I’ve been on the internet a long time. I started messing around on a network service called Delphi in 1995. My first job two years later was as tech support for a local Internet Service Provider. I met my wife and two of my best friends on an IRC server run by SciFi channel, and met another of my closest friends writing (I hesitate to admit, and beg you to remember I was 18 at the time) fanfiction. I’ve seen communities come and go, some brushing past some kind of perfection before flaming out.
That IRC server that Scifi ran – first called Icarus, then Events – was, for most of my life, the best community I ever found. You don’t get friends and love out of an IRC community unless it’s something special. Until last year, I was convinced I’d never find anything close again. That moment of perfect beauty came and went. So it goes.
It took the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression to change that. Let it never be said that the subprime mortgage industry was all bad.
I came to Planet Money like many people did: through This American Life’s fantastic “Giant Pool of Money.” I came because the only way to hold back the horror of those early days of the crisis was to stay informed. Information made my mood darker, but it also held the panic at bay. My wife can attest to how raw my nerves were; I don’t know exactly what had me so spooked, but I was very, very scared. Planet Money was my life preserver.
Here’s what I didn’t expect: To find another community as special as the one I found back on Icarus. In the past year I’ve made real friends. It’s been a while since that’s happened online. Not just net friends, either. They’ve come to mean enough to me that me and Erin flew to New Orleans just to have the chance to meet some of them. That thing I thought was just a life preserver turned out to be a boat, and I wasn’t alone in it.
Though Planet Money is a great show run by great people, there is one person who deserves much of the credit for the community the show built: Laura Conaway. Which is why I am absolutely crushed to learn that, as of today, she’s moving on to other things.
Like I said, this is not my first time to the dance. I’ve seen great work done, work that built a deserved readership but that never built a community. Blogs written by keen but distant minds, films shot by brilliant but reclusive souls and music performed from afar. And I’ve seen great work tainted by disdain for its audience. Great work married to a personal accessibility is rare, and should be treasured. For the past year, Laura Conaway of Planet Money worked to make its blog not only fantastically informative, but inclusive of all of its readers.
I was lucky enough to work with Laura during her time on Planet Money, first on a debate with another read and later on a development project that was some of the most fun coding I’ve ever done. Most of the fun of it was getting to work with Laura herself, who is such a rare mix of smart and personable that I wish everyone could have had that chance.
Back when Laura was still on the podcast itself, she used to say that this was our recession, they were just reporting it. It’s a sentiment I hope does not leave the show with her. If it does, the show will be less for it, even if the reporting stays as strong. It’s hard to do great work. It’s harder to build a community around it that’s more than an aggregation of listeners. Laura succeeded, and she did so in a very, very short time.
I say none of this to sell short the hard work of Adam Davidson, Alex Blumberg, Caitlin Kennney, Chana Jaffe-Walt or David Kestembaum, nor any of the great interns who served at Planet Money over the past year. I wish only to point out the rare gift Laura gave to their show, a gift I hope survives beyond her tenure.
As for Laura, I can only hope that her destination is bigger, brighter and better than her point of departure. She deserves it.
Raise a glass, folks. It’s the end of the tour.
P.S. Did you know that an elegy is a type of poem? I thought it was just a style of music. The things you learn in the midst of sad news.
Before Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket, everything in the Gundam franchise had been put together by Tomino Yoshiyuki. Much as Gene Roddenberry was the heart and soul of Star Trek, Gundam was all Tomino. I think there are two points at which the franchises made vastly different choices over how to continue, and I think those decisions have a lot to do with Gundam being the superior franchise.
The first is in how the franchises grew beyond the direct control of their creators, which for Gundam began with 0080: War in the Pocket. The second was its decision that the spirit of Gundam was more important than its continuity and began producing alternate universe versions of its themes, starting in 1994 with G Gundam. The first choice, to open the universe to different creative talents, made the second possible. So where did Gundam get it right where Star Trek failed?
Star Trek grew away from Roddenberry awkwardly, simultaneously locking him out of creative decisions while straitjacketing themselves into a limited conception of the “Roddenberry Vision.” It led ultimately to a string of too-similar shows that were never allowed to push the concept past its high water mark in the early 90′s. Like a religion tied more to its rituals than its spirit, Star Trek became an increasingly empty series of rote repetitions of the same concept.
