Thus the best master and servant duo sign out of the war and I certainly will miss them. They truly deserved better than this and when tomorrow comes I am certainly going to try my hardest to roll for Mordred in Fate GO but nonetheless this isn’t a bad way for them to go out. They still show in this episode that they had the best chemistry out of all the masters and servants, to a degree that I still wonder why they were not made the main characters instead of you know who. The fight between Mordred and Semiramis was suitable epic though again A-1 animators can’t match up to what Ufotable could have done with this scene, though it is an admirable effort regardless. Though a bit chaotic at times and editing could be a bit too quick. I might as well clarify a few things here and mention that while Semiramis is constantly mentioned to be one of the world’s first poisoners, but this isn’t really the case with her legend.
The matter of her poisoning the king actually came from a tragedy written by Voltaire on her legend and she wasn’t really well known for using poison. This can be somewhat forgiven by the nature of servants being based on people’s perception of them rather than the actual figures, hence why Vlad could turn into a vampire and Shakespeare’s general magic powers. But again Semiramis isn’t famously associated with poison so there is some pretty big liberties being taken here which is oddly not often the case with Fate Servants in general. You can certainly give Type Moon flak for character designs and their personal quirks but in general they do stick to the history of the character, even if they have to tweak events a bit so that they still work.
The second thing is that the stuff that Sisgou injected into Mordred’s neck was an antidote for the hydra poisoning, made using the hydra head he got way back in episode one. The anime really glossed over just why Sisgou wanted that head and why he had this antidote in the first place but well A-1 has done a pretty poor job portraying the finer details of this story, even if I think the general things I dislike about it are the same. Still I really did love this for the symbolism of having Mordred take down another ruler for her final showdown and having the knight of treachery die because of her loyalty to her original master. Sisgou’s situation is far more vague in the series due to a lack of screen time but it appears both he and Mordred misunderstood just what they really wanted out of this war. Mordred just wanted to take away some of her father’s burden and Sisgou didn’t want not to continue the mage line of his family but instead just wanted his daughter back. There death scene was actually a big highlight of this series for me and makes it once again hard to categorize this show as a good or bad series.
Finally we have Joan vs Shakespeare in which Shakespeare reveals that his method of defeating her is through mindfuckery. It is rather amusing to have Shakespeare try to guilt her over her past only to have her break down when he calls her out on her affection for Sieg. Now it has been brought up that her feelings for Sieg are influenced by the girl Laeticia, whom she is possessing, though I think there is something later to say that Joan has her own feelings for Sieg as well. Personally I prefer to think it’s all Laeticia as I annoys me to think that Joan of Arc is unaffected by her mother, the war, being burned alive or even Gils horrible child murdering and yet gets mind broken because she wanted to get with a piece of cardboard called Sieg. I never was in favor of this relationship hinting as it is rather annoying to have a strong(Though rather boring) character like Joan get taken down a peg over a man. Still it was nice to see Saber Gils show up and even show him slowly twisting into the Gils we see in Fate/Zero. So we are near the finale and aside from Shakespeare, all the interesting characters are pretty much dead.(Sorry Astolfo fans but while he has moments, I still don’t find him all that interesting.) I have heard some rather unfortunate things about the ending to come and I just hope it’s not quite as bad as people make it out to be.