Since the show still does a lot in terms of its world building and theming plus… y’know… the action in this week’s episode takes place just above Earth’s atmosphere but anyway…
Best episode of the series? Best episode of the series. In fact, it’s one of the best atmospheric battle episodes in the Gundam franchise. In fact it makes all the Dort downtime more than worth it, as the battle is pitched with very intensity and such sakuga. Everybody gets to be cool in this episode, protags and antags alike, and they milk this life-or-death struggle for all its got. It isn’t just Eugene taking control of TWO spaceships utilizing the Alaya-Vijyana System, it’s Galli-Galli and Ein vs. Mika and Shino as the former team tries to stop the latter from entering Earth (FINALLY!). Then it’s the Outer Earth Orbit Regulatory Joint Fleet’s turn when THEY try to stop Tekkadan. Everything is awesome here, and is performed with such unpredictability that once again, you fear for any potential deaths of our heroes, and yet are completely relieved everybody makes it out alive.
Yet it ain’t just all garish aesthetically pleasing marketable robots that make this episode exceptional, it’s of course character moments. I figure this is to get it out of the way since everything will go down some form of hill on Earth, but we’ve come full circle from a moment in Episode 1. Kudelia and Mika finally shake hands, and it’s a great moment capping off all the respect shit I’ve been talking about the past few episodes. We even get an expansion of the flashback sequence when Mika and Orga are kids, showing how rather… underdeveloped but eager their wish to go to a new place was. It’s been a while since the show had a meaningful interaction between the two, and to see it here, even if in flashback, works wonders. We also get some MORE dimensions from the opposition, as the head of that aforementioned mouthful, Carta, has a history with Galli-Galli and Kamen Maccy. I’m sure I have said this already to some degree, but again I appreciate Okada fleshing out a side that could’ve been just hoity-toity, racist, Terran scum. Instead we get our fair share of eccentricity and character from them. That’s worth their weight in gold when it comes to any show.
Other than that, I’ve not much else to say. There is not really anything to speculate TOO MUCH about in this episode, for it doesn’t raise anything that warrants deeper questioning in a thematic or plot sense. This is an episode about what we already know about the characters, and how some have come a long way since the beginning, and it did wonders in that regard. I don’t know how the wheels will come off in the last six episodes of this run, but thank goodness we have an episode like this to end the fourteen episode-long trek from Mars to Earth.
Watch it, you jerks.
Iron-Blooded Notes:
- Ein’s dead and I didn’t say anything about it, you say? Well, it’s all about that one shot of what I assume to be his cockpit ejecting from his mobile suit. It’s strangely vague enough for me to question whether the guy croaks or not. If he lives he’s the first mobile suit pilot in any Gundam show to take an impaling to the cockpit quite well. Feel for Galli-Galli though, will that make him more prejudiced to der Martians?
- There needs to be a non-credit variation to the ending today. The animation is superb there as well, especially Atra’s gamut of teary-eyed emotions as she moves from sadness to joyful relief seeing Mika alive. It is like… Lisa-Lisa level styles of tear explosion when she did that during one scene in the Battle Tendency arc of the JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure anime.
- The ED to this episode >>>>>>>>>>>>>>> the current 2nd ED.
