Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury – Episode 15 [Season 2 – Episode 3]

Yep, we’re back to standard Gundam with dead children.

The fifteenth episode of Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury has aired now. In the last episode, Earth House was arrested, Sophie died, and we had the biggest theory confirmed. Now we’re going to go to Earth itself and see how our favorite boy Guel is doing. Is he suffering as expected?

Obviously, but we’ll cover how in my Recap and Review.

Recap

On Earth, we see the camp for Dawn of Fold and it’s filled with people of all ages, rather than soldiers as I expected. We then cut to Olcott, one of the agents of Dawn of Fold, who goes into the abandoned school building where they have Guel locked inside of a toilet. He hasn’t eaten willingly within three days and has been apologizing to his dead father the entire time, causing the man to force his mouth open and then make him ingest food. Since he can be a useful bargaining tool he isn’t allowed to die.

After that, they discuss evacuating since Norea sent a message that the Beneritt Group had sniffed them out. They had been staying with the refugees until now and so they can’t leave them behind. And we see Norea blaming Nika by beating her senselessly for her ideals getting Sophie killed and the impending attack until she gets stopped because they can’t let her kill Nika yet.

Meanwhile, Shaddiq is talking to his father about how ambitions. He wants to put an end to the current cycle of war profiting and partitioning, which he intends to do by selling the group’s assets to Earth. He wants to do so to create a stalemate that won’t leave the wars to be fought on Earth. Darius claims it’s him working off his grudges against Spacians because he’s half Earthian. He states that isn’t the case, or at least grudges won’t fill his belly, but he does think that as long as Spacians hold all the power no one can do anything. So he’ll be the one to hold it.

In Space, we see that the leader of Dominicus is questioning why they weren’t sent to Earth instead of the Security Group. News about the attack on the school leaked, but the board doesn’t want to owe Cathedra anything. Mio goes to visit her father’s second-in-command to ask about Quiet Zero when the call ends.

Back on Earth, we have one member of Dawn of Fold wanting to take point in the upcoming operation while the veterans are telling him that things are about to go down and their family will be involved. The children make a grave for Sophie as Naji and Olcott look over it when they learn they found a place for the refugees. The Mobile Suit pilots will remain as decoys to keep them from noticing the evacuees.

Night falls and we see one of the children attempting to kill Guel because their father died at the plant. Guel questions why he survived instead of his father, which prompts the children to bring up that his family’s company is about to go bankrupt. That gets his attention, but then the Security Forces arrive.

The fresh pilot opened fire after they told him not to fire first and it ends up getting the school area bombed. Olcott and Guel end up getting buried in the rubble with the children while the four pilots land. Olcott has a vision of his son dying before snapping awake (revealing his arm to be mechanical) and seeing that one of the children had suffered injuries bad enough that he has to leave her to save the other. The injured child is left calling for her father softly, at which point the rubble near her shifts.

The pilot who screwed up gets killed and they lose another two units before Olcott emerges in a mobile suit and kills one of them. We then see Guel managed to survive and is carrying the injured child out, trying to get them to safety, as she questions why he’s doing it. Then a Dawn of Fold mobile suit lands near them and he opens it to find the pilot dead, leaving him to vomit before seeing it still has power and deciding to use it to help the girl.

Dominicus looks through the list of suspects and sees that Olcott, whose real name was different, was a former member. He apparently had his own sense of justice and his family was killed in an operation as collateral damage. The man himself thinks that he threw all of that away before the mobile suit that Guel took launches into the sky in search of a vehicle.

It distracts the final unit, allowing Olcott to kill them, when he receives a message from Guel that the child died in his arms. He ends up making a grave for her and Olcott talks to him as he questions what he should do. He tells Guel to think for himself and so he asks how to get to an orbital lift, as he doesn’t want to lose anything else that binds him to his father.

