Sousou no Frieren Season 2 Ep.05 - Milliarde. Was she Frieren's friend?

Episode 5 of Sousou no Frieren Season 2 (Frieren: Beyond Journey's End) continues with another slow-paced episode divided into two segments. The first part showed a bit of Frieren's past before she was part of the Hero Party, and it was the more interesting of the two.

It turns out that Elves spend most of their lives trying to find something to give purpose to their extremely long existence. Some of them, like Milliarde who was shown in this episode, did very petty things as a result of this. For example, she inscribed a note stating that a cheap, terrible wine was "the best liquor in the world", causing various people many years later to go on a quest searching for it.

Milliarde, I wonder if we'll ever know about what was her relationship with Frieren.

That's it folks, that's the end of this anime series. Joking aside it was a fun scene.

The episode does not really show what kind of relationship Frieren and Milliarde shared, but the very fact of her existence made me realize how little we really know about Frieren's life. Most of the series has focused on the ten years she spent together with the Hero Party trying to kill the Demon Lord.

But what about the thousands of years before that? Did she have friends, like Milliarde perhaps? How was her childhood? How long do elves spend in child form? Is it similar to that of humans, or does that stage of life also get longer accordingly? It would be nice to explore more of these themes in the future, perhaps in the same way they did today by showing some remnants from that era.

The second part of the episode was instead just your usual "the Hero Party came here and left something incomplete that Frieren now needs to settle," which we saw repeated multiple times in the previous season. In this case, it was an enormous debt that forced Frieren to help out in finding valuable silver ore in a mine.

I can't say I am a fan of these stories, especially when they are so short (half an episode) that they feel more like filler than anything else. I really need to start reading the manga for this series as well, just to understand how it is structured there. The only reason I am not doing so is because I read that the series has undergone a repeated series of hiatuses due to the health issues of the writer and is not really progressing at the moment.

Using her magic to detect minerals. She would be rich in an heartbeat!

Fern was ready to strike and destroy the city to save Frieren.

The next episode is titled "A Demon-Slaying Request," which means we will be back to seeing some action. The preview voices seem to imply that there is a demon attacking various villages and that Frieren's group will be too late to save some of them. Will it be another minor demon like the sword one, or a bigger beast?