Gundam, on the other hand, was not as extreme in either direction. Tomino never entirely stopped producing Gundam shows, and Sunrise never felt so tied to some abstract, limiting conception of what his vision was as to let their franchise stagnate. Interestingly, I feel that Gundam managed to stay truer to its roots than Star Trek precisely by being willing to go off the map when they had to. Imagine a Star Trek series as different in form as G Gundam was to everything that had preceded it that still managed to wrestle with the moral dilemmas that made Trek what it was.
All of that began with 0080. The first full Gundam OAV, War in the Pocket did something that I have to imagine sounded crazy at the time. It told a sympathetic story of Zeon soldiers fighting the the Earth Alliance during the One Year War. It also avoided the kind of scope that marked the previous Gundam series’ and film; instead, we follow a young boy, Alfred, on a neutral colony as he befriends an undercover Zeon pilot. Bernie, the pilot, has come to the boy’s home on Side 6 to destroy an experimental Earth prototype. What follows is more coming of age tale than war story, closer to The Red Badge of Courage than Star Wars. Alfred develops a sort of hero worship for Bernie and his comrades and comes face to face with the daily tragedies of war.
0080 is an odd bird, and if you’ve seen any Gundam prior to it you may find yourself fidgeting through the first three episodes of this six part OAV. Like I said, it’s small and intimate, and you’ll see little battle until the end. By the time the battle comes, you’ll almost wish it hadn’t as the war takes a terrible toll on the characters. It’s the kind of small, slice of life story that would have made the Star Trek universe so much richer had it been allowed. The demands of an epic, 50 episode war story leaves little time to see how the average person – or even average soldier – deals with life in the world. War in the Pocket gives us just that. It’s a story of characters at the mercy of larger forced, forced into combat when bloodshed is the last thing they want.
There’s a battle near the end, where Bernie’s unit makes its assault on the prototype’s military installation, that’s brutal to watch. Character after character is cut down mercilessly in a mission that has lost all meaning in the face of the relationship that’s formed between Bernie and Alfred. What follows that battle hurts as much for its inevitability as the actual deaths that the series’ conclusion gives us.
War in the Pocket is canny in how it ties into the mainline Gundam story without ever getting directly wrapped up in it. The prototype under construction is codenamed the “Alex” and serves as an intended replacement to Amuro Ray’s RX-78. Though the project fails to go into production before the end of the One Year War, the technology used serves as a link – retconned though it may be – to the Gundams we see in Zeta. It gives the impression of a realistic, ongoing attempt by the Earth Military to stay technologically ahead of its enemy. Like actual military research, not everything under development becomes reality.
It took me time to come to grips with how I felt about War in the Pocket, but the more I think about this OAV the more I like it. It’s small and quiet and painful. It’s one of the most effective tragedies in the franchise, perhaps the most effective. While Tomino was always good at giving his audiences depressing, nihilistic conclusions, he never quite nailed tragedy. Unlike the endings to Zeta and Char’s Counterattack, War in the Pocket‘s characters do not meet their doom because life sucks. They are trapped by their own decisions and by a remorseless system that has no interest in small, human needs. Bernie goes into battle that final, fateful time because to choose any other way would be a betrayal of self. True tragedy only emerges from characters given the choice between change they cannot stomach and continuing on to their doom. War in the Pocket navigates this tricky narrative landmine perfectly.
I don’t know if I’d recommend War in the Pocket to someone who hasn’t seen Gundam, because I simply do not know how it would play. On one hand, it’s an identifiable, human story regardless of knowledge of the world. On the other hand, it’s an extension of themes developed in the ten years of Gundam’s existence to that point; whether it stands on its own or not isn’t a question I can answer. I saw it very late into my Gundam experience – just months ago, in fact – and cant’ separate my feelings on it from my broader feelings on the franchise.
I can say this: War in the Pocket is an amazing piece of work, and the first step Gundam would take in taking a great concept and turning it into something that could be healthy 30 years after its creation. If only Star Trek had done the same.
It might be hard to accept, but it needs to be said. Dollhouse‘s failure is not the fault of Fox. This time, we have to blame Joss Whedon.
