You're listening to season ten of Mobile Suit Breakdown, a weekly podcast covering the entirety of Sci-Fi mega franchise Mobile suit Gundam from 1979 to today.
This is episode 10.27.
Sayonara Uso, and we are your hosts.
I'm Tom, and if you hadn't come.
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Covering Victory episode 27, Uchuo Hashiru Senko.
Or a flash that runs through space. The episode was written by Sonoda Hideki, storyboarded and directed by Ashizawa Takeshi, with.
SEO Yasuhiro in charge of animation. Now the recap.
The sky over the royal palace in Zanskars capital. The colony once known as Ameria is dark with storm clouds. Newly enlisted Bespa mobile suit pilot Katagina Luz. In her rig, Shako holds Uso and his victory at gunpoint, but she does not fire. Not yet. She whispers to herself that all of this is Uso's fault. If only he hadn't come here. She finally pulls the trigger, but Uso snaps his beam shield into position, blocking the barrage and returning fire with his vulcans. He's enraged at the sight of this as yet unknown pilot spraying deadly beams without regard for the damage every stray shot inflicts on the colony and its terrified inhabitants. He charges into saber range. Theyre close enough to hear each others voices over the calm, and Uso is shocked to find Katagina, once so vocal about her disdain for war, warriors and weapons. Now embracing all three. Marbet interrupts in her gun easy. Theres no time for a duel. Bespa reinforcements will arrive soon, and the two league military pilots need to find a way out of the colony before theyre overwhelmed and annihilated. The other kids are also struggling to escape, but the Zanskar home Guard has cordoned off the spaceport and are holding the panicked crowd at bay with machine guns and armored cars. USO flies by overhead, Katagina blasting away recklessly behind him, some of her shots strike the entrance to the spaceport, and in the confusion, Odello, Shakti, and the rest are able to slip past the guards back to the fishbone. Chronicle arrives on the scene with his Kontio squadron, but a sudden explosion at the colony wall diverts them before they can surround UsO and Marbet. A squadron of javelins, led by Oliver and Junko blast their way in another raid on the capital, Uso and Marbet slip out through the same breach, rendezvousing with the fishbone just outside. Even here, Katajino refuses to abandon the pursuit. She nearly gets him too, but Junko throws her gunblaster mobile suit into the path of Katajinos Beamdhead teams. The Shrike Ace even manages to shoot a leg off of the rig. Shako Katagina is finally forced to retreat, leaving Uso free to retrieve the wounded Junko and ferry her back to the lean horse Junior. Back aboard the mothership, Uso learns that this most recent raid was only the first phase of a coordinated operation. The league, with federation assistance, plans to use the recovered Kailas Gili Big cannon, controlled remotely from the Leanhorse Junior to strike the Mutermasugen spacefleet while it waits in port. Uso worries that the cannon, designed to strike planetary targets from orbit, is too powerful for this kind of precision strike, but Junko insists that it's the best chance they have. A decisive blow now could bring the war to a quick end. Unbeknownst to them, the fleet is already leaving port. Before they can fire the big cannon, the league pilots must hold off the Zanskar counterattack. With the shrikes badly depleted and the federation forces inadequate to the task, Uso, Marbet, and Junko are all forced to sortie again. Uso's senses and his ability to see beyond his senses have grown sharper. When a team of zolats tries to surround him, he shoots them down with ease. 1234 Chronicle and Katujina swoop in on him together, the rigged Shako ensnaring Uso with its wires while Chronicle lines up for the killshot. But again Junko comes to the rescue, and in the ensuing fight, both chronicles Kontio and Junko's Ganezi are disabled. Chronicle, reduced to just his pilot suit, is able to get onto the big cannon. Junko leaves her mobile suit to pursue him, but arrives too late to stop him from planting a bomb that will disable the lean horses remote control. The two fight a brief, inconclusive gun battle amid and around the massive cables that decorate the big cannons exterior. Kathujina arrives in her mobile suit to extract Chronicle. Uso tries to do the same, but Junko insists on staying to disable the bomb, and she is killed when it detonates, forced to put his horror aside as new orders come in over the radio. The remote control has failed. The big cannon must now be fired manually, and Uso is closest to the control room. Captain Gomez guides him through the procedure. Uso looks tiny in the operator's chair, his small hands trembling on the firing controls. He pulls the trigger. Outside, a desperate chronicle orders Kataji to position his derelict Kontio near the muzzle and detonate it just as the big cannon fires. The blast diverts the cannons beam just enough to miss the colony spaceport. Instead, it cuts a swath of devastation through the fleet, destroying dozens of ships and killing thousands of soldiers.
What a good episode. What a good bleeping episode. In the running for best episode of Victory so far, I don't think it quite displaces the Barcelona episode for me, but it is up there.
Ooh, I think I might have liked this one even better than the Barcelona episode.
Ooh. But do you have another one that you like even more than this one?
I don't think so.
All right.
Yeah, this one was really incredible.
Very tightly plotted.
Yes. I think, like, halfway through, maybe a third of the way through the episode, I turned to you and I was like, this is such a tightly scripted episode. And they're usually not. This stands out.
The animation quality in this episode was remarkable.
And they did some of those. The very evocative, emotionally charged, surreal imagery, the red backgrounds, the thumping heartbeats. A lot of those details that we associated with first Gundam, but that haven't really been present in victory thus far.
I will say we just upgraded the audio for our viewing setup, and we got a new sound bar. The old one was great. Lasted us a long time, but was more than ten years old.
Yeah, yeah. Twelve years old at this point, and not particularly good. When we bought it, it was a, we just got a tv and didn't realize it didn't come with speakers. Let's go to best buy and get the first thing we find there.
Yeah. This was our first place together.
Ah, the old days at the time.
