Fire Force Season 3

Episode 6

“Beyond Prayer” is that most classic, climactic type of battle anime episodes: “Two Dudes With Crazy Powers Wail On Each Other For Twenty Minutes Straight (With Some Flashbacks and Digressions Thrown In To Keep Things From Getting Monotonous).” Fire Force has indulged in this kind of showcase several times over the course of its run, and the end result is almost always a great time (and an excellent demonstration of the talent working at Studio David, if nothing else). Season 3 has been rough around the edges, to be sure, but the good news is that “Beyond Prayer” mostly delivers on its potential and serves up a heaping helping of good old fashioned anime whoo.

I say “mostly” because there are still a few noticeably shabby-looking cuts that detract from this otherwise excellent action sequence, though they are not enough to derail the entire production. It's a shame that a moment like Shinra locking in and flip-kicking burns like a boss ends up looking kind of stiff and slapdash, but the emotion of the moment works well enough, I think. Besides, once Shinra's blue flames kick in and the battle's final act takes center stage, the animators' work really gets the chance to shine. It's a fun fight, at the end of the day, which is exactly what it needed to be.

There's also a decent amount of substance to go along with all of this style. Burns' flashback is a great bit of mood-setting that helps lead us into the man's final (?) testimony to Shinra and Joker; it shows us a man whose lifelong devotion to his faith has struggled to reconcile the flawed and fractured reality of the church's manipulation and lies. While I think it is a personal copout for an aged soldier like Burns to say that he's just too old to face the truth and act like a revolutionary, I won't deny that it's a very real reaction for a man like Burns to have to face the revelations he has experienced.

I would be remiss if I neglected to mention the very cool (if incredibly) brief awakening of Iris as a new Pillar. The sequence where she rescues Maki and the rest of Company 8 from Dragon's flames is a great bit of direction all around. Now, I'm not going to start expecting Fire Force to suddenly become a series with exceptionally deep, well-rounded character development (especially for its female characters), but I hope that the show can do right by everyone's favorite nun and give her some interesting material to work with in the near future.

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Fire Force is currently streaming on Crunchyroll on Fridays.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on BlueSky, his blog, and his podcast.