There’s sink-or-swim parenting. Then there’s this.
The eighteenth episode of Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury has aired. In a horrible case of the monkey paw curling, Guel has won a duel and thus claimed Aerial for himself at Mio’s behest. How will Suletta cope with the loss of her sister and the betrayal of her betrothed? As you can see in the preview picture, not well at all.
But we’ll cover that in my Recap and Review.
Recap
We start with a lecture on Permet, mildly satisfying the lore nerds among the fandom who want to know how this stuff works. In the aftermath of her loss, Suletta has been oddly cheerful while going hard in her studies. The other Earth Kids are worried about her, considering she just lost her bride and sister, though she claims she’s marking things off her wishlist.
Guel meanwhile is struggling to get support from financiers due to not having a track record, even with Mio and Prospera backing him. The latter suggests announcing the new mobile suit model they have, a Gundam that’s just been sitting there called the Schwarzette. Vim had been working on it, which rankles Mio because Prospera had been sharing the technology behind her back. Though Prospera states that this was before she acquired her company and she should announce it as a joint project between GUND-ARM and Jeturk.
Mio refuses since her company was originally made to use GUND for medical purposes, as she originally promised. Though Prospera points out that if she’s going to win the presidential race she’s got to start making compromises. Mio doesn’t like it but acknowledges that she’ll keep her end of the promise before asking where Prospera is, who reveals that she’s at Grassley since they wanted to talk.
We then cut to Belmeria, adjusting the programming on Aerial since the area of parallel distribution is her specialty. She reveals that they are currently working on a GUND-Bit in mobile suit form designed to expand Aerial’s data storm network. But instead of a Gundvolva, it’s called a Gundnode.
Then back to Prospera where Shaddiq expresses he’d like to make Gundams part of the Beneritt Group’s core business. Prospera calls out how Grassley hated them and then questions why they couldn’t capture any of the ones that attacked the Open Campus, which Shaddiq claims is because they had self-destruct protocols. She sees through the lie as Mio comes in, pissed that he’s undercutting her to become president and having gotten Peil’s cooperation. That means in the race to become president he’s got two of the three big groups in his pocket and they only have two weeks before the vote.
While all of that is going on from the political side of things, at the school we have Suletta tending to the greenhouse despite everything that happened. When Chuchu asks her if she hates Mio for the betrayal, she thinks she’s the one at fault for breaking her promise. Then Lauda comes by, states that no one needs Suletta before thanking Chuchu for saving him, and then leaves the latter confused and the former even more guilty. Chuchu eventually gets fed up with Su’s self-depreciation and states they’ll take her to see Mio at the head office. Everyone else in Earth House is going except Martin, and when they note Chuchu has changed she states she’s acting how she thinks Nika would, which causes him to noticeably flinch but stay silent.
We then cut to Norea and Elan Five along with Nika. The latter finally asks if he’s the Elan they knew, to which he happily admits he’s a different person and explains this mess. Peil uses an AI to determine its leader based on a Grading system and the real Elan won, but since they needed someone to take place in duels and they were already using enhanced humans to work on Gundams they decided to kill two birds with one stone. Nika is horrified when he points out that Su and Aerial are the exceptions to the rules, but he just questions why Norea gets into a Gundam instead.
She claims she has none, at which point calls out how she’s hollow inside so she tells herself it’s for the Earthian’s sake. She gets pissed off enough to try to kill him with actual effort this time, claiming she needs no other reason aside from wanting to kill Spacians. He then states that they should be honest that neither of them wants to pilot a Gundam since their lives are cheap as is, while Shaddiq is selling off assets to Earth and claiming it’s for his father’s sake.
Back with Mio’s group, Prospera brings up those protests on Earth that are escalating, and Mio wonders if they could try to calm them down since that’ll be a good mark on their track record. Both of them state she needs a show of force to negotiate on even terms and so she wants to use Aerial. She hopes to show them that the Beneritt group in the future won’t need to resort to violence.
Then we see Belmeria is currently being accosted by the two members of the Space Assembly League for questioning, while Martin is guilt-tripping over reporting what Nika did. He gets called out as a double-crossing rat by Secelia right around the time that Mio gets an escort to Earth with the commander of the Dominicus, Kenanji Avery. As for the rest of the Earth House kids, they try to meet with Mio but Prospera instead sends Su off to chat with Aerial and they go on a ride out in space where she vents her heart to them.
Without Mio, Su is struggling to move forward and so Aerial does some space magic to bring her into the world beyond the data storm. There she sees what Eri looks like along with the other GUND-bits, who introduce themselves as the Children of the Coven and state they don’t need her as the key to give Eri a physical form. Then Eri forces a Data Storm on Su to show her the past, about what happened seventeen years ago, and how Su is basically a clone of her.
Now that she’s at Permet Eight, Eri doesn’t need a pilot. So Su can’t cling to her or their mother anymore. Then she vents her into space where Prospera confirms everything that was said and tells her to go back to the school since that has all that’s needed to fill her heart.
