Episode 8 – Fire Force Season 3

A part of me wishes that I had gone back to do a full rewatch of the last season of Fire Force and caught up on all of the plot threads that have become so hazy in my memory since 2020, because “Holy Mother of Darkness / The Knight’s King Great Adventure” is just chock full of payoffs that have been years in the making (at least in the first half). The fact that I could keep up and be as riveted as I was this week may be a testament to how successfully Fire Force is running with all of this narrative momentum, even half a decade after the fact.

Granted, one of the keys to this series’ success is that its story has always stuck to a simple and digestible core foundation, even when the plot digresses into tangents of lore and worldbuilding. Fundamentally, what Hibana’s crew learns in the dark basement of that burned out temple is not all that complicated, even if you don’t quite remember who the Woman in Black is or why there is an adorable little mole-guy hiding in the shadows and watching Sister Sumire unload two-and-a-half-centuries’ worth of evil exposition on our heroes. Once, the world was free from the terror of human combustion, but the Great Cataclysm ruined all that. Since then, there have been forces at work trying to finish what that first attempt at apocalyptic conflagration started. Sister Sumire, as it turns out, is one of those sinister schemers who orchestrated the feeding of insects to innocent children like the young Sisters who went up in flames all those years ago.

Finally, we have confirmation as to what that spontaneous combustion means in the grand scheme of Fire Force’s cosmology. The Infernals, you see, really are doppelgangers, with each one of them down in the Nether corresponding to a regular, not-eternally-on-fire person up on Earth. When the Infernals try to combine with the body and soul of their surface-dwelling counterparts, boom, you get spontaneous combustion. In other words, the world of Fire Force essentially functions exactly like that of the Jordan Peele horror movie Us, except with more explosions and fan service.

What makes all of this info-dumping work is how well david production capitalizes on that excellent, creepy atmosphere built up last week. Sister Sumire’s nondescript presence perfectly fit a character who has secretly been doing some truly heinous evil behind the scenes. Her Adolla Burst manifests from the constant shivering she experiences from being forced to live in a world that isn’t completely consumed by hellfire. The sequence where she forces Habina to confront the cowering, tortured Infernal doppelgangers of her combusted childhood friends is just so deliciously deranged.

This episode isn’t all dark mood and horrifying revelations, though. Thanks to the quick thinking of Vulcan, LiSA, and Yu, our bravest little idiot knight errant gets to go on the adventure of a lifetime. Of course, when I say “Adventure of a Lifetime”, I’m referring to the ramshackle replication of old RPG tropes that the gang manages to cobble together thanks to some game Asakusa residents and Arthur Boyle’s deeply ingrained personality disorders. Fire Force has always had fun playing up how genuinely out of touch with reality Arthur is, and this might be the show’s crowning achievement in that regard. Everything from the ridiculous fetch-quest nature of Vulcan’s game to the old-school pixelated visuals that accentuate Arthur’s POV is just pitch perfect.

It might work a little too perfectly since Arthur’s inability to parse basic metaphorical language leads to him conclude that the real orichalcum ore that is needed to reforge Excalibur is waiting for him down in the Nether instead of the tsukemono shop that Vulcan was trying to direct him back towards. I can’t think of a more perfect conclusion to this farce than having Vulcan’s well-meaning exercise in enabling Arthur’s delusions lead to the gang being forced to march so confidently and so wrongly into a place of nightmarish horrors.

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Fire Force is currently streaming on Crunchyroll on Fridays.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on BlueSky, his blog, and his podcast.