Mobile Suit Gundam 00 – 30

Short Synopsis: Celestial Beings visit Kataron in an attempt to team up.
Highlights: Well, let’s hope Saji has learned his lesson now…
Overall Enjoyment Value: 7,5/10 (Good)
Overall, I liked this episode quite a bit as it continued to push the plot forward, although I do have a large complaint about the way it ended. It just reminded me too much of Code Geass, in which the creators just too often tried to evoke sympathy by creating an as large bloodbath as possible. The big problem is that the lead characters that were so morally unambiguous in the first season turned into the clichéd “heroes of justice”.

In the first season, there were some evil parties, but no party was pure good. Everyone was in it for his or her own ideals and agendas, and especially the split world into three equally powerful parties made up for a lot of interesting politics, where the viewer got the chance to side for a lot of differently possible parties. Unfortunately, they’ve now merged together into one big glob of a country where only the characters from the first season seem to feel any sympathy.

It’s not a complete disaster, but this series really NEEDS to do something to prevent A-LAWS from turning into your stereotyped evil empire that needs to be defeated. The top-decision makers are the biggest problem, I think. They just aren’t fleshed out as well as the people fro the first season. It’s a shame, we’ve got a series with some wonderful characters across the scale of good and evil, and now they have to take orders from pure evil people.

Gundam Wing had the same in its middle part, and it managed to pull through when said organization fell apart. That’s what I hope that this series is going to do as well: just let the evil empire do its stuff for a while, and then around the episode 13-mark make it fall apart with a big bang. I mentioned this before, but the most important thing that this series needs to do is to give each of its characters an identity: a unique role that’s going to create a lot of different parties one could side with.

Strangely enough, I was more annoyed with Louise than with Saji in this episode. Saji’s behaviour felt natural: we already know that he’s struggling between every different party, and he’s not exactly someone who can keep a secret. However, it seems that Louise didn’t enter the army to grow, but rather to take revenge on the Gundams for her hand.

Speaking of stereotypes… what was up with Ali al Sarshes? Has he spent four years getting more and more insane or something? I would have preferred a less direct scene.