After watching Fox rake Firefly over the coals, I know it seems natural to point fingers at them as Dollhouse has struggled with with a poor time slot, increasingly common preemptions and an early, lengthy production shutdown. Firefly was a classic show right out of the gate. Its treatment as a failed property so early in its run was absurd, made worse by Fox’s meddling with the airing order of episodes and – yes – regular preemptions. Its run was cut unceremoniously short halfway through its first season. It was a travesty; Firefly started great and got better as it went. What could have been a healthy SF franchise died because executives didn’t understand what they had.
On the surface, the problems with Dollhouse sound familiar. Without knowing what’s going on behind the scenes, I can’t discount executive meddling as a drag on the show. There’s a clear difference, though, between Firefly and Dollhouse.
Dollhouse is a far worse show, by almost any measure, than Firefly.
It has a great premise, I agree. Occasionally, when they find the right story to tell within the premise, it really works, too. The unaired episode, Epitaph One, is ironically the best of the lot, and it shows that the premise Dollhouse is far from an unworkable idea. It’s got some amazing actors running around in it, too. Olivia Williams, (Adelle DeWitt), Enver Gjokaj (Victor), Dichan Lachman (Sierra), Harry Lennix (Boyd Langton) and Reed Diamond (Laurence Dominic) have all put in noteworthy performances. The ingredients are there. Even with every bit of executive meddling Firefly faced, there’s enough raw material to pull from to put together something worth everyone’s time.
A premise is not a show, nor are the raw materials of good storytelling guarantee of creating something memorable. Dollhouse is troubled by problems deeper than network interference. What bothers me is that, judging by his interviews and statements, Joss Whedon is either unaware or in denial about his show’s weaknesses. With Dollhouse a near lock for cancellation at the end of its 13 episode second season, it’s fair to ask why this show didn’t succeed, despite a miraculous and probably undeserved renewal after its troubled first season.
Misplaced Faith – I love Eliza Dushku. She’s sexy and tough and full of charisma. I fell for her as Faith and was impressed by how well she handled some of the tougher material for that character. Watch “Five by Five” and “Sanctuary” in Angel’s first season for Eliza at her best. But when I hear Joss claim it was her ability to play any role that inspired him to create Dollhouse, I question his judgment. While strong in some areas, Dollhouse has put her weaknesses center stage. Worse,we’ve twice seen better actors play the exact same character as her within the same episode: Season one’s “Gray Hour” and season two’s “Belle Chose.” If you were concerned about her ability to be the center of a show that demands she convincingly play different people every week, you were sure of it after those episodes.
Broken Dolls – One of the worst things you can do to a group of characters who are supposed to be experts is to give them only stories where they screw things up. Yet Dollhouse‘s primary plot device is to have the Actives malfunction in the middle of a mission. We’re three episodes into season 2 and we’re still without a successful engagement. It strains credulity that anyone would hire these people when malfunctions result in things like kidnapped babies and homicide. (Having worked in many corporations I’d argue that it does not strain credulity that these people still have their jobs. Look how long Ken Lewis kept his position at Bank of America). It’s also boring to see the same device used over and over again. Joss has been a canny writer in his other shows, able to turn cliches on their heads every episode. Here, we just get the cliche.
Inertial Dampeners – What do you do with your miraculous renewal after ending a season with the introduction of a great antagonist, followed by an un-aired episode that turns the premise of your show on its head? Go back to the status quo, right? For reasons I do not understand, Joss Whedon opened a season that needed an immediate ratings boost with three stand-alone malfunctioning Actives plots in a row. This is where my disappointment with Joss – and my annoyance with his apologists – becomes acute. By rights, your show should have been canceled. Yet, rather than open with a barn burner of a season premier, we get Echo pretending to marry an arms dealer to help take him down. This was followed up by imprinting Echo to think she was the mother of a newborn. Then a serial killer story. Yes, Friday night is a death slot. Yes it can be hard to pull ratings up. But it’s nearly impossible to hold an audience when you tread narrative water for most of a month. With your show on the bubble, there’s no excuse for not going all out. Nothing in season two has been bad, but not bad is not enough when your existence is on the line.
