WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS OPEN SPOILERS. READ AT YOUR OWN RISK.
Full Metal Panic! 15 - 17
So here we have what is apparently an anime-only arc for this show.
Which, by all you Akame ga Kill! watchers out there, seems to be a terrible thing done to adaptations. When they're not done right anyway.
That is not the case here. This arc essentially serves as a separate side-story to all the high-school hijinks combined with Chidori's attitude. Chidori isn't even featured in this arc.
So Sousuke receives some disturbing information that Gauron is still alive.
He is assigned to an assassination team to deal with that problem. And this is where thing start to go in a different direction for this show.
For the most part, we've seen Sousuke's military allies mainly be teenagers. Mao, Kurt, Tessa, etc. On the assassination team for this arc, Sousuke's the only teenager around, and is paired with many adults, some of which are cocky individuals that look down on Sousuke and only see him as a hindrance. It feels realistic, in a sense. Despite what the reports about Sousuke say, he's still a teenager. The kind of person I'm sure a fully war-trained adult wouldn't like to take orders from. It all comes across as natural, despite how unlikable some of these guys are at first.
But it's not all bad. One particular female team member named Gray acknowledges who he is and the two form a small friendship of sorts during the mission.
But despite that, the majority of the team doesn't listen to Sousuke's advice and completely botch the mission, turning the entire thing into a fight for survival, as a member of the team gets severely injured.
They end up managing to elude the enemy, and end up having no other choice but to listen to Sousuke, who knows the area quite well, due to it having a connection to his past.
As the team recovers and reformulates their strategy, you start to notice the members of team showing newfound respect for Sousuke, albeit in their own way.
But while that's going on though, we discover that an old friend of Sousuke has defected to the enemy and is predicting his every move, with Sousuke believing that he's no longer alive. It creates this clever sense of tension and despair for the viewer, as you begin to see that the team is essentially backing themselves into a corner without anyone able realize it.
It goes about as well as you'd expect.
Sousuke gets separated from the group and is forced to fight his former friend, whom he doesn't realize who it is until the very end, making all the more sad. The remaining team members try as hard as they can to hold off the main target, each getting offed one by one.
There's one especially heartbreaking moment where the teammate who was injured tries to suicide bomb the target only for him to be denied from it at the last second. You can really see the fear and despair on his face during that scene as he does so.
It all culminates to a point where Sousuke ends up being the lone survivor of the mission, having finished off the target and his former friend. He arrives back home, and sits down next to Chidori, who asks him:
"Why don't you say something, Sousuke?"
To which he responds: "No problem."
This scene right here basically sums it all up. Nothing in this arc that happened to Sousuke, with the exception of him fighting his own friend, was new to him. It's a battlefield. People die right in front of you. There are times where you'll survive being unable to help or save anyone you care about. Sousuke grew up knowing those things, therefore he has nothing much to say about it. I don't know, maybe I'm looking too deep into it in that sense, but I feel that it all fits with the way Sousuke and Chidori pretty much live in separate worlds.
Either all, this arc has been some really good desert military warfare that I never thought I'd see done good in an anime like this. I really enjoyed it. It hits all the right notes, keeps just the right tone, and delivers a great deal of character backstory along with it.
Good job, FMP.