Of life when if you manage to find a more spacious apartment, it ends up being cavernous and empty because you cannot afford furniture to fill it up. But anyway, we got a new sound bar, and I did feel that the episodes sounded much better, too. Richer, more layered, was picking up, I think, more of the sound effects, some of that might have been. I was paying more attention because I wanted to know, hey, do the new speakers sound significantly different? Hard to know exactly which of those two things contributed, but one of the earliest scenes that stood out to me animation wise, was during the first confrontation between UsO and Katagina, which incidentally made me think of this YouTube channel called Every Frame a painting, which I'm sure some of you have watched before. They did a great video a while back about Jackie Chan. By a while back, I mean, like years ago, but one of the things they talked about was cinema, showing you the same hit over and over and over again to lend weight to it, to make it feel harder, more aggressive, more severe. Sometimes they show it from different angles, and that same technique gets used in this fight. The initial shot is like a perfect profile shot with a laser cutting a straight line across and hitting a mobile suit in the leg over that surreal background. Then we go back in time a second or two and we see that hit again, but now from a sort of front facing angle. Then it's shown again twice very quickly, and once slowed down. It tells us this fight is serious. Katagina has already declared, verbally at least, her willingness to kill Uso. I think the purpose of emphasizing this hit is not only, oh, one of the legs has been taken out, the victory is pretty badly damaged, but also, oh, she means it. She's not just bloviating, she might actually kill him.
Showing the same hit from multiple different angles, multiple different times to really emphasize how serious it is is the kind of thing that if you're just organically watching the show, you might easily miss. Your brain slides over it. You see it, but it doesn't register that they're showing it over and over and over again like that.
Right.
Somehow our brainstor take it in stride without that little hitch of like, wait, didn't this already happen? Why are we seeing this again?
When they do the pilot cut ins during the mobile suit fights, they're usually kind of triangular shaped or weird trapezoids or.
Yeah.
Did you notice that one of the points typically points directly at the cockpit of the person?
No, but that's clever.
It's another one of those neat little visual details that you don't necessarily notice, but it's still like it registers somewhere deep in your subconscious.
This was the same logic as a speech bubble or a thought bubble.
Exactly. Exactly. There's a level of full commitment on display here, and I mean that both in the case of the characters, but also the staff making it, it's one of the first episodes that has really, truly felt like Gundam in its platonic ideal form. As I imagine it. When I think of what true Gundam is, this episode is in that hall of fame, visually, auditorily, story wise, the whole gamut. And I looked at the staff who had worked on this because I was thinking, gosh, this is so good. It's so much better than what we've been seeing. Did they bring in a bunch of ringers? Is this like the a team from another production? Are these people who have not been working on victory up until now? And no. Basically everybody involved has done other episodes of Victory before. They've probably even all collaborated on an episode before. But it's just like everybody brought their a game for this and it really works. If you're not watching victory, you gotta watch this episode. It probably relies a little bit too much on what has come before in order to be a true standalone. But if you've been listening to the podcast, you know what's come before. Go watch this episode.
The core of the episode feels like this contrast between Uso and Katagina. I specifically say contrast between them rather than their relationship because most of what the episode reveals about them or makes plain about them doesn't have to do with how they relate to each other per se, but their clash brings it all to the surface. I really hate Katagina in the way that one can really hate a well written, detestable character because after watching this episode, I do feel like she's a person. She doesn't feel so much like a caricature, she feels like a human person with all the flaws and foibles that that entails.
A human ugh, I know, that's the worst thing to be.
It's actually quite telling that she begins her little monologue about why she has to kill Uso, how mad she is at Uso, etcetera, long before he can hear her and before he has any idea who she is. On the one hand, she is constantly justifying her own actions. On the other hand, shes constantly deflecting blame, making other people responsible for what shes doing. And its sort of like, well, which is it? Are you doing something that you think is good and necessary? In which case, why are you shifting the blame for that to someone else? You don't even think it's blameworthy? Or are you a young adult who simply cannot take responsibility for their own actions and you're constantly looking for people to blame, including people younger than you. In particular, her bit about how if Uso hadn't followed her, she wouldn't have become what she was. So one, what does she mean when she says, I wouldn't have become what I am? Does she mean a pilot? Does she mean a participant in the war? And when she says, if you hadn't followed me, does she mean to space? Because I don't buy that at all.
You've put me in a bind.
Uh oh.
I wanted to let you talk about how you see this as an episode, mostly about the contrasts between the two of them. Before I reposted that, I actually think this is an episode about reversals, changing places, and the only real contrast is in their perspectives. But now you've brought up the one line that I think really does support your position over mine. And I agree with you completely about the way you're reading it. Katajina's tendency to blame Uso for what has happened to her, become of her, for these changes in her personality, for.
The choices she's made.
And in fact, Uso isn't really following her, like, kind of a little bit.
Back in when he first left Earth, right? A little bit. He was also looking for his parents.
Yeah, back in the RD Gibraltar arc. You know, Uso had a bunch of different reasons for leaving Earth and going into space, and certainly one of them was that he was chasing Katajina. But that has not been his focus. That's not why he went to Zanskar. That's not why he's there now. So this is Katajina's self obsession. I think that has been a consistent thing with her throughout. She is very selfish. She doesn't really believe that other people exist or matter except in relationship to herself.
Right. She simply does not care about or think about other people.
Which is why she recklessly blasts away with beam weapons inside the colony, trying to kill Uso. Because USo matters to her as an antagonist. And all of these Zanskar civilians don't really matter. They're not real to her.
And it's made very clear that this isn't some Zanskar military position. The military personnel at the spaceport call in, tell them to stop shooting beams in the colony. They're wrecking all the buildings. So its not as though she is under orders to take him down at any cost. It has just never occurred to her that what shes doing could hurt other people or its occurred to her and she does not care.
