The confrontation between Machu and Nyaan ended up being kind of a nothinburger, and Machu easily succeeded in awakening Lalah. So what did that do? As we discovered later in the episode, something. Maybe the third impact again. We can never have enough of those, I suppose.

Enter Char.

The final confrontation with Kycilia happening on a theatre stage was a forceful, but still pretty good visual symbolism. As they have their talk, the play is crashed by the MCs of the show, who take the wheel in the usual search of Mr. Walking Plot Device, who sheepdogged them back into Lalah's presence. Kycilia gets unceremoniously dispatched as not relevant anymore to the plot, and both Chekov's guns go off, not at who'd you'd expect.

Char getting subconsciously magically dressed into his uniform by Lalah was utterly hilarious and blatantly a "hey guys its me, the guy from the merch" moment.

And while the battle outside rages on, we discover - Mr. Walking Plot Device is... from the UC, and might be, if I interpreted the scene correctly, Amuro Ray - here to destroy the G-Spam timeline.

Queue the late 80s Album Oriented Rock / Synthpop blend, it's Beyond the Time time, and time to bring back the RX-78-2 to the fight for the cool of it. Gonna buy the merch yet?

My cynical commentary aside

Any thoughts on the episode? I liked most of it, beyond the quick dressup scene I mocked and the finale. Lalah as a world ending threat (or is she? that's actually a question that remains unanswered and is interpreted differently by characters!) was probably an inevitable plot development, in a society that knows only the apocalypse and status quo (I'm talking to you liberals), and Char vs Machu vs Nyaan could have been a decent final battle for it.

However, the ending was just awful imo. If that is Amuro in the graffiti man's soul, or inside that Gundam, then any conflicts from the G-Spam universe become completely meaningless.

It all becomes background noise to Amuro vs Char, because Tomino wrote so in 1979 and 1988.

The customer service was impressively horrible.

Noel also made a video taking a bus from Lima, Peru to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which is 87 hours of continuous driving. Beyond the people watching TikTok without headphones on, it seemed like a significantly more pleasant experience than the US one.

Think about it...

Jokes aside, it's sad how the genre has outright gone the way of the Dodo since like 2009.

...is basically the backstory to Star Trek, but worse?

Going from the Season 2 shenanigans, continuing on the "love is the answer" themes. I understand what it was going for as a movie, and pulled it off kinda competently.

The ending was frankly weird, with Setsuna going all Mass Effect 3 ending to end the conflict out of nowhere. But I did like the portrayal of the aliens themselves. An unknowable entity you might not even be able to communicate with, not to mention know their intentions. You know what this reminds me of? Oh wait I already mentioned that series in the first sentence.

Overall, a good Gundam AU, that failed to live up to its heights from Season 1. Fantastic music though. It made me go down a kick of 2000s Japanese Alt Rock.

Antideutsche plotting to make me laugh my ass off in public during my break smh

It also feels like these things are making me more musically illiterate.

You see enough Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Imaginal Discs and the twenty yearly Trhä albums as super highly praised and something every music nerd should listen to, and forget what kind of music most people actually like... which if you go by the spotify charts, is a lot of slop! And if you go by the radio, it's mostly the same stuff since 1995.

The show offers you a disapproving commentary on the War on Terror, liberal technocratic fantasies, and even accidentally recognizes that the bourgeois state itself is one of the biggest obstacles in the liberal one world fantasies that were popular at the time this show aired.

And predictably retreats into hope and despair that this is all caused by a lack of good morals on the part of the rulers. Because if you did that, you'd get something oddly similar to the backstory of Star Trek... and now, but nicer. Literally nothing changes, but it feels good!

Light of the world, shine on me! Love is the Answer! - as always.

And good lord there is a lot of love. This show goes really overboard on the romance melodrama in season 2. Without giving one to the MC, despite the obvious candidate of Princess Marina Ismail. Guess he can't be the man, the legend, Colasour the Indestructible.

Season 1 was the strongest, when it was about geopolitical blocs trying to crush an insurgency that happened to be the main characters of the show. Season 2 retreated hard into totally not newtype mysticism - as can be expected from Gundam really... I need to rewatch After War Gundam X.

What this show was really strong in were the visuals, especially in Season 1, and the music. The soundtrack is composed by Kenji Kawai, and featuring excellent OP and ED themes. Such as the OP2, sung by Tomoko Kawase - one of the Japanese artists I consistently get impressed by - plus Pulse by the Back Horn (containing ED1) is a really good album.

As close as this show was to jumping the shark, it never really did (in the movie? I haven't watched it yet, but thanks to Super Robot Wars I know what it's about lol). The show is just very, very competently made. At the very end of Mecha's presence as a TV anime staple.

Is this show good? Yeah.

Does it have good politics? They're very lib lol, though much more interesting than I expected.

What is this show really? Full Metal Panic, but without the comedy + Gundam Wing

Bonus: A random comment I found on r/gundam

This band is way too obscure outside of Norway smh