Headscratchers / Galaxy Express 999

• Episode 29 has a woman state that although she doesn't have a pass, the Galaxy Express will take someone who's a refugee, since she crashed on the planet. This should have affected an awful lot of other plots, including the previous episode, which had a man stranded on a planet. The episode is also about staying with an abusive boyfriend.

• Isn't it a bit excessive that every non-Jerkass machine-human dies in the same episode s/he is introduced, except for Spiral, who despite putting a brave face on it ends up in a situation that verges on a Fate Worse than Death?

• On that subject, it bothers me that the series seems to be trying to combine Cybernetics Eat Your Soul and, well, the opposite. In many places it is implied that people who become machine-humans lose their humanity in ways that extend far beyond just Immortality Immorality, one of the most prominent being Maetel Legend where everyone mechanized, including Maetel's mother, instantly turns evil. Yet we've seen good mechanized humans (including one almost at the end of the TV series where Tetsuro actually learns that there are good mechanized humans). And it's not just that Matsumoto continuity is hazy, because Galaxy Express itself implies it too—and besides, this isn't just a continuity contradiction, it's a contradiction between themes.
  • There's also that woman in Space Symphony Maetel who became mechanized for medical reasons and clearly isn't evil. How then did Maetel's mother turn evil?
    • She started that way? Or different people react differently to being mechanized. That could be the real theme: Mechanized or organic, people still choose to be good or evil.
    • Some people are evil inside and lose any restraint once they get stronger and apparently immortal mechanized bodies. Maetel's mother, on the other hand, became completely mad due the particular way she was mechanized: she wasn't just taken from her old body and placed in a robotic one, her human body was slowly transformed in a robotic one by nanomachines implanted into her in an attempt at making her Brainwashed and Crazy, with seeing that many being mechanized in a more traditional way at the time were being brainwashed damaging her sanity even more and her inability to be killed when she realized what she was becoming making her finally crack. Then she became fully mechanic, and she became evil and even crazier when she partially defeated the brainwashing. I say partially because she absorbed and consumed the one responsible for her mechanization when she was supposed to be completely subdued to his will, but then prosecuted his plan to mechanize the entire universe...

• At the end of episode 63, Miru is shot by Lelan as she reaches for the artificial sun's kill-switch, then after Maetel's tongue-lashing sends Lelan reeling, Lelan bolts outside and is killed by the daylight. So now that Lelan is dead, and Maetel and Tetsuro know where the kill-switch is...why don't they pull the kill-switch and save 99.9% of the population from a horrible, screaming death?!

• The logic of the story requires that a pass for the 999 cost less than the going rate for getting mechanized. So why do machine-humans seem to greatly outnumber people who can afford passes?
  • I think the logic only requires that it be true for Tetsuro, who got a free pass. I don't think we saw any other people saying "I'm saving up for a pass so I can go get mechanized."
    • Also, it's quite possible that the premise is true now, but hasn't always been true. Most of the planets we see don't seem to have thriving economies.

• Are the brains of machine-humans electronic or biological? It's very strongly hinted that they have human brains, but on the few occasions we get to see a machine-human's brain it appears to be a smallish boxy wifi-router-looking doodad that couldn't possibly be big enough to house a human brain. But if they have electronic brains, how does that square with the episodes where a computer the size of a tennis court is needed to host a human consciousness that still comes back wrong anyway?
  • Different technologies: the one used to make the normal machine people is superior when it comes to house a human consiousness than the one used in that episode. Also, the person in question didn't so much come back wrong as start out wrong.

• The woman on the butterfly-people planet asks her lover why their race doesn't venture to other worlds; he answers that their life-spans are much too short to survive the journey to even the nearest of them. She objects that this is not a good reason...but...erm...it kind of is.
  • Because there are three ways to reach other worlds: Generation Ships, cryo sleep, and plain old FTL travel.

• The Filament episode incorporated an interesting idea that I'd long thought would make a good SF story (basically a Sixth Sense reveal with an entire planet of beings that don't realise that they are ghosts courtesy of some sudden cosmic catastrophe) but it just gets tossed out with a few cursory words in the middle of an Infodump and is never mentioned again. I wish they had expanded on this rather than just done yet another Tetsuro-held-hostage story. Still, you have to love that even fricking ghosts get taken in by the Machine Empire's propaganda.