These Zanskar civilians must all be corrupt and therefore it will be good if they die. Just like Uig.
Another contrast to UsO in a line that I feel, summarizes Uso in a nutshell when he mentions that it might be preferable for her to attack him or kill him than for her to kill a whole bunch of civilians. He's also not gonna let her kill him. That he's gotten to a place as a fighter, as a soldier, where he's willing to risk himself to protect others, but he is going to defend himself. He's not going to hesitate about protecting himself. And the mere fact that he doesn't want her to die, hes not gonna let her kill him. But even though shes done all of this, he doesnt want her dead. She wants him dead. She wants him to suffer.
He is inconveniencing her for the last time.
He makes her feel bad, so he.
Should go away at once, forever.
He wants the fighting and the death to stop. He wants the war to be over. Katagina wants to make him pay for his crimes, sure.
But think of the first thing she says. If you hadn't come here, none of this would be happening. And that's the same attitude that USo had. That's what got him in the mobile suit way back in Kasarelia. That is how he started the fight too. They, the yellowjackets came to earth and so he had to fight back. Now the league militaire has invaded Zanskar's homeland. In the course of this episode, they raid the colony again. They've done that before, like they have brought the fight to Zanskar. And so of course, the people of Zanskar are fighting back. That's kind of what I mean about the role reversal. The episode opens with Uso saying you can't use beam weapons inside of a colony. Think of the risk to the civilians. And Katajina is firing willy nilly. It ends with Uso firing the really big cannon at the colony. He has justifications, right?
It comes down to whether or not you feel, think believe that the reasons each of them are taking these actions matter. Katagina doesnt care about the colony, or the people in it, or the people on earth, or anybody whos not in power and directly connected to her.
And USo does care. USo doesnt want to kill those people. But at the end of the day, he kills a lot more people than she does. Now, they're not firing at the civilian part of the colony. They're trying to hit the spaceport, they're trying to hit this fleet. But they're taking a big risk because as USO points out, the big cannon is too powerful for this kind of precision shooting. Even when they miss, even when they don't hit the spaceport at all, not directly, they still do severe damage to the spaceport. If it had hit, what would that have done to the colony? It probably would have cut the end right off of it and killed everyone inside.
As Gundam so often tells us, war is hell. No civilian is truly safe. But ultimately, I have so much more respect, sympathy feeling for USO because USO recognizes the magnitude of what hes doing. If Katagina killed a colony full of people, she would blame someone else. She would refuse to take any responsibility. She'd be like, oh, it was their fault. They made me. Somebody made me. Since you brought up the laser, small sidebar that everything about the way that they talk about the laser was extremely reminiscent of discussions of the use of the atomic bomb. From USo's comments that this weapon is too strong for the target that you intend to use it on. To junkels, I understand it's horrible, but this could end the war. That there were people who strongly believed that the use of the atomic bomb could bring what had been a long and bloody war to an end. And right down to the extremely vivid depictions of those killed in the blast who yeah, if you're caught in that initial blast, there's nothing left of you. It's not that you're like, blown to pieces. You're incinerated. You're just gone.
It's also reminiscent of previous Gundam shows where there has been a big gun and typically some, like, high officer who is just gleeful over the opportunity to fire the big gun and just wants to fire it as soon as possible and as many times as possible. And then the people who are actually responsible for pulling the trigger feeling much, much more conflicted about it. I think it debuted in double zeta with Macha Mucha, the Anaheim employee who kept trying to get bright to fire the big gun at whatever was in their way, including colonies. Here, it's Jin Jahannam rubbing his hands together, practically dancing in his seat over the opportunity to do all this damage. As long as we're on the subject, the visual metaphor here with the big cannon is pretty obvious, right? We've got these, like, couple of big spheres mounted on either side of a long shaft, covered in cables that make it look very veiny.
It's an extremely phallic weapon.
I was gonna say it looked like a tree.
You were not. It looks like a penis and testicles.
And it shoots its hot death all over space.
It feels so obvious in the episode, but im glad you brought it up because while obviously there are plenty of women in this series who are dealing death, there is a sense of warfare and destruction as masculine and nurturing and healing as feminine, even though the doctor.
Aboard the Leanhorse Junior is a man.
And a bunch of the deadliest pilots are women and theres Patajina. But then you also have the big healing ceremony and Shakti the empath having a lot of premonitions in quick succession in this episode. But I want to come back to Shakti. I don't want to.
Sure, sure.
It is not lost on me that they are firing the big phallus to disrupt the healing ceremony by the queen mother, who is, according to Katagina, planning to turn all power in the earth sphere over to women like, oh my God, they're doing gender on this. They're doing gender all over the place.
Her line wrecked me, though. Extreme gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss, ours more female tyrants also. Does she?
Good question.
She's described a matrilineal society but mostly with respect to the monarchy and the monarch. But what about everybody else?
And Chronicle says it's actually caught. Who wants to make it a matrilineal society? We haven't actually heard anything like that from Mariah, who doesnt have any real power. So how could she turn all power over to women when she doesnt have any power?
And maybe kagati wants women rulers because he feels like theyre easier to control.
Hes doing the siroko.
What have we seen of who runs Zanskar? Its all old men. Its not Maria. And there arent even other women. The highest place woman weve seen in the whole thing has been whats her face, pink haired Hamana like Farah.
Farah Griffin. Hey, do you think there's any significance to the fact that Sirocco, who was from Jupiter and according to the background setting materials, so is kagati and Jupiter is associated with Zeus, Jupiter the symbol of masculine power in greek mythology.
And we don't know very much about Jupiter, but it's often talked about as a frontier kind of place, a rough and tumble kind of place. It's where they mine, harvest a lot of their energy source.
Yep.
You know what's characteristic of oil rigs, oil facilities, similar kinds of places?
Mmm. What could it be?
