One death flag nearly averted, at a great cost of human life.
Okay, Episode 36 (or Episode 11 of Season 2) of Iron-Blooded Orphans has aired and the episode opens with the Mobile Armor waking up and immediately wrecking Iok’s mobile suit. Yet the fool refuses to retreat and it causes his men to waste their lives trying to get him to safety. Honestly, his men are ten-times better than him since his foolishness basically caused this mess to happen. In the aftermath, Rustal reports that contact with their group has ceased so he sends Julieta and Vidar to go look into it and Julieta decides that she wants to earn that Seven Stars honor for Rustal by killing it.
With Tekkadan, Mikazuki realizes they need to destroy it but by the time they can mobilize anyone it disappeared from the mining plant. There aren’t any survivors since the Mobile Armor specifically targets the cockpits and crushes them completely, killing the pilots inside, as its purpose is to kill humans. Mikazuki and McGillis see it as something akin to an angel designed to kill off humanity, having done so to 1/4 of the human population in the Calamity War, hence Mobile Suits are essentially demons made to emulate and hunt down the angels.
It also attacks bases in order to refuel, since they don’t have a Ahab reactor. Using this information, McGillis decides that they need to ambush it and sees it as Tekkadan and his own responsibility to kill it before it can self-repair itself, make more Plumas, and then head for Chryse to kill a bunch of humans.
Kudelia refuses to evacuate since it means leaving the weaker and lower-class population to die. As she puts it, if she runs away first, no one will trust her intentions in the future. So she intends to risk her life like the rest of Tekkadan and Atra agrees to do the same, giving Mikazuki motivation to stop it before it gets there.
However, Iok gets in the way, ruining the ambush and thus changing its course to the agricultural plant. Julieta rightfully called the idiot out for thinking that would be enough and tells him to stay out of the way, while Ride and Akihiro’s group heads over to help evacuate the plant. The beam weapon doesn’t affect Ride’s suit but blows up the plant behind him despite his effort to protect it, and the Pluma then swarm him until Mikazuki gets involved. McGillis also heads to the scene with his subordinate but is stopped by Vidar in his gundam, closing out the episode.
So this episode served to show the horror of the Mobile Armor and just how catastrophic it can be. I still question what kind of idiot would build a self-replicating weapon of war designed to kill humans, but it does explain why the gundams have demonic names. Also, Iok needs to die at this point. The egotistical moron not only woke the mobile suit up, but he condemned the people of that plant to die by being an idiot.
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