• How did Matsumoto manage to write Masspron as a parody of modern industrial China nearly 15 years before Deng Xiaoping's "southern tour" created it?
  • For the same reason some sci-fi writers have presented China as a future great power rivaling US and Russia (sometimes combined) since the fifties: they saw it coming.

• If the Waterpress Nation couldn't build spacecraft, how did they manage to invade the Cheyenne Fish's planet in the first place?
  • They bought them?

• Anvils dropping in opposite directions:
  • War is—
    • Pointless killing (Destruction of Macaroni al Gratin, The Laboratory of Eternal War)
    • A glorious proclamation of hope for the future...or something (Lifeform no. 3)
    • Pointless and cruel but it's an expression of Natural Will that noone can escape so you can't stop it but you must because someday you might put a stop to it but you can't because it's impossible but you must... (Queen's Rebellion)
  • Banditry is—
    • Teh Awesome!! (The Great Bandit Antares, Pirate Ship Queen Esmeraldas)
    • Vile degenerate thuggery!! (Rebellion of C62)
    • ... but a step up from beggary (The Gimme Planet)
  • If your lover jilts you—
    • It's because you're a jerk who deserved it (Tale of a Short Life)
    • It's because she's a jerk and murdering her and her boyfriend and then framing an innocent person to save your own neck is kinda okay (Song of the Skeleton)
    • It's because he's a jerk but just let him alone; work out unresolved feelings of rejection by mass-murdering thousands of innocent strangers instead (Graveyard at the Bottom of Gravity)

• What exactly is the Conductor?
  • An alien of some sort most likely.
  • Apparently he's an invisible man with a pressurised gas body.

• Where are the other passengers? Tetsuo and Maetel seem to have the 999 all to themselves.
  • It's early, so I forget the episode number specifically, but it's the first episode with Antares. Antares robs a car connected to the car Maetel and Tetsuo are in, which seemed decently occupied. I guess the two tend to sit in the more empty cars.
  • They tend to sit in the more empty cars, and the most of the passengers are from Earth in the first place. Some take the train at the various stops, but there's more people who leave, and others die when the misadventure of the week doesn't involve only Tetsuro and Maetel (rare, but happens).

• Who or what pilots the Galaxy Express 999 and the other train-spaceships? Are they basically automated/semi-automated robots?
  • The engines house sophisticated A.I.s. Several episodes show this quite clearly.

• What period of time does the show cover? There's multiple references to the 999 coming round once every year and other statements seem to heavily imply it is a unique train. So that would mean on a round trip Tetsuro took six months to get from Earth to Promethium. Or about 21 weeks. In that 21 weeks he manages to have over 100 episodes worth of adventures (excluding the two parters it's probably close to a round 100, not motivated quite enough to check). That means he's having about five episodes worth of adventures per week. And considering they stop at each station for an on planet day, it must mean the travel time between planets is absurdly quick. Like less than a few hours. I guess it really is more train than spaceship.
  • Neither of these assumptions is necessary; the 999 is a route, not a train. To use a specific example, the Vancouver-Horseshoe Bay Express bus is commonly called the 257, but there's not a single, specific bus that covers only that route. So if the trip to Andromeda and back takes, let's say, two years, then there are two trains on the route. We just never see the other because it's irrelevant to the story. Alternatively, Leiji Matsumoto never crunched the numbers.
  • It can't just be a route, because they make it clear that there is only one 999. I can remember at least one very clear reference to this (as I was considering this question as I watched the show and was hunting for such references). When the 999 gets lost in a Black Hole, it shows Galaxy Command and them lamenting the fact that 'the' 999 has been destroyed and they will have to build another one. An alternative to the timeline first presented is that the journey back to Earth is actually an Express service and takes much less time, meaning the show has about a year to cover every episode.

• Why hasn't Maetel been mechanised? Given her backstory it seems like it would have been heavily pushed on her even without consent.
  • Maetel was meant to be a honey trap which works better as a true human to be trusted. Promethium intended for her to go, pick up "lost" people and give them the promise of hope as a machine body and take them to the planet to be inserted into it. Promethium didn't expect Maetel to be a traitor and tell the truth to her charges who made the sacrifice willingly. The only reason Tetsuro wasn't told until the last moment was because Maetel didn't intend for him to be sacrificed.

• Is it possible to ride the 999 without a pass? If you live on a planet that only gets one train, the 999, can you buy a ticket for passage just to the next world over instead of a full pass?
  • One episode shows a man doing exactly that, so yes.

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