He's not going to answer for me. But these places are mostly staffed by men. There are women, obviously, who work in them. I have friends and family who've worked in such places, but that working population is substantially male or at least used to be. I haven't looked up the stats anytime recently. I doubt it's changed that much.
But cockatiel has like a cyborg monocle, right?
Yes. There's two different guys with eye injuries. I don't remember which one has the monocle and which one doesn't. Or if they both do. But they're different monocles.
I move to begin referring to him as Jupiter Monocle.
Jupiter Monocle. But then we cant call him the fauns. Eh? When Katajino mentions, youve always acted on your assumptions, not bothering to look at anything around you. Projecting much.
So youre saying they are more similar than it seems at first.
Well, do you think thats true of Uso earlier on?
Yes. Katagina only sees USo as he existed as like a little boy in Kasarellia. And in the first couple of episodes when they were actually talking to each other. She hasn't seen his development. She doesn't recognize that he's a different person now than he was then.
Because Uso as he is now as of this episode. I think she's completely wrong.
Sure. But think about Uso in that one episode from the Kameon arc. When he just like, makes some assumptions about where he thinks the besp forces are going to go and then flies off on his own and goes right into an enemy patrol. Uso did in fact used to make these wild assumptions and then act on them without thinking it through. But that was the past. He's grown up in a sense. Katagina is now chasing him. She is following a lot of the same steps on his path of character development. But her development is happening much later.
And one point in favor of your theory that they are more similar than different, if somewhat time removed. In that regard, Uso doesn't want to believe that Katagina really, truly thinks and feels this way. He doesn't want to believe that this young woman who he was obsessed with. I don't think he still is so past tense there. But he doesn't want to believe that he was obsessed with someone and totally gaga head over heels for someone who would describe the guillotine as a necessary.
Evil to silence people like you and.
Blurts out, have you been tricked by Chronicle? It's patronizing. He's in denial about who she is.
I love the little detail that Marbet kind of has forgotten who Katagina was when Uso is like, that's Miss Katagina in the rig shako. And Marbet is like kata. Oh, that Katagina. Right? Of course. Yes. Her.
That girl who was very insistent that she wasn't going to get involved in the war.
Yes, we knew for like, a week. I think it's meaningful that Katagina now appears in a modified, upgraded, space use version of the same mobile suit that Uso was piloting originally and that she has received it from Chronicle when Uso stole his from Chronicle.
That is a nice parallelism, I grant you.
Ooh.
In the scene after Marbet arrives, another great bit of animation where one of them charges the other and then the person being charged sidesteps and cuts off the other mobile suit's arm at the wrist, which is an actual sword technique. Right. That's from kendo or. I'm sure it's in a lot of sword arts that you sidestep and then take out the sword hand if you can.
Amuro did a very similar thing to Ramba Ral way back in the day. It's a good, good bit. Lots of good fighting in this episode.
And to highlight how slick it is, they slow it down for you. It's really beautifully done.
Do you think there's any significance to the fact that, like, four different times in the course of this episode, somebody gets the legs blown off of their mobile suit?
This hadn't occurred to me at all during the episode, but you mention it, and my first thought is landmines.
Ooh.
A lot of conflicts in the eighties and nineties, in Europe, in Asia, in Africa, involved heavy use of landmines. And in the nineties, there was starting to be more activism around that and about the horrors of it, that they mostly end up harming civilians, they mostly end up harming children who then lose a leg or both legs or an arm, you know?
Yeah. I mean, the use of landmines in, like, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Washington, real bad. And that was one of the major influences for this show. I hadn't thought of that. That's a good connection.
Yeah. For me, when you bring up the legs being taken out, that is the first thing that leaps to mind. The activism of this era around landmine removal and trying to make changes to international law so that landmines would not be used in this way again, because the horrifying damage they do, mostly to non combatants, was just. I mean, had always been unacceptable, but was getting more attention, more publicity. People were seeing those results more. Were you thinking of some other reason?
No, I was genuinely curious. It's something I had picked up on. It happened enough times that I was like, this is. This feels like a theme, but I don't know what it's supposed to mean? This episode does a really good job landing punches that have been set up previously. For instance, the whole system they've worked out to control the big cannon remotely from lean Horse Junior. The mechanics of that, the plausibility of it was all established in prior episodes, so they don't need to go through it again. We know what those guiding cables between the two ships mean because we saw them do that in a prior episode. That's real good. They also do a great job of, like, foreshadowing things earlier in the episode and then landing them later on. For instance, Katagina's reckless shooting damages the spaceport in the beginning of the episode. Uso's shooting later on damages it at the end. At one point, when Uso is flying around in the core fighter, I think it's Otis on the bridge of the lean horse, Junior says, oh, Uso, I hope you don't get caught in those wires. He means the control wires. But not long after that, Uso finds himself entangled in the wires off of Katagina's shako. And Sidebar on this if you told me that the whole gimmick of Zanskar shooting out wires to entangle enemy pilots had been invented for the sake of this scene where Uso becomes entangled by Katagina's wires, I would believe you because it's so good and so representative of the relationship between the two of them.
Speaking of mobile suit design, Katagina's mobile suit appears to have a battle fan.
It does. Beam fan, shield.
Heartbreaking character you hate. Has a really cool weapon. It's not as much a focus, and perhaps ultimately, like the comparison between Katagina and Uso comes down to whether or not you think people's motivations really matter. But to see Katajina seemingly resent Uso's soft heartedness, to blame him for the fact that she is now a soldier, to be willing to sacrifice herself for chronicle, et cetera. And then to have several moments in the episode where Junko echoes things that we've heard Marbet say before, where they really appreciate what a good kid Uso is, that he's kind and that he thinks about others and they feel guilt or shame, that they have to rely on him as a soldier, that they have to put him in these positions where he's going to harm others. And Junko goes to defuse the bomb herself and says, at least let me do this. She cannot bring herself to let Uso have all these most dangerous jobs to do, all the most dangerous, awful things.
