So far this season, Sousou no Frieren seems to be going for a sort of Platonic ideal of its idyll mode. That’s due to change starting with the next episode (in two weeks, no ep next week), which is a sort of good news, bad news scenario. I mean, a major arc with this series can go either way. On the other hand the big bad of it (a demon named Revolte – that’s quite a development) is going to be played by Miki Shinichirou, who’s at the very top end of the seiyuu pantheon of Gods.
Given that the Revolte Arc will probably take up the rest of the season as it’s only ten episodes, the other side of Frieren wanted to go out with a bang. So we got an episode of the show at its most perversely low-key, starting with a chapter about an old dwarf named Fass searching for an ancient Elvish liquor named Boshaft (which is an odd name for a liquor). He’s discovered the underground chamber where it’s hidden, but it’s behind a barricade sealed with Elvish magic. Fass gets wind that Frieren is in town and begs her to help him open it, but she refuses even after he offers twenty gold coins. It will take three months, she argues. The youngsters, both more sympathetic and greedy, agree on her behalf.
As it turns out Frieren has a history with Boshaft, given that she was friends with the Elf (Milliarde) who created it. As such she knows it actually tastes terrible, and that Milliarde put up the ward as a sort of lark. Heiter was keen to taste it once upon a time, too. It does indeed take three months to open the chamber, and the liquor does indeed taste terrible. But as long as he gets to share it with a crowd, Fass doesn’t seem all that heartbroken about it.
On to the “Norm” district (adjacent to the Cliff district, I imagine), an area run by a powerful trading company that seems to have fallen on hard times. The president of the company gave the Heroes’ party a big loan eighty years earlier, and his grandson now fills that role. He promptly presents her with a bill she’s quite unable to pay, and assigns her to work in the mines to pay it off. Never mind three months – her sentence is 300 years, which to beings like Fern and Stark is rather a problematic number. Interestingly Frieren offers little resistance to all this, leaving the kids to try and figure out what to do next.
If anything, this chapter is even more meandering and odd than the Boshaft one. The president really just wants Frieren to find a vein of silver, which of course she’ll have no problem doing. Why not just ask rather than go through the whole charade? Entertainment purposes, I suppose. But she seems to take no issue with his argument for why this outcome is the best for all concerned. These sorts of detours are the essence of this side of Sousou no Frieren, where life is what happens along the way. These weren’t exactly the most compelling among them, to be sure, and I suppose it isn’t the worst time in the world to introduce some actual plot (especially if you’re slipping the audience a Miki in the process).
