Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX

Episode 10

It's all fun and games until everyone gets a gun. Both Machu and Nyaan are being primed for a violent reunion by adults they trust—and neither Challia nor Kycilia has proven themself to be a trustworthy guardian this episode. Everything escalated quickly in “Yomagn'tho Blockade,” an episode that showed us the teenage love triangle is still a major plotline despite the total absence of one of its angles for three episodes now. Pronounced shifts between monotone grayscale and psychedelic color set the mood as the story ramps up, suggesting that, as momentous as this episode was, even more intense scenes lie further ahead.

Five years after Degwin Zabi's funeral, Gihren and Kycilia appear to be the final remnants of the Zeon family, at least at the beginning of the episode. I've criticized this show for doing away with fascinating characters within a single episode, but Gihren barely sticks around for two minutes. Though Gihren and his cronies point their fingers at Kycilia for hiding her face, she gets the last laugh when it turns out she's wearing a gas mask and they're all inhaling deadly poison. It turns out Gihren was wise not to meet with his sister for five years if she's the sort of ruthless person who will kill him immediately upon their reunion. It's incongruous to compare who Kycilia is politically with how she presents herself to Nyaan. When Nyaan prepares food for Kycilia, she tells Xavier he can't have any because she only prepares food for people she likes. When she's brushing Nyaan's hair, she appears almost maternal, though a handgun and some coordinates are not your average motherly gift! Now the balance of power has irrevocably shifted in exactly the way Challia has feared.

Kycilia and Nyaan make up one half of the episode, and Machu and Challia represent their counterparts. Machu has gotten closer to Challia, calling him “Beard Man” as a nickname. I'm not quite sure how the kabedon, aka wall-slam, fits into their new relationship! It scared me a bit when we saw it in the preview that there was going to be a romantic bent to their connection moving forward, but instead it feels like Machu sees Challia as a mentor figure. When Challia opens up to Machu about his past and she pays attention, it's a very different sort of interaction than their silent cross-examination just last week. As Machu reflects on her status as a universally wanted criminal, the color bleeds out of the scene to portray her in muted gray. It corresponds well with Challia's backstory about his time on Jupiter, which is portrayed in stark black and white. In the original Universal Century story, Challia Bull is known as “The Man From Jupiter,” but his time there is very unclear. The story Challia tells Machu is new to me (other than the fact that he was stationed on Jupiter to gather resources), which means the character-building angst he reveals is unique to the Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX version of Challia. The gun Challia gives Machu has a heavy past, in that Challia nearly used it to kill himself. Machu has already fired a handgun once in this series, so maybe Challia's tale will convince her not to use it too rashly. But there's also a Chekov's Gun situation at play here. I'd be very surprised if the season ends without either Machu or Nyaan firing one of those babies.

If scenes of intense introspection accompanied desaturated scenes, brilliant color signaled obliteration. It's unclear to me exactly what happens to A Baoa Qu when Nyaan triggers the Zeknova. In the Universal Century timeline that occurs during 1979's Mobile Suit Gundam, A Baoa Qu was Zeon's last line of defense in the One Year War. Only when it fell did Zeon sign a treaty with the Earth Federation. In the Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX timeline, A Baoa Qu appears to be intact—well, at first. Did Nyaan manage to swap the two space fortresses between parallel universes (let's call them A Baoa Qu and B Baoa Qu for laughs), so the UC timeline's destroyed version is now in Machu's universe? Or were there no parallel universe shenanigans at all: did triggering the Zeknova simply destroy A Baoa Qu with its force? The episode ended just as things were getting good. Machu doesn't realize it's Nyaan in the GFreD, but I'm sure that learning the pilot's identity will only add fuel to her anger. These girls are still bent out of shape over their absent sewer-dwelling dreamboat. The difference is, now they both have guns—not to mention the giant mecha named after metasyntactic variables. Something is about to go down in this room, and I can hardly wait for next week.

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Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video on Tuesdays.

Lauren writes about model kits at Gunpla 101. She spends her days teaching her two small Newtypes to bring peace to the space colonies.