God, I thought this was fantastic. She laments that they can't do more, but when they try to do more, like the whole thing about controlling the big cannon remotely from the lean horse junior is that if they do that, then the old men can pull the trigger. The old men can do this, like, morally compromising action. They can take the risk of collateral damage onto themselves. But when chronicle destroys the remote control, it falls to USo. Junko really wants to prevent that. She dies trying to prevent them from destroying the remote control. She dies trying to prevent Uso from having to be the guy to pull the trigger.
And theres reciprocity to this relationship. Junkos mobile suit is first destroyed because she is protecting USO. And then the way he recovers her is so gentle. He tries to prevent her from going back out there. Shes injured, and initially she lets him think that he did convince her not to go back out there, and then shes out there anyway.
Junko just keeps sacrificing one body after another to protect Uso until the only one she has left is her own.
They're trying to protect his innocence. They are trying desperately to protect his innocence, and they can't.
And by proxy, the innocence of all children like him. Another bit in the battle that really lands because of the setup in prior episodes, because they've shown us the docking procedure going poorly, they've shown us it failing. They've shown us the different bits getting blown up when USO does a mid combat docking here, there is actually some tension. There is actually some feeling that it could go wrong. And normally in a show like this, you know, the docking procedure is just stock footage that they play to save themselves a little bit of drawing time. Normally in a Voltron or whatever, we all know it's going to go off without a hitch here. There's a real possibility that hitches might.
Arise while we're discussing the lead up to the firing of the big cannon and everything. While I don't like the character of Chronicle as a person, I love him as a character, mainly because he seems to have these deeply warring impulses within himself. He's objected to treatment by superior officers that he thought was extreme or out of line, but wasn't willing to put his neck out. Once it became clear that objecting was risking himself, he stopped at the beginning of this episode when the league military show up and blast a hole in the outside of the colony. He says a federation raid, impossible. And he's constantly underestimating him. This isn't even the first time he's been like ah, they can't possibly stand up against us. Gloria Szanskar. And yet he also has good instincts. He suspects that the raid is cover for something else, that it isn't just about disrupting the ceremony or even just about trying to rescue people.
And he gets the little new type noise when Oliver's squadron first blasts that hole through the colony. Perhaps Chronicle has a little bit of the extrasensory perception.
He's the one who thinks to plant the bomb, and right after, he's planted another great scene.
That sequence is so good. Junko and Chronicle having that little pistol fight amidst the big chunky cables of the big cannon. I am always saying Sci-FI needs more big chunky cables, and look what you can do with them.
And these moments when we actually get to see humans in normal suits moving around in space next to ships, colonies, machinery give us a sense of scale that often disappears once people are in the mobile suits.
And his plan to divert the beam with the explosion of the contio probably saves a ton of lives. It's a good plan. Now, it may in fact have been counterproductive for the purposes of the Zanskar empire, because if Uso had fired on the original target, maybe the Mutramasugan fleet would have survived like they had already left port. Maybe more of them would have made it through. But given the information available to him at the time, it was a brilliant move.
And while this was not their stated intention, theres a shot later in the episode that shows the muzzle, the end of the barrel of the big cannon. The glands completely shredded. Its like mangled. Theyre not going to be able to fire it again with any accuracy without intensive repairs that they may or may not be capable of doing. When USO first launches for this second half of the battle, he has a beautifully rendered version of an iconic Gundam protagonist moment. It's a bit of a newtype awakening moment or embracing the newtypism or, I don't even know, you'll tell me what you think it should be called. But he's grimacing. The newtype background is pulsing over the regular animation of his cockpit. There's a sound like a pounding heartbeat. And then he is in the zone, for lack of a better term, and takes out four or five mobile suits in quick succession with single shots. He somehow accesses that place of intense focus and awareness, like the scene when Omaro first does this and is counting kills and he's just counting 1234. And they're also dissociating, right? Like they can't do that. They can't be in that place and make those kills unless they abstract it somewhat from themselves.
I call it the psychic shooting gallery, but USO still brings some of himself into it. That intellectualizing impulse, that analytical mind that sees what all of his opponents are doing and studies their techniques, is still there. He sees that last one, that fourth mobile suit coming at him, and he's like, this guy is skilled. He's only using a thruster nozzle. He's hiding his movements among the stars. He's still, like, reading, analyzing, studying, improving his own technique. To me, maybe the most remarkable thing about the writing in this episode, and there are a ton of great details. I've only touched on a couple of them, but the best thing about it is somehow, despite the massive, sprawling cast, they managed to give basically every character something to do that feels necessary, organic in the course of the episode, and natural to their character, even if it's a tiny little thing like Oliver chiding Uso for something that isn't his fault.
Or what does the highland girl do?
I mean, okay, good point. She has a couple of lines. She's not. Not present, but it's true. Alicia and I guess, like Tomash and Carl don't get to do much. But your quibbles aside, think about the number of characters who get to do things. The old man polycule is back, and they're all getting to do things, things that feel authentic to their characters. Gomez is there, and he gets to do things and say things, and so does Jinjahanam, and so does Junko. I mean, Connie's absent, but I'm gonna stop undermining my own point here. Even Khufu gets stuff to do.
And the various moments that characters get, feel like themselves. That Odello, when that one mobile suit comes up to the fishbone, like, give me your gun. He's like, oh, there's only one option here. And fires all of their missiles. It's like, really? Was that your only option? Odello? No. Odello's favorite solution, any problem is to shoot at it.
If you have missiles, you must fire them. Forget macross missile massacre. This is Odello's ordnance obliteration.
