Not even being subtle 
Also in the same scene they allude to a coming Zeon civil war (classic fascist infighting), which kinda adds higher stakes to Challia's quest to find the Red Comet.
Another banger episode, although we just speed ran a whole bunch of UC tropes all at once. Shiiko's a pretty good antagonist, and the stuff that happens in this episode is really going to push the main cast in interesting directions, so I'm all for what they're putting down even if it's a bit familiar- Tsurumaki was really channeling his inner Tomino in that (admittedly very cool) dogfight, right down to the comic panel cut-ins and dialogue.
(Also, something tells me that if they're in a rush to get through all this kind of story stuff early on, that they're planning some wild swings later, but that's just a hunch).
Remember,
This is the director of FLCL, so we're going at a heck of a break neck pace (me personally I'd rather take it slow) and he's leaving a lot of character work up to interpretation and understated, but imo it's there. A lot of Machu/Shuji's relationship is her projecting her own desire for freedom onto him more than anything else (the entire scene with Nyaan by the canal), where even she realizes later this ep that she doesn't truly know anything about him.
Yeah you should be good as far as background now, the rest of UC is just gravy, although maybe Char's Counterattack would be cool if you're up for it? Idk.
Seed was a rehash of the original Gundam except they went through the floorboards and removed all the cool leftist subtext and replaced it with techno-liberalism, and I really really hate Seed for that even if objectively it's a mid show at worst and not really worth the ire.
Pretty sure the reason I have it downloaded is because, to me or someone else, you recommended the compilation movies and Char's counterattack as bare minimum to catch up.