Summary:
With Alejandro keeping him at bay with the Alvatore’s beam cannons, Setsuna follows Lasse’s advice to shoot at the pieces of the container that the Alvatore is still holding on to. Unfortunately, the Alvatore gets through the subsequent explosion unscathed. Across the battlefield, Sergei and Soma are searching for the damaged Kyrios that is hiding behind an asteroid. It is during this lull in the battle that Allelujah tells Hallelujah that he’s also alive and that he can’t die until he knows the meaning of this fighting. Realizing what Allelujah is saying, Hallelujah takes off his helmet and pulls back his hair to reveal both eyes. This allows both sides of him to participate at the same time, and despite the damage to the Kyrios, he’s able to take on both his opponents at once. Alejandro meanwhile sends the Alvatore’s GN Fangs after the Exia, so Lasse has Setsuna dock the Gundam with the GN Arms. Combined, they’re able to destroy all the GN Fangs and avoid being hit by the Alvatore’s main particle cannon. They then charge at it and succeed in slicing off one of its claws and shooting off the second. However, Alejandro responds by firing all the cannons on the Alvatore, and several of these shots hit the GN Arms, causing a big explosion in the cockpit that Lasse is in.
With the GN Arms taking more and more damage, Setsuna charges the docked Exia at the Alvatore and drives his blade through its GN field. He manages to take out the field, but an explosion rips through the GN Arms soon after, leaving Setsuna to take on his opponent in just the Exia. This hardly holds him back though, and he proceeds to slice up the Alvatore, causing it to explode. Back in the other battle, Hallelujah tells Soma that she’s not a perfect super-soldier like she thinks she is and compares her to an animal acting on instinct. He feels that the fusion of reflexes and thought is what a super-soldier should be, and he then activates the Kyrios’ Trans-Am system. This grants him the speed to start slicing the limbs off of Soma’s GN-X, however Sergei protects her when Hallelujah goes for the kill. Soma uses the opportunity to shoot at the Kyrios, knocking it out of Trans-Am mode and sending it adrift. She doesn’t try to finish it off though because she’s concerned about Sergei and opens his cockpit to check on him instead. Sergei thinks that she shouldn’t worry about him and go fight, but Soma declares that she can’t because she feels that if she lost him, then she’d be all alone. As for Allelujah, the right side of his face was hurt by a cockpit explosion, and when he sees Soma with Sergei, he recognizes her as someone named Marie.
Meanwhile, a still-uninjured Alejandro brings out the mobile suit that was inside of his mobile armor and attacks the Exia. Setsuna accuses him of distorting Aeolia Schenberg’s plan, but Alejandro replies by saying that things are going according to plan - it just involves him in the leading role now. When Setsuna questions what he’s after, Alejandro explains that he wanted Celestial Being to ruin the world through military intervention so that he could influence the world in its revival. He thinks that Setsuna doesn’t belong in this new world though and unleashes a particle cannon blast that forces Setsuna to activate the Exia’s Trans-Am system. Setsuna now believes that he’s found the culprit behind the world being warped, and when faced against the Alvatore’s GN field, he recalls how Lockon once told him that the Exia was equipped with a solid blade so that it could combat GN fields. Their initial plan had included fighting with Gundams, and Lockon had said that if something unexpected should happened, then Setsuna would be their trump card. Because of this, Setsuna drives his blade straight into the Alvatore’s GN field and succeeds in taking it out. Setsuna now believes that he’s Gundam again and uses all of his blades to incapacitate the Alvatore.
As he sits in his damaged mobile suit, Alejandro gets a message from Libbons calling him a good clown. Libbons reveals that this was his plan and suggests that Alejandro should leave the unified world to him. Alejandro is pissed off, but he dies moments later when the Alvatore explodes. Setsuna, on the other hand, barely gets a chance to catch his breath before yet another mobile suit appears: a Flag equipped with a pseudo-GN Drive. Its pilot is Graham, and when he messages Setsuna to declare his intent to get revenge for Howard and Daryl, Setsuna identifies him from when they met back in Azadistan. Recognizing Setsuna too, Graham comments on how they’re connected by the
red string of fate and compare his feelings to those of love, but he feels that going beyond love is hate. During all this, he and Setsuna start slicing each other’s mobile suits apart, and they eventually charge straight at each other. The two succeed in driving their weapons into the other’s mobile suits, and this leads to a large explosion. Meanwhile, an injured Tieria decides that their plan will continue on and ejects the GN Drive from the Nadleeh. After having done this, he feels that he can finally go to where Lockon is.