Post-credits, we see Mio talking to her father’s second-in-command who tells her that Quiet Zero started as a modest idea. Her mother, a botanical engineer, could apply survival strategies for plants to humans. Her father supported those ideas, wanting to bring an end to the fighting even by taking drastic measures, but the accident took her away along with his hope.

Mio realizes that’s why he came up with the Holder situation. He wanted to marry her off to someone powerful and as camouflage for Quiet Zero. As he wants to fulfill her final wishes, even if it means using the Gundams he buried, but Mio should follow her own heart.

Review

Finally, my need for Guel scenes has been satisfied with a full episode dedicated to him. We also get to see the mess that’s the situation on Earth, at least with Dawn of Fold. Let’s unpack it all shall we?

First, we see that in the fallout of the attack on the school Nika had been captured by Shaddiq’s harem. Norea naturally blames her for everything, from Sophie’s death to the need to abandon their homes and the deaths that will happen on Earth. Nika feels that because Dawn of Fold keeps doing things like this, no one will listen to Earthian voices.

It ties back to their clash of ideals. Nika wants to act as a bridge to end the violence, while Norea notes they need weapons to get the message across and fight back. Neither can accept the way the other handles things.

Shaddiq seems to have his own opinion as well on how things work. He feels that as someone who is both Earthian and Spacian, the power lies too heavily with the corporations and so the violence won’t end. So he’ll give Earth the tools they need while controlling the power to end the wars by forcing a stalemate. The fact that he’s willing to stage terrorist attacks and put everyone in danger is a sacrifice he’s willing to make.

On Earth, Dawn of Fold proved to be less organized than I thought despite them putting up a nice front in space they weren’t as well off as I expected. They only had four mobile suits they could field and nearly got wiped out by as many units from the Security Group, largely doing nothing meaningful until Olcott showed up. If they only had two Gundams then why did they send both to attack the school?

Thinking about it, Naji and Olcott are competent but they aren’t working with a lot. The fact that the refugees were the ones living there and they were staying as guests probably meant they have no set base. Olcott being given as much of a backstory as he was, being a former member of Dominicus and a mechanical arm, leaves me to think that he’s probably not going to be surviving for too much longer though. He’s acting too much like a parental figure and we know the fate of those in a Gundam show.

But onto Guel. He was as broken as we would expect for someone who killed his father. Worn down, questioning his right to live, and not even resisting when the girl came to kill him, the only thing that got him moving again was learning that they were going bankrupt. His brother was nearly killed in the attack on the school, his father is dead and their mobile suits were used in the attack on the colony, all of these things factored together don’t inspire confidence and so I can imagine how it’s happening.

And then he nearly gets killed as collateral damage, only to hear the child who wanted to kill him crying out for her father. He gets out and tries to get her help, coming across a mobile suit that got downed but was surprisingly still intact. I can only assume that the pilot was killed by the landing itself, but he still jacks it so that he can get her help.

Then she dies in his arms and all he can do is make a grave for her. This dude cannot win. Even when he tries to help someone, he can’t and ends up seeing more death and having no direction. The only thing he can do is try to move forward and keep what little he has of his father.

Father and Child is the title of the episode and it’s fitting. Olcott lost his child and even though he threw everything away it still haunts him. Guel lost his father defending himself and can now only scramble to get a hold of what’s left. The ones who are left behind can only struggle to keep moving on.

Last is the thing with Mio and Quiet Zero. A lot of the fandom was questioning how her mother was involved in this and we’re getting the basis of it. She came up with a theory at the very least and for someone who lacked any other semblance of finding peace other than violence, it was his hope.

Not that it justifies anything for Delling. I mean, I already figured he would get some kind of reason for his Gundam Hunting and killing the scientists involved. His second in command might call it drastic measures, but I watched the Prologue and saw a woman get her brains blown out for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s no different than Dawn of Fold attacking the colony, everyone has some measure of justification for what they do but whether you agree with them or not is something for you to decide.

Such is the nature of Gundam in the end.