And Gomez, as perhaps the most experienced commander and the captain of the lean horse, Junior, now taking the very manipulative but to him, totally necessary step of overcoming Uso's resistance to using the big cannon by saying, if you don't go shoot it, then Junko died for nothing. And it's still a moral injury for Uso. It hasn't entirely been taken out of his hands. But it is an order from a superior officer, and he is a child being manipulated into it by an adult.
And he's being asked not to do it for his own sake, but to fulfill Junkos will, to become a vessel for Junko's battle spirit to do this.
And as the commander, there's this beat when Uso first tells him Junko is dead. This was beautiful, where you can tell there's just shock on his face. And then he recovers because he has to, because he's in charge. He can't afford to grieve right now or really even to process what's just happened. They are still in the middle of a battle, and he is trying to fire the big gun and keep the ship intact and keep their pilots alive.
And it's still remote controlled firing. He is still truly the one firing it. He gives the order. Uso is just, at this point, a cog in the machine. Uso fills the gap created by chronicles bomb. He connects the command to the gun.
He might be the finger that breaks the glass and the finger that pulls the trigger, but he's not a person.
Whoever decided to make the firing mechanism for the big cannon, like a pistol grip that you hold and point at the target and then pull the trigger like you're firing a handgun. Ah, chef's kiss. Brilliant design. There's another Gomez moment earlier in the episode that is more fun and less horrifying, which I want to touch on before we return to Junko, which is Jinjahanam is, like, gleefully rubbing his hands together at the thought of getting to fire the big gun.
Yeah.
And then he hears Gomez yelling angrily into the comm system, and we're focused on Gomez. He's in the foreground, he's talking. But if you look in the background, Jinjahana has this, like, really worried expression in his face, like, oh, no, is everything going to go wrong? The captain is angry. Something terrible must be happening. And the visible relief on his face when it's just that Gomez is ordering more mobile suits out is so funny. But now back to tragedy. Junko's death is the one moment where it feels like the episode's ambitions slightly and briefly exceed its grasp. There is a jarring disconnect between Junko in the real world working on the bomb, and then this slow motion pan across her naked body in the psychedelic star field just before she is killed. Something doesn't quite connect between the two of those.
It is jarring, and perhaps there was.
A better way that they could have.
Conveyed this, but I interpreted that moment as even before the bomb has actually gone off, she's realized what's about to happen. She knows she's dead before it happens.
I'm impressed that you read that from the episode, just watching it, because I watched it a couple more times, and I only noticed, I think, on my second watch through that there is very briefly and very faintly a kind of, like, red starlight that shines directly from where her third eye should be, from her ajna chakra. And I had to watch it again in slow motion to confirm that it's actually there. But it is right at the very beginning, we get this little bit of light from her third eye. And I think this is a premonition. This is junko realizing in the split second before the bomb goes off and.
The shock on her face, because generally speaking, most people who put themselves in these kind of dangerous situations, they know there's a risk of death, but you couldn't keep doing it if you assumed every time you did something dangerous you were gonna die. You go in there assuming you're gonna get through it. And so the shock of realizing this is it. The nudity as an expression of vulnerability, of the sort of ultimate realization that you are just this fragile body floating in space.
Hmm. I read the nudity as more that it is a representation of the inward self, the true self, stripped of all.
Artifices, which is also extremely vulnerable.
Speak for yourself.
I don't think we can talk about premonitions or empaths without finally delving into Shakti. Shakti's premonitions start out more subtle. They start out as the kind of thing where you're almost not sure it's a premonition. It could just be common sense.
Hey, guys, I think we should run.
Exactly. I think we should run and get out of here right before the spaceport gets hit by some of these beams. But then later, when she tells Uso, you mustn't stay here, my interpretation was not that she's concerned just for Uso's safety, and that may not even be her primary concern. I think she can sense the position that he is going to be put in if he stays part of this battle, and she doesn't want him to have to go through that. She doesn't want that for him.
Also, the physical effects that this is.
Having on her, which I don't believe we've really seen before, where she's clutching her chest and panting, sweating, she is obviously in some pain or discomfort.
The closest parallel I can think of is the way Omro reacts when Giren uses the colony laser to wipe out a huge portion of the Federation fleet just before the battle of Obawaku.
And I don't know if it's simply the magnitude of what's happening is new. And Shakti having never been exposed to it, her body is having this really strong reaction or doing kind of the.
Star wars, billions of souls screaming out in terror and then suddenly silenced.
Perhaps it's a sign that she's becoming more powerful, actually, and it links her to Mariah, because when Maria uses her powers, it takes a lot out of her. And Maria, generally speaking, is doing that on purpose. She controls when it happens and seems to control how it works. It seems as though with Shakti, it's happening unconsciously. And then finally, not exactly a premonition, because when she has the sense of it, it's happening, but there's no way she could know it's happening. When she says the red light and she's thinking of the beam that's just been fired from the big cannon, her response to it is about the people. The people, they're dying. So many. The horror in her voice, the obvious pain in her body and the way in which the scenes are laid out. UsO's internal struggle to fire the weapon and then mirroring his horror, Shakti's horror. And at the end, their linked lines about each other, that they're both experiencing this intense emotional suffering and that one of the only things that feels like a comfort, one of the only things that feels like it's going to help them get through it, is each other. Uso crying and saying to himself, I have to get back to Shakti. That after what he's just experienced, what he wants more than anything else is.
To be with Shakti.
And Shakti suffering a magical empaths sense of however many hundreds of people just died, telling herself, I'm fine, I'm fine, because Uso is safe now.
Personally, I think the episode would have ended slightly more powerfully if we did not get that last scene of Uso, if the last we saw of him was firing the big gun and then everybody else sort of talking about him and thinking about him and looking for him, but no sign of Uso himself. If they had just left us to wonder what this has done to him. But that's a small quibble.
