That’s not a sound food should make.
What They Say:
“Logistics in the Northern Plateau”
Frieren is reunited with Fass the dwarf, who has been searching for the Boshaft liquor for over 200 years.
Review: (Please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
The arrival at the Northern Plateau was marked by harrowing danger and combat, but that doesn’t last long. Like anywhere else, once the party reaches a city, their life-or-death battles are replaced by the most inconsequential side quests. Similar to the recent sword demon quest, as soon as Frieren gets a whiff of her past coming back to cause her problems, she insists on leaving town immediately, much to the surprise of her companions. But she should know by now that the more she resists, the more she’s guaranteed to be found by her pursuer while she tries to escape. Since it has been 80 years since she last visited any of these locations, these interactions usually have to be either descendants or nonhuman races. This time it’s the latter, an alcoholic dwarf named Fass who has spent centuries singlemindedly obsessed with finding a particular liquor and laments that fellow alcoholic Heiter didn’t survive another 80 years.
Frieren has tried to make these quick breaks a couple of times now, but we’ve never seen quite as extreme of a role reversal as when Fass offers a handsome sum of gold for the party to spend the next three months breaking down a barrier. Suddenly three months is all the time in the world to the immortal elf of over a thousand years and no time at all to the impatient young ones ready to cash in on an easy job. So why is Frieren resisting so strongly when using magic to help NPCs with mundane tasks is business as usual for this team, and three months is a blink of an eye to her? That’s because Frieren is intimately familiar with the origin of this legend, and she knows it only leads to disappointment.
You might wonder why Frieren never told Fass the truth instead of letting him spend another 80 years wasting his life to try to find some booze that was actually disgusting, or at least inform him when he’s on the verge of reaching it and just needs her presence for another three months. These are all very good questions, and I don’t know that we get a great answer. One can imagine that Frieren didn’t want to take away the life purpose of someone who had already dedicated 120+ years to it, hoping he would never find it, and now that he was about to do so, bringing it up would just invite the question of why she didn’t do that 80 years earlier. Still, the fact that this isn’t even acknowledged seems a little strange.
We experience that quarter of a year much like Frieren would, with our perspective of time bypassing nearly the entire period without so much as a montage. After that, it makes sense that we’ve finally reached the 30-year mark of Himmel’s death. The journey through the Northern Plateau continues, and we’re in for some laughs right off the bat with Stark’s reaction to their rock-hard bread. Frieren explains that resource distribution in the Northern Plateau is not ideal these days, and they come across a powerful organization that should be helping in that process. However, Frieren isn’t quite savvy enough to realize that this is another prime example of her old acquaintance’s descendants coming to collect on some old debt, this time literally.
The small fortune from Fass is a drop in the bucket of what Frieren owes from Himmel’s party borrowing money 80 years ago. No demon can defeat Frieren, but a shrewd merchant with a piece of paper can make her instantly accept her fate of mining for the next 300 years. Everything about this sudden reveal is executed hilariously. Almost exactly 80 years after her last journey ended, she declares that this one, too, must end, as she gets dragged away by rough-looking miners and her much shorter-lived companions are left mouth agape in her dust.
Of course, a mage who uses magic to do everything from obliterating hoards of demons to polishing statues isn’t about to do manual labor that would actually take decades or centuries to strike riches. A beautiful sequence set to perhaps Evan Call’s most strikingly dramatic cue from the first season uncovers the location of the silver, and despite appearing to have resigned herself to centuries of hard work moments before, Frieren calmly takes a seat and lets the boring muscle men get to digging. She recalls the kind noble who lent her party money with no repayment deadline and questions why his grandson would place her in servitude on sight. Frieren knows the insidious minds of demons all too well, but merchants are another breed altogether. Logistics can be more challenging than adventuring, and any good merchant will use any leverage to its full advantage. As is often the case in stories like this, the traveling party always comes across new characters exactly when they’re needed, and that little scrap of paper made Frieren more useful in a day than her debt or years of blind mining ever would.
Just as three months passed in the blink of an eye, this season is also only here for three months, actually closer to two given its short episode count, and we’re now halfway through that run. The fact that nothing has particularly happened in this half of a season isn’t necessarily a problem; on the contrary, that kind of material is much of what made Frieren so special. But as inconsequential side quests go, this episode was far from the strongest showing. The perception of time is a major theme in this series, and it’s interesting to see how that plays out in the execution of the series itself. Some episodes feel all too short because they’re so propulsive, while others are just the opposite: so leisurely that they seem to comfortably stretch on forever. This time, both stories just came across as brief and anticlimactic, leaving the episode as a whole lacking in some of the lasting depth we’ve come to expect from every uneventful distraction in Frieren. Fortunately, a relatively weak episode of Frieren is a pretty good episode of anime in general. The series is always beautiful, even if this one didn’t show off as much as many episodes do, and we got several moments that earn emphatic laughter.
Evidently, this is exactly the point at which we’re supposed to be asking “When is something going to happen?” Apparently the series will be off next week, and when it returns for its second half, it will dive into an actual arc. I assume it will last the rest of the season, since five episodes still isn’t an especially long arc now that Frieren has one over twice that length under its belt. Again, major plot progression and action isn’t inherently any more valuable than vignettes that change nothing about the status quo in a series that handles the latter so well. But if this short season ends up split into half free-flowing world exploration and half serious arc, we should get the best of both worlds in the time we have. Given the unusual episode count, I imagine the arc will be complete in those remaining five episodes, but I’m much more interested in the character development and allegories for our lives than whatever might be literally happening in the story.
In Summary:
Not every episode of Frieren has to blow our minds. Sometimes, an old dwarf is just looking for booze for hundreds of years only to find it’s a prank. Sometimes, Frieren gets confined to servitude for even more hundreds of years only to leave within hours. As our short sophomore season already reaches its halfway point with diminishing weight, it’s finally time to start looking at what else it has in store, which we will apparently explore in its latter half. But even when Frieren is relatively testing our patience, we can still marvel in wonder at its aesthetics and laugh out loud at its expert sense of humor. Just like Fass finally achieving his life goal, it may be disappointing, but it’s still a good time.
Grade: B-
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Advent Seven 
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