Also floating adrift in space is the Kyrios, and Allelujah questions if Hallelujah knew about Soma being Marie. Hallelujah thinks that Allelujah would not have been able to fight if he knew, but he feels that it’s the same either way. He then tells Allelujah that he’s going on ahead, and Allelujah suddenly realizes that Hallelujah is gone. Sometime later, Marina reads a message from Setsuna that he had written before the battle. In it, he talks about learning the meaning of fighting and questions why the world is so warped, why people are unconsciously malicious, and why they hurt each other. He thought that he’d have answers if he met her since she’s on a different path than him but wants the same thing, and so he kept seeking an answer with his Gundam. He now lies unconscious as the Exia floats in space.
Four years later, in A.D. 2312, Saji writes a message to Louise - something he hasn’t done in a while. It’s been two years since he heard from her, and he informs her that he’ll be working in space starting from this year. Though he’s experienced a lot of sadness, he’s also realized a small dream, and so he wants Louise to realize another one. Saji is waiting for her in space, and while he’s in the middle of his job, he sees a trail of GN particles in the distance. He knows that it’s not a Federation unit because the particle color is different, and he soon figures out that it’s a Gundam. In this future, the United Nations has become the Earth Federation, and all of its member countries have dismantled their militaries so that they can form the Earth Federation peacekeeping force instead. On the Celestial Being asteroid base, Ian reports to Wang Liu Mei and Hong Long about rolling out each of their new mobile suits. She asks to see the first generation unit, so Ian brings out the 0 Gundam and talks about removing its GN Drive. However, it didn’t match, and Ian wonders if the Exia’s will work as he looks at the hanger door for the 00 Gundam. This 00 Gundam is a unit that Wang Liu Mei thinks will change the world.
Four Years Later
So at the end of this first half, it looks like just Alejandro and maybe Lasse were added to the list of dead characters. I’m surprised they didn’t do more to make it seem like Setsuna is dead - showing him floating unconscious in a Gundam adrift in space pretty much guarantee that he’ll survive, especially since Tieria seemed to have had the same fate yet turned out okay in the four-years-after epilogue (he’s even sporting a Lockon-esque haircut). Actually, that may be a bad example because it’s not guaranteed that Tieria is alive. There’s a person listed in the credits as Regene Rejetta, voiced by
Paku Romi, and speculation is that this character could be the new Tieria. I listened to the “hmph” he/she made in that scene with Louise, and it sounded female and different from normal. That, plus the process of elimination due to how Paku Romi’s voice is very distinctive - she does a lot of young male voices like Hitsugaya from Bleach - makes it entirely possible (even probable) that
this is her.
On the whole, I think the production staff did a pretty good job of setting us up for the second half of this series with the stuff in the epilogue. At the very least, they made me curious about Libbons’ harem, about the aforementioned Tieria stuff, and about if there’s going to be a Zeon to go with the new Earth Federation. I found it a little odd though that, in the epilogue, they played the scene where Shirin appears to be leaving Marina, but in the voiceover, it was Nena talking with Wang Liu Mei about the world changing. That left me confused for a moment because of the disconnect between what was going on on-screen and what was being said. At least we now know that Nena is probably serving Wang Liu Mei. The other thing that bothered me was how they incorporated Graham into the episode. His fight with Setsuna was exciting to watch, but it felt really tacked on - like they realized too late that they needed to do something so that they could make Graham the masked character in the second half. It was amplified by how there were only five minutes between when it looked like he died and when he appeared again with the mask. I’m hoping that he’ll get some better character development in the future.
Regardless, I still enjoyed the ending and can’t wait to see the continuation in October. Fortunately though, there’s CODE GEASS to look forward to next week.