I don't know. I enjoyed this little parallel line construction. Also, having brought Katajina back into Uso's life in this particular way for the show, to make clear that he has abandoned that old infatuation, that he has gone from kind of wanting to get rid of Shakti, someplace safe to feeling this intense need to be near her because of the comfort that her presence gives him, that both of them are in these difficult positions, that both of them feel this deep internal conflict, but feel a sense of safety with each other.
There are a lot of lines and story beats in this episode that feel linked in the same way. As they're preparing to fire the big cannon, Chronicle sees it charging, and he says, how do we stop it? How do we stop this?
I love that the big cannon, this horrifying weapon, lights up with, like, rainbow.
Twinkly lights, you know, for spirit. And then Junko, when she sees the bomb, she says the same thing. How do I stop this? How do we stop this?
And Uso, when he's holding the trigger of the gun, I. This will stop the war, right? How do we stop this? As in the bigger this, the larger conflict. Will this do it? Is this going to stop everything? How do we stop it?
And neither of the first two were able to stop the thing. And now ninas research on shrikes in.
Japanese folklore with junkos death in this episode, this feels like a good time to revisit shrikes, or, in Japanese, mozu, this time as a motif or symbol in japanese arts and culture. In the most general sense, shrikes are associated with autumn in the forests and cultivated land that make up their habitat. Autumn is when they are most visible, especially late autumn, when many trees have dropped their leaves and meadow grasses have died back. They are also most audible at this time. Autumn and winter are when male shrikes sing more to attract a mate. Moreover, autumn is when their most famous behavior, impaling prey on branches, wire fences and so on, is at its peak again, for mating reasons, better fed males sing louder and longer, and the display may be proof of a male's hunting prowess. In Japanese, this behavior is called hayanie, a word that also means the first offering of the season. In fact, an old legend has it that shrikes do this as a ceremonial offering. They sacrifice their first kill of the season to honor the gods and in hope of a plentiful autumn. There are several japanese phrases and sayings that refer to shrikes. What in English we would call bedhead in Japanese is called mozu nosu, or a shrike's nest, although it's rarely used now, there is a yoji jukugo, or four character idiom, mozu kanjo, translatable as shrike math or the shrike's check, as in the check or bill. At a restaurant, it means mooching, to quote jisho.org comma, splitting the bill so that the others end up paying the whole amount, or wheedling others into paying the whole bill. The expression has its origin in a mix of folktale and observed animal behavior. First, the folk shrike, pigeon, and sandpiper go out for a meal, and the final tally for their food and drink is 15 mon. Shrike, small, cute, persuasive, convinces the others to let them divvy up the check. In Japanese, pigeon is hatto. So shrike tells Pidgin, since your name begins with ha, you should pay eight or hachi monden, moving on to sandpiper or shigi, shrike says, your name begins with shi, so you should pay seven or shichi mon. And then the whole bill was paid without shrike having to pay even a single mon. The shrike's reputation for persuasiveness comes from its behavior, specifically, its song. In kanji, mozu is written with the characters for 100 and tongue because its song frequently mimics the songs and calls of other birds, birds that it preys on naturally, because nothing is ever straightforward in folklore. There is a reversed version of this story, wherein the shrike finds 16 mon, but the pigeon divvies up the money, taking eight for itself, giving four or shi to the shigi or sandpiper, three to the quail or uzura, with u sometimes meaning three, and only one mo to the mozu or shrike. Not certain what that version says about shrikes. There are quite a few folk tales that involve shrikes, many of which also involve cuckoos. In one, shrike tends horses, and cuckoo is a farrier, someone who makes horseshoes and shoes horses. Shrike goes to cuckoo for new shoes for their horse, but runs out on the bill, leaving cuckoo to call out angrily looking for shrike and demanding the bill be paid. While shrike hides. Whenever cuckoo is around, food that shrike leaves skewered is for cuckoo left in the hopes that it will make cucco less angry about the unpaid bill. In a similar but darker tale, shrike carries off or kills and eats cuckoo's little brother. The cuckoo is constantly calling out, give back my brother. And this is why shrikes never come out in the open when cuckoos are around. In yet another, there are two cuckoo brothers, and the elder is blind. The younger brother works very hard to feed them both and gives the elder all the best and most delicious things while he subsists on nutshells and roots of grasses. But the elder brother becomes suspicious. He is certain the younger brother must be keeping the best things to himself. In a fit of anger, he kills his younger brother, and instantly he is no longer blind. But when he tears open his younger brother's throat, he finds the poor scanty food the younger brother has been eating and sees that he was wrong to be suspicious. Filled with remorse, he cries out over and over, endlessly, so much so that the gods hear him and respond. They say that if he calls out 1008 times every morning, his brother will probably forgive him. In some versions of this folktale, Shrike takes pity on the elder brother in his mourning and leaves food for him. In another version, the younger brother becomes a shrike to better feed the elder. It sounds as though shrikes and cuckoos in the wild must fight a lot, though none of the sources mentioned it. One did mention, though, that shrikes are one of the species of birds that cuckoos will parasitize. Although not all cuckoos do this. Some cuckoos famously lay their eggs in other birds nests, leaving the hard work of brooding and feeding to those birds. One of the most famous shrike stories is from the kojiki and Nihon shoki, the mythic and historical texts recounting japans early history and concerns the emperor Nintoku. Japans 16th Emperor Nintoku and his retinue were visiting a potential site for his mausoleum when a stag emerged from the woods and charged straight at them. Just before the stag reached them, before it could hurt anyone, it suddenly dropped dead, and from its ear out came a shrike. It had flown into the stag's ear and eaten its brain to save the emperor. According to folktales of Japan by Seki Keigo, the motif of bird flies into large animals ear and kills him appears in multiple tales and across dozens of versions of those tales. Emperor Nintoku chose that site for his mausoleum, and the area is named in the