Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury

Episode 19

While there have been plenty of story threads lengthening and intertwining as usual for the show, it was easy to hone in on Suletta's struggles as the center of last week's episode of The Witch from Mercury. As predicted, the tanuki's tumblings have landed her firmly at rock bottom. In this week's episode, we witness our leading lady, at last, reaching Maximum Divorced status, shuffling around dead-eyed in the dark and scrounging for leftovers like the raccoon creature her disheveled looks cause her to resemble more than ever. It's great. Of course, it works because of the upswing in care and clarity Suletta comes to by the end of this one, as she might be on the path to getting her groove back. And that all comes about because of reflections we glimpse in those aforementioned parallel plot lines, which in this episode turn out to be the ones to bear fruit. Terrible, tragic fruit.

This is a Gundam series written by Ichirou Okouchi, so it was kind of a given that things would go bad before long. It's to the point that, as viewers, it's easy to be perhaps unfairly critical of Miorine for her naivete in walking into the negotiations. Sure, both we and she know that Prospera shouldn't be trusted any further than Miorine's tiny little business-major arms could throw her, but MioMio might not clock how far Mercury's Best Mom is willing to go to act on her anime-level scheming. But Miorine's hopeless optimism also comes off as unearned in the earlier, non-explosive parts of the negotiation. Even if we as viewers didn't have a fuller picture of how badly the Earthians have been treated by the Spacian capitalism of the Benerit Group, I'd still absolutely be able to empathize with the leader for feeling insulted that the first envoy sent for supposed "real" negotiations was an actual child who was doing so as part of her space senior project. Miorine still manages to win them over after all, in a way that effectively speaks to how her incipient character development might progress as Suletta's has. But that little victory was always going to be there entirely for Prospera to cruelly rip it away half an episode later vis a vis giant robot death ray.

Threads like that one, the way it dovetails into threads about Prospera and Bel and the reveal of who and what the Dawn of Fold are, gel together in an episode like this one because they're united by the idea embodied in this episode's title: "Not the Best Way". The idea is borne out of an otherwise amusing early scene between Secelia and Martin (who is doing his best to suck a little less, by the way), where it turns out the couch-camping councilwoman seemingly does seek to dispense good advice to the people she roasts via her crazy confessional! It's a concept that follows everyone around this episode, the idea that they thought they had a choice to make but were put in positions where they could only make one kind of move forward, a move that was doomed to backfire regardless. Miorine had to attempt to attend those negotiations, regardless of her approach. Nika had to do what she could for the Dawn of Fold and her friends in Earth House, even as it landed her in her current amazingly awkward roommate situation. And Suletta had to suffer the end effects of her mother's plans before she could land and stand up again as an independent actor.

That attention to plotting those sorts of events which have to happen to move this kind of story forward thus works because Okouchi has baked their inevitability into that theming itself. And they land anyway because Okouchi as a writer knows how to take moments that might feel like perfunctory swerves and make them hit with raw emotion he's stoked us for up to this point. Sure, it's sudden for Norea to break down and reveal her true rage and sadness over Sophie's death. However, it fits because it comes alongside Suletta's inability to pretend things are okay. We're just now seeing the upswing. And honestly, major props to the writer for not forgetting about Sophie and still finding new ways to roundhouse kick me in the emotions with her lingering pathos. That's just one example of the chain of fireworks setting each other off alongside the more literal explosive developments this week.

That string of shaped charges ultimately leads to more steps in Suletta's emotional arc, which we've been especially interested in these past few episodes. But they all stand out as their own defined yet parallel stories more than they seemed to in those previous weeks of build-up. The more mechanical approach to dropping all these switch-ups is also appreciable, given how intricate the interconnecting web of sub-factions, past factions, and competing agendas has grown. Even if you were one who already watched G-Witch's prologue episode when it first came out, it might be helpful to go back for a refresher (and if you didn't watch that episode before getting into the show… why?). That's why it's all the more important that those satisfying emotional moments land, giving us something to revel in apart from just moving Bel's name around on the table of who's pulling her strings now. And hey, they gave us a little bit of cool mech action as well, getting to witness Prospera piloting Aerial in what's got to be one of the most extreme examples of Take Your Daughter To Work Day. It's the kind of anguishing build-up we can relish from Gundam and Okouchi—even as we're happily witnessing Suletta get better, we're also anticipating how everything else is only going to get so much worse.

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Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Chris is keeping busy keeping up with the new anime season, and is excited to have you along. You can also find him writing about other stuff over on his blog, as well as spamming fanart retweets on his Twitter, for however much longer that lasts.