Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood - Episode 27 ENGLISH DUB Review

Episode 27, Banquet at the Crevice"

"I'll give you a hand job for a quarter!"
 

*****SPOILERS*****

Synopsis: In a dream, Hohenheim talks to a younger Pinako about his sons, the country, and humans. Another version of him appears and reveals that "Pinako" is really him trying to defend the human race. In the end, he dreams of confirmation of his beliefs by Trisha and the people he knew in Resembool. Waking up, Hohenheim continues on his journey.

Comments:

How does one review the dub of something that is largely a clip episode? The only characters who aren't speaking merely in clips are Hohenheim, Father, a younger Pinako, and Trisha. So, I guess what I'll have to do is, well, just comment on their performances.

Well, if that's the case, then this is one of the best episodes of the English dub, because they all do an excellent job. The episode has the luxury of only having crappy performances in the clips played in it.

Like I've said before, I really enjoy John Swasey's Hohenheim. I think it has this very depressed, detached sound to it, and yet Swasey is able to make it sound geniunely so, with a sense of whistfulness, unlike Scott McNeil's sleepy, uninterested Hohenheim from the first series. You can even get the sense that there's some warmth in there, too.

Father, meanwhile, sounds very forceful. You really get the impression that he has some real power, real ambition. It's also much different from the weaker, more sagely sounding Japanese voice for the character. He even sounds feeble in Japanese, despite his immense power. I haven't decided which take on the character I like. To be honest, I would have preferred a dryer, disinterested sounding Father, which I think the Japanese version comes closer to, but this version isn't bad.

The younger Pinako is something I wish we could have seen more of. She really got short in her old age, didn't she? What I like about her voice is that it actually sounds like a younger version of her usual voice. She can really emote well, too. They did a good job casting for this.

I love Trisha's voice, both her younger and older one. She really sounds warm and loving. With a voice like that, I can tell why Hohenheim fell in love with her.

One of the things I dislike about Brotherhood is that it makes it pretty clear that Hohenheim and Father really aren't the same person, even if they look alike, before it needed to. In the manga, it was ambigious until Edward met Father (which is in the next episode). What if you hadn't read the manga? For a while, plenty of people believed that Hohenheim had created the homunculi.

Overall ENGLISH DUB Score: 4 out of 5


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