shrike's honor. Nintoku's burial site is the daisenryo kofun, part of the mozu, or shriek Kofun group in present day Sakai city in Osaka Prefecture. Sidebar that kofun are keyhole shaped burial mounds, often surrounded by large moats. This story is also credited as the reason that shrikes are the city bird of Sakai and prefectural bird of Osaka. It is said that the founder and shogun of the Kamakura bakufu, Minamoto no Yoritomo, was so impressed by a demonstration of shrike falconry by Sakurai Sayori, a military commander of Shinano province, that he gave the man a sword, kind of a big deal as gifts go. And although shrikes were an unusual choice for a falconry bird, they come up in another anecdote a couple hundred years later. There are records that Oda Nobuyuki, the younger brother of Oda Nobunaga, used a shrike for falconry, and according to Sawahiko son, a monk of Seishuji temple, he never missed his prey and was said to have been very skilled. One of the most famous and well known examples of shrikes in the visual arts was painted by none other than Miyamoto Musashi, famed swordsman, strategist, artist, and writer. Incidentally, that painting is on the japanese Wikipedia page for shrikes, so it will be linked in the show notes. In haiku, shrike is a season word for autumn, and shrikes are mentioned in two poems of the the oldest extant collection of japanese waka, which was compiled during the Nara period, sometime after 759 CE. The authors of these two poems are unknown. The first number, 1897, is harusareba mozu no kusaguki miezu tomo warewa miyaramu kimiga tari oba, which means something like in the spring when I cannot catch even a glimpse of the shrike in the grass, I look for you. It is usually interpreted as a love poem expressing longing for a loved one who is gone. The next poem, number 21 67, is akino nono obanaga ureni nakumozuno koe kiki kemuka katakike wagase, which I would roughly translate as do you hear the cries of the shrikes perched on the autumn fields of pampas grass? Listen, my love. A more modern example is the folk song mozuga karekide, or shrike on a bare tree, published in 1935 and based on the poem don't cry Shrike by Sato Hachiro, I say based on, but I couldn't find the text of the poem to independently verify the similarities and differences. One japanese source I found claims to compare the two, while another discussed the difficulty of tracking down the poem as originally published and of attempting to trace the history of the song's creation and distribution. What neither source disputes is that the lyrics to the song are almost identical to the text of the poem. The music was composed by an elementary school teacher in Ibaraki Prefecture, Tokutomi Shigeru, who used a mimeograph to make copies of the sheet music and distributed them to students and friends. The song spread farther with the evacuation of Tokyo during World War Two. Ibaraki Prefecture borders Tokyo directly north, and many evacuees wound up there, and the song spread even farther after the war. The name of the song and the image of a shrike on a withered, leafless, or dead branch was likely inspired by the Miyamoto Musashi painting I mentioned earlier. I will post links to the full lyrics of the song, as well as a link to a recording of the song on YouTube, but to summarize it, the song is from the perspective of a younger sibling doing their chores and thinking about all the typical autumn sounds, the calls of shrikes, the sound of beating straw, their grandmother working a cotton gin, the same as every year, except that this time one sound is missing, the sound of their elder brother chopping wood. Their elder brother was sent to Manchuria. This would have been during the second Sino Japanese War, and the singer, missing him thinks to themselves that the shrike cries out from the cold, but that their elder brother must be even colder. There is some debate about whether or not the poem and the song were intended to be anti war. They do not have the rousing, patriotic tenor of most pro war, pro empire songs, and no references to the glory of sacrifice for the nation, just sad partings, the pain of separation and worry over a loved one's health and well being. This could be perceived as war fatigue rather than anti war, or it could be viewed as an attempt to be anti war in a subtle way, since there was lots of censorship at the time, and being explicitly anti war could be dangerous regardless of original intent. The song's post war popularity led to it being covered many times by all sorts of bands, but especially by folk bands in the sixties and seventies as an anti war song. Ultimately, most of these elements feel as though they could contribute to the chosen name for this squadron of mobile suit pilots, the association with autumn and as such, with death and with endings, the bravery of a small bird fighting a much larger animal, the martial associations with some of japanese historys most famous warriors, and the sadness of a child whose life has been disrupted by war. Im not really seeing the connection to being a mooch, but weve got one shrike left. Maybe something will come up. Next time on episode 10.28 let's roll. We research and discuss Victory Gundam episode 28, and I keep waiting for Steve McQueen to show up. Universal century Manzanar something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blew up. Tobi Gun Tire women's workplace solidarity.
Speak.
Now or forever hold your peace stooges, three of them. They're rioting at a college level. The gwigsy becomes even cooler. Im going to keep it real with you, 57th prime minister of Japan Abe Shinzo. This will not solve that. Declining birth rate, death flags aplenty, and the Motorads ride at dawn. Please listen to it.
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There are a lot of wrong Gundam opinions out there corrupting the fandom. Like all those people who say that they only watch Gundam for the mobile.
Suits, when really the only valid reason.
To watch Gundam is for the silly little guys and to have context for when the silly little guys show up.
Like the balls or the petite mobile.
Suits or Haro or the Gwigsy.
And at the core of her, I'm trying to like, distill everything down, but maybe I should wait to do that. At the end.
The birch canoe slid on the smooth planks.
That moment of Odello.
What moment of Odello?
We only have one option.
Oh yeah, I have some stuff on that too.
And in some ways the two of them are being contrasted and in other.
Ways, the two of them are being compared.
Analysis AP Media studies exam compare and.
Contrast are we getting college credit for this AP? The juice of lemons makes fine punch.
We have a hack now for keeping the cat from interrupting us, which is if we give her, if we make sure to have some food and a comfy bed for her in the office. Sometimes she still wants our attention, but generally if we ignore her for long enough, she'll be like, fine, I'm going to sleep.
Wake me when you're done.
All right, so your point?