With the fourth REBEL 3199 “movie”, titled “The Aqua Sasha,” we reach the midpoint of this glossy modern retelling of 1980's Space Battleship Yamato movie Be Forever Yamato and TV show The Bolar Wars. Comprising episodes 11-14, these recently appeared on Crunchyroll at some point soon after their October theatrical release in Japan. While I really appreciate the speed at which we get each new release of this great show in English subtitled streaming form, would it kill Crunchyroll to actually tell anyone it's available? Such a complete and total lack of Western publicity is guaranteed to keep this excellent space opera woefully obscure.

There's a lot going on in REBEL 3199, which means each individual plotline takes a long time to progress, making it feel, at least in these middle episodes, that there's simultaneously a little too much happening, yet there's not quite enough plot development. Most of these events are of the interpersonal and political intrigue variety, subsequently making less room for Yamato's majestic, multi-colored space battles. This is probably the least action-packed clump of episodes so far, though the few action set-pieces that remain are a treat to experience.

The viewer's attention is split between multiple plot strands. On the new home planet of the displaced Gamilas people, Garmann-Gamilas, Supreme Leader Desler contends with repeated attacks from the enemy Bolar Federation. However, slumbering beneath the planet is a massive fleet of quiescent Iscandarian Shalbat-class warships, merely awaiting the correct trigger to revive them into action… Yamato holds the only remaining Iscandarian Cosmo Reverse System whose Wave Motion Energy resonance can awaken the fleet, in a super-cool sequence where enormous walls and pillars of yellow light erupt across the planet's surface. (Although the Gamilas and Bolar ships have their own Wave Motion Energy variants, none of them are “pure enough” for this task.)

Nominal lead Susumu Kodai is once more sidelined by the show's enormous cast, but he does get to pine over his missing fiancee Yuki Mori, plus he reunites with his niece Sasha, daughter of brother Mamoru Kodai and Iscandarian royalty Stasha. Due to some timey-wimey shenanigans, following her kidnapping by the Dezarium, Sasha is now seventeen years old, and her story seems to validate the Dezarium's claims to come from the future. She's been brought up in very abnormal circumstances, accordingly acts out like a bratty teenager, and we sadly learn her caretaker, lieutenant Kaoru Niimi has apparently died off-screen after what sounds like a prolonged, horrendous experience. It's not unusual for the Yamato franchise to kill off prominent characters, but I wonder if there's more to these events than we're currently privy to. Never trust a death if you don't see the body.

Back on Earth, we see the Dezarium's influence grow via two main viewpoint characters. Yuki Mori remains in the care of high-ranking Dezarium officer Major Alphon, and she seems to be developing at least some sympathy for him, though it could just be Stockholm Syndrome. It transpires he is a “non-standard failure” among his race, “ruled by emotions,” and held to higher standards to justify his existence. Unlike his fellows, he needs to sleep, and is tortured by nightmares. His actions become more heroic, his allegiances unclear, following the lead of other charismatic Yamato antiheroes like Desler.

Perhaps the most interesting, yet atypical for Yamato, plot thread involves Tsubasa, son of former Yamato officers Makoto Kato and the deceased Saburo Kato. His friendship with the cute Dezarium kid Frulul provides a strong emotional core, reinforced by his mother's developing friendship (romance?) with Frulul's father Maxim. Dezarium children's minds are transferred to new, larger bodies with each successive birthday, as a way to mimic biological growth. Frulul's father mourns that his daughter can't experience a normal human childhood, and that the Dezarium's ways are but a pale imitation. Frulul also begins to experience unfamiliar emotions as she spends time with Tsuabasa's family, even crying for the first time, and though her father can observe everything she sees and hears, he can't experience the way she feels. Importantly, Frulul removes her glowing red command medal that connects her to Dezarium ruling AI Mother, at the same time as the humans around her begin to adopt them.

These episodes and their themes of scapegoating immigrants, false flag bombings, and the rise of a controlling, rigid autocracy, are incredibly timely, considering current political realities in the West. It's hard not to see Gamilas immigrants being loaded onto deportation ships, while being jeered at by angry mobs, and not think of the disturbing ICE situation in the US, or the rise of Reform in the UK. Science fiction is always at its best when holding a mirror to the present in which it was written, and this season of Space Battleship Yamato is one of the timeliest sci-fi anime I've ever seen. When economic times are tough, it's easy for populists to rile up the people against a perceived threat by scapegoating the “other.” In Yamato's case, it's the blue-skinned Gamilas people, standing in here for any number of marginalized or oppressed groups in the real world. What's especially tragic is that the masses in both fiction and real life don't realize they themselves are being manipulated, and in some ways are victims of systemic oppression from those in power. (Technocratic billionaires and creepy, emotionless, gray-skinned robotic Dezarium are looking pretty similar right now.)

Interestingly, there are two major antagonist factions in REBEL 3199's sprawling narrative. The aforementioned Dezarium are the modern analogue for the 1979 and 1980 movies' Dark Nebula Empire, and are effectively unsettling AI master manipulators. So far, the Bolar Federation have acted mostly in the shadows, via slave race proxies. We meet new character Ram, a general from the planet Barth, which like Garmann-Gamilas is freezing due to strange cosmic occurrence “The Witch of Uralia” that may be artificial. In order to keep his people alive, Ram must bend to the Bolars' will and attempt to destroy Garmann-Gamilas. Far from being yet another pathetic enemy underling, he's shown to have a conscience, acting even against his own interests. I'll be interested to see where the plot takes his character next.

These episodes' two big action climaxes come as a pair of excellent, tense, if brief, space battles, both hinging on half-Iscandarian character Sasha's mysterious powers. In the first, the Yamato must destroy an enormous Bolar missile with the power to vaporize a planet. In the other, the Yamato and the submarine-esque Zerandal (captained by the amazingly-named Volf Fleurken) descend into the weird subspace void and are attacked by a pair of freaky tentacle Dezarium craft things that for all intents and purposes look like enormous glowing space sperm. Perhaps during its early teen episodes, REBEL 3199 has entered its difficult adolescence phase.

We're left with a painful cliffhanger that means the wait for the next tranche of episodes in February 2026 will be particularly challenging to endure. Although these four episodes haven't quite reached the excitement and intensity levels of the preceding release, REBEL 3199 remains an extremely consistent, gorgeous show with high production values, fascinating characters, and an intelligent script. I'm hoping the Yamato crew will get the chance to travel into the teased far future in subsequent episodes, I really want to know what truths there are to the Dezarium's claims.