Back-to-back episode time! Great for letting off steam after work!
Getting right into it, we get a flashback of the last episode, followed by the opening narration and OP. <twiddles thumbs>
The two new mobile suits are apparently quite fast, leading to the Diva opening up with its ever-Worftastic point defense weapons. One of the suits fls right up to the Diva, points what looks like the one thing the Guren from Code Geass had that I forget the name of at it, and then flies off without doing anything. Villain Ball count++.
The other UE attacks the Gundam, and quickly disables its ability to use the custom beam rifle. Enemy Genre Savvy count++. Bruzar talks with Grodel about the colony, and suggests about a 50/50 chance of succes. Bruzar tells him to Never Tell Me the Odds!, and I make a Gurren Lagann joke to myself. Afro ginger dude whose name I cannot remember asks about other mobile suits, and expresses some rather reasonable skepticism about relying on one mobile suit in the hands of a teenage mechanical engineer.
Yurin interrupts Flit's battle by leaning in front of his targeting computer, clearly reasoning that the only thing the Skywalker approach needed was more loli. After she touches his hand, Flit activates bullet time, notices the UE is following a fixed pattern, and rushes in to point-blank it. A decent action sequence.
Grodel tells the bridge crew to focus, as they are still in the middle of an operation. I realize now why Grodel earned so many favorite-character points so quickly: in addition to early establishment of badassery, HE IS A JAMIL. If you keep this up, Sunrise, I may start to respect you again. (Particularly if one of the other two protagonists is A GARROD or A LORAN, and if your obligatory A CHAR is up to snuff.)
Back on track, the UE get into the colony and start scanning things. Grodel sends Flit back after it, and then Vargas explains the AGE System cannot make a special weapon for this enemy because it does not have enough information. An excellently arbitrary restriction, that will no doubt solve many small problems and bugger up all the important ones.
Bruzar is interrupted by the arrival of the other UE mobile suit, which starts shooting at the control centre. The obligatory "everything has gone ass-up" music starts playing as the UE exits the colony, right into the Gundam of a very angry Flit. Lots of strange flying patterns, glowy bits, and SPACE FRICTION but not much. The core fills up, but with no way to separate it from the colony it gets buggered up. Bruzar calls the Diva with a backup plan, as he works his way through to an old construction centre he keeps up just in case. For an old dude bleeding all over the place, he is pretty lucid.
We get a Bruzar flashback of seven years ago, where he meets an even more chibi Flit. He brings up Flit's family's skills as mobile suit designers... despite the fact he is a little kid. Young Flit talks about the in-construction robot as a "savior that protects humanity", and Bruzar seems amused. I would not be as hopeful about a little kid building giant robots, but maybe engineering knowledge is a heritable trait in the future?
We get Flit and Yurin working some obvious elements to whatever-this-'verse-calls-Newtype hax, starting to chip away at the other UE.
Bruzar manages to disconnect the core of the colony, getting tossed around in the process, with just eight minutes of time to go. This is going to come down to the wire, methinks...
Back to Flit fighting the UE for a moment, and then back to the Diva and the colony. Grodel gets the obligatory "launch the ship" hand gesture (you probably know the one I mean?), and we see the Diva pulling out of port in another well-animated scene.
Cut back to Flit fighting the UE, during which he gets another bullet time moment, and actually misses, leaving him to stand unarmed in front of the UE in a You Shall Not Pass! moment. Clearly the aliens are terrified of things standing with their arms outstretched, because it turns and flees.
As the UE leaves, the collapsing colony blocks off the core, adding yet another invocation of the Unspoken Plan Guarantee. With two minutes to go, Bruzar puts on some classical music and grabs a bunch of propellant, gives Flit and Uncle Ben speech, and goes out like a boss. The core is pulled clear just in time as the colony explodes to a continuation of Bruzar's music. Way to set the character-death bar high at the start, series.
After the colony finishes its impressive if highly unrealistic purple-fire collapse, we cut back to the ship for the denoument. Flit and Yurin talk, during which she gives him her hair ribbon (obligatory Nanoha joke) and leaves just as Emily arrives, probably to avoid turning the series into Macross.
Someone wakes up from a cryogenic tube somewhere as our end-of-episode cliff hanger.
My greatest complaint so far is that the action sequences seem pretty uninspired. It might be a little too much of the traditional Gundam rinse and repeat philosophy, but right now the series sits right on that edge between "awesome" and "realistic" that just sort of falls flat for me. Hopefully they will push to one direction or the other (this being Gundam, I am going to guess the former) to entertain; at least so far, though, the series has exceeded my (medium-low) expectations, but has a long way to go to hit the Threshold Of Awesome.
