the end of the episode, after Denken’s group defeats the copy of Laufen. The long-haired woman, Methode, says something that’s written as “If whoever cast this spell can control multiple copies simultaneously, they must be terrifyingly powerful.”, but I don’t see a reason for the second clause to be in the present tense. The specificity of their previous commentary on the copy suggests that it’s the first one they’ve encountered – if they don’t know that whatever is creating the copies can maintain more than one (even if the viewer does), the sentence should still be hypothetical. I’ve seen another translation which renders the second clause as “they’ll make a terrifying threat”, which is vague enough to function under both assumptions – this is good because that translation pluralizes Denken’s first post-combat comment (“replicas” instead of Crunchyroll’s “a replica”), which I read as implying that the shown fight with the Laufen clone was only the final stage of an encounter with more than one (my Japanese isn’t great, but I do know that the language doesn’t enforce plurality like English does, so this is very likely to be contextual), though—again—I don’t see any evidence in the prior scenes to make that jump.
Ugh, my brain.
Points in this episode’s favor include Fern’s conversation with Sense about drive, which I found very endearing. I’m sure there are more than a few people out there who’ve made notable accomplishments in their fields of study only to suffer from burnout and would appreciate a companion who retained their enthusiasm for that subject specifically and/or general joie de vivre. It’s going a long way to averaging out my opinion of Fern after several incidents of her being unnecessarily difficult. As for Frieren herself, I have mixed feelings about RPG logic being applied (or applicable – I’m not sure which is weirder) in-universe, but her bonding with Himmel continues to be adorable and my only real complaint is that I feel like the mimic gags go on for too long (that’s time which could have been used to show Denken’s group fighting another clone so I wouldn’t be driving myself to an aneurysm).
I’m a huge fan of Wirbel pairing off his trio and their doubles in what I assume is an attempt to rock-paper-scissors the matchups. I’ve been waiting for something like this to happen ever since watching Those Who Hunt Elves and being very disappointed when the protagonists found themselves in a similar situation and just accepted the mirror matches. I hope it works out.
While the set-up for this one is a little wonky, there’s some good stuff in here, and the dramatic reveal at the end makes me very excited for the next installment.
The Con Artists 
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