In general, you’d be hard-pressed to find another show that leans on montage this heavily, but it basically always works for two reasons. First, this story is fundamentally about the passage of time. What better way to convey that on the screen than channeling good old Dziga Vertov? Second—and not to overstate this point—but damn, this show is pretty. In this montage, the group scales verdant cliffsides and traverses an atmospheric forest at night as Frieren’s glowing staff gives the darkness a blue hue. Animation for weekly TV shows is difficult and demanding, but Madhouse gives virtually every scene enough visual identity to be memorable.
After fighting a three-headed dragon (er, lizard) in a sequence where Stark comedically gets the short end of the stick (he has to run around as bait while the mages fly and take pot shots), they finally get to their goal. And, well, on its face, it’s very underwhelming. The legendary hidden “hot springs” is basically an ankle-deep puddle. Surprisingly, though, Stark doesn’t seem to mind, commenting that it’s a foot bath that they all can enjoy together. He reveals that he knew it would be like this all along, and in a flashback, we see that his mentor Eisen had lovingly complained about a similarly annoying trip to find this exact landmark years earlier. But there is more than a little warmth in the old dwarf’s tone as he describes the unforgettable view he and his buddies had experienced together.
We cut from a shot of Eisen’s group staring at a gorgeous purple horizon match to our trio in the present doing the same. Sure, it may have sucked to get here, and the payoff isn’t worth it on paper, but the memories of struggling through it all together justified the climb. If you could sum up what the series is about in a few seconds, you could do worse than this sequence. Then any worries of this all playing as overly saccharine are dispelled with a comedic reveal that the trip back was somehow even worse. Hey, at least it will be worth a laugh in hindsight.
After this initial detour, the adventurers finally make their way to a nearby hot-springs town on the way to their ultimate goal. We see that Frieren has been spending all her time soaking in the spa, and her expression makes it seem like she’s reached a transcendent level of comfiness we can all aspire to. The camera jumps to Stark and Fern, who seem a bit listless by comparison. They don’t have anything to do tomorrow, and Stark, mostly to tease Fern, suggests they go on a date together. In a testament to Stark’s historic lack of game, Fern is genuinely stunned. He’s usually denser than a neutron star, and while she had hinted at wanting to hang out, she didn’t think he’d make a move. She accepts and wanders out of the room in a daze.
Meanwhile, Stark is totally freaking out and goes to Frieren for advice. She’s deep in her vacation era and eating a popsicle. After downplaying her ability to help him, she rattles off a long and very useful list of Fern’s likes and dislikes. Surprised, Stark comments that she can be a weirdly good parental figure at times for her adopted mage daughter. Frieren downplays it, and we slip into an affecting flashback where Fern’s other adoptive parent, Heiter, rattles off the same facts about the girl. Frieren indicates she doesn’t deserve credit because she simply took all of the knowledge from Heiter instead of observing it herself. Still, while Frieren may have a hard time picking up on social cues, the fact that she’s remembered all of these details for more than a decade demonstrates just how deeply she cares about her apprentice. It’s a moment as warm as the surrounding hot springs, demonstrating how even the show’s more comedic segments will find a way to slip in a dagger that reminds us of the allies Frieren has lost and how she tries to carry on their legacies.
Our central elf certainly isn’t perfect, though. When Fern, who is similarly (if not more) nervous about the date than Stark, asks for advice, Frieren drops some hilarious clunkers that stem from her master’s thousand-plus-year-old dating tips. Fern, not particularly consoled, wakes up in the middle of the night and looks anxiously at the moon. (For those who don’t get the visual symbolism here, in Japanese, the word for moon [tsuki] is basically the same as the word for “I like/love you” [suki], making it a frequent companion to romance in Japanese media.) Her staring up at this celestial body very clearly represents her trying to figure out her feelings towards the party’s frontliner. As she worries about the date, this shot of the moon fades to black, cueing the ending theme. Like me, many viewers will likely shout at their TVs, “Hey, where’d the rest of the episode go? What about the date?!”
On the one hand, the fact that the cliffhanger creates this kind of intense response shows just how invested I am in the relationship between these two. On the other, there’s a touch of adaptation awkwardness here with how Madhouse chose to divide these manga chapters. It very much feels like the setup for the date and the date itself should have been in the same episode. And it comes across as even more odd considering the arc in the first half had a satisfying beginning, middle, and end. Still, if some occasional splits like this are the biggest price to pay in an otherwise outstanding adaptation, a rare anticlimax is worth the price of admission.
Stray observations
- • After Frieren gave Fern her nonsensical dating advice, I realized that the derpy smile she sometimes makes is a reference to how her otherwise genius mentor, Flamme, looked when passing on these pearls of “wisdom.”
Elijah Gonzalez is The A.V. Club’s associate editor.