Prospera takes the Gundam for herself and boards Mio’s ship, asking if Eri was sure about that as they could have brought her with them. But Eri states that Suletta deserves to live freely now. Cue credits as she’s left drifting in space crying.
Review
Someone hit the fast-forward button because they crammed just about every loose plot strand in this episode in an attempt to weave them together in the future.
Let’s start with the first and biggest one: Suletta and Eri.
The mystery behind Eri and Suletta has been made clear at last. As many theorized, Su is effectively a clone that Prospera made of her daughter seventeen years ago when she was being assimilated into Aerial. Not the only one either, considering the Children of the Coven were all floating there with her.
Being pulled into Aerial resulted in her being trapped without a physical form and so she needed a key to move around. That was Su’s purpose and she was raised to carry it out, but now that she’s hit Permet Eight she can move on her own. So Suletta isn’t needed anymore.
Now, to her credit, Eri isn’t being malicious about it. In the short story light novel, she was already against having her younger sister participate in her mother’s revenge. Now that she’s reached the point where she can act on her own, she decided to cut her out of her life entirely so she can be on her own.
And Prospera seemingly agrees with that sentiment. Though she questioned if they should bring her along in a moment alone with only her daughter, she ultimately agrees that the only way for Suletta to move forward is to end things. That being said, leaving her stranded in space is kind of a dick move.
The poor girl was already blaming herself for everything that happened, but now they’ve completely cut her out of their lives after dropping this truth onto her as a form of tough love. That’s a villain origin story right there. She’s going to be coming back in Season Three wearing a mask and swearing revenge against all of them.
Like mother like clone daughter, I guess.
I mean, at least she has the Earth House kids. They are super supportive of her so far with Chuchu earning her spot as best girl again. They even went as far as to go to visit the place where Mio is to try and reconnect them, except for Martin. That poor bastard is questioning if he did the right thing he reported a crime and he wanted everyone to be safe.
I get where he’s coming from but as his bandage shows snitches get stitches. The fact that Nika couldn’t come out to tell him means he doesn’t have the full context. We do, so we can see that it was a bad call on his end. But with the information he had, he did nothing wrong given that the very two Gundams who attacked them before were the same ones that Nika signaled. It’s just a bad situation.
But I will admit the confessional scene with Seclina was weird. I mean, it has to serve some purpose right? She isn’t a Grassley plant given that she was surprised by the attack, so I wonder if she’ll be the one to piece together Shaddiq’s plan and that he has Nika?
The next issue is the presidential race. There are only two weeks left when I thought they would have more time, and everyone is scrambling for support. Jeturk is struggling because they have little credibility with Guel, though his father was keeping a Gundam in storage the entire time and had been working with Shin Sei. I can only assume that was when they first brokered a deal back during the Witch Trial.
Shaddiq, meanwhile, is stacking the deck in his favor. He’s got Peil backing him while Elan Five is under his thumb, he tried to get Shin Sei under his thumb, and he’s already pushing the sale of assets in the name of his father’s safety. He’s such a snake that I can’t help but be impressed at the competency here.
Then there’s the investigation into Shin Sei with the Space Assembly League. I suspect that they’ll uncover more about Quiet Zero that Prospera is keeping hidden since Shin Sei wasn’t involved in that particular mess at Plant Quetta. Though Belmeria hadn’t been on board at the time so that’s a dry well from my point of view. I hope she snitches on Peil though, since that would bring down Shaddiq’s credibility.
We also learned how Peil elected Elan to be its head. An AI said he was the best so the entitled douchebag goes around acting better than everyone else. Honestly, I kind of expect Elan Five to kill him and the hags before taking their place as the leader.
Speaking of the Enhanced Human Five, he knows how to read Norea. Calling her empty enough to warrant her getting up and actively trying to attack him. He’s lucky she didn’t have a gun on her at the time or she might have emptied it into his chest, but at least the secret is out now.
But again, I find it strange that Nika didn’t know Gundams kill people. Yeah, Eri is the exception to the rule, but no one hid that. They were banned for a reason.
Moving onto the topic of Mio now, we see that in the aftermath of her breaking Su’s heart, she’s acting as the brains to Guel’s operation. Even so, she tries to keep to the principles that she set when she made GUND-Arm with everyone as they didn’t want to manufacture weapons. But the situation and Prospera are wearing those down pretty quickly, as her going to Earth to try and quell the violence with peaceful methods while having a Gundam and security force of all things present is a nasty combination of both sides meshing together.
You know Shaddiq is going to have Dawn of Fold interfere here, right?
Kidnapping Mio removes her from the race, gets Aerial in his pocket, and secures his victory. Plus, it’s not like Guel can’t suffer more. There’s a perfectly good pseudo-father figure there he hasn’t killed who was also a former member of Dominicus and they have the current commander. That’s asking for trouble.
It’d be weirder if he didn’t have them act to kick off the second half of the season, where Su will need to pull herself together to rescue her.
Looking forward to it.
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