Ignoring History – I realize that Fox’s decision not to show “Epitaph One” made things difficult for Joss and his writers. For those who saw it, a troublesome premise suddenly made sense. Coming into season 2, Joss made comments that the premier would feature new scenes in the bleak future of “Epitah One” to get the rest of the audience up to speed. When this was dropped due to concerns of creating an overly complex opener, I got worried. Without seeing where this technology was going to lead, Dollhouse can seem small and uninvolving. Now, three episodes in, I’m wondering if we’re going to see that future acknowledged at all before the lights go out. I worry that this has created two, separate but equally unsatisfied, groups of fans. On one side, you have those who haven’t seen “Epithaph One” and feel, as I did last season, that the premise is intriguing but pointless. On the other, those who have seen it and are wondering when the hell it’s going to have an impact on the show itself. Ignoring his most provocative episode, for any reason, is not helping Joss’ show.
A better time slot, a more consistent schedule and better advertising might pull in more first time viewers. But of the shows that have aired, how many would compel them to keep watching? Of the first season’s thirteen episodes, I can only think of six: “Man on the Street”, “Needs”, “Spy in the House of Love”, “Briar Rose” and “Omega.” If someone watched it on DVD, you can add “Epitaph One” to the list. That’s half, and all of them in latter half of the season. Of the second season’s three episodes, I doubt any would turn a casual viewer into a fan.
It’s not Fox’s fault that Joss Whedon has had trouble getting a handle on his own premise, nor is it their fault that he started season 2 with a run of episodes resembling the least favorite of the previous season. Like every other working writer, Joss Whedon is not infallible. He’s fantastic and funny, and he’s created three of the most beloved series’ of the last decade. He’s no slouch. But that doesn’t make every failure someone else’s fault. Dollhouse has been an interesting piece of work and, on the balance, I’m glad to have seen it. It still could be a lot better.
I hope that the second half of season 2 is as good as people are saying. Sadly, it’s too late. I fear Joss missed his shot.
At the least, let’s give Fox the credit they deserve for giving it to him.
It’s too bad most cliffhangers suck, because I really do love them.
I can’t entirely blame the people who use them badly. The term itself refers to the kind of cliffhangers I hate, where we cut away with a character in imminent danger then cut back to see them rescued without an extra scratch. I get why they became so popular in old serial films. Any kind of suspenseful, what-the-hell-will-happen-next ending is likely to pack the seats for the resolution. If every single episode ends with one, maybe you’ll keep making each installment as must see as the last.
Like half of the Star Trek season finales that ended with a giant OMG only for the Enterprise to come back next season and solve the whole problem in the teaser, a bad cliffhanger only reveals itself in its resolution. It buys you some time with your audience. Cliffhangers, both good and bad, work. At least, they work until the audience catches on that you’re cheating.
I think Annie Wilkes in Misery said it best:
Anyway, my favourite was Rocketman, and once it was a no breaks chapter. The bad guy stuck him in a car on a mountain road and knocked him out and welded the door shut and tore out the brakes and started him to his death, and he woke up and tried to steer and tried to get out but the car went off a cliff before he could escape! And it crashed and burned and I was so upset and excited, and the next week, you better believe I was first in line. And they always start with the end of the last week. And there was Rocketman, trying to get out, and here comes the cliff, and just before the car went off the cliff, he jumped free! And all the kids cheered! But I didn’t cheer. I stood right up and started shouting. This isn’t what happened last week! Have you all got amnesia? They just cheated us! This isn’t fair! HE DIDN’T GET OUT OF THE COCK – A – DOODIE CAR!
So if the difference between a good cliffhanger and a bad one are in the resolution, what is that difference? Leaving aside cheats like Rocketman’s retconned leap from the car, there are still a heap of really terrible cliffhanger resolutions sloshing around out there. Especially on television.
My feeling on cliffhangers has always been this: The “What will happen next?!” suspense is nice, but that alone is not worth the cliffhanger. That moment in The Next Generation’s “The Best of Both Worlds”, where Riker orders the Enterprise to fire of the Borg ship carrying Locutus-ized Picard is awesome. If you happened to see it when it originally aired, you probably spent all summer freaking out over what would happen next. It was a damn good feeling. But when you got back, here’s what you got: The Enterprise fires…and the super-cannon does nothing. At all. Sure, the explanation is fair. Picard’s knowledge of the weapon when he became Locutus prompted the Borg to prepare for the attack. It was logical.
It also sucked.
A really good cliffhanger is one not where we cut away before the pivotal moment, but where we cut away after. We don’t have to know we’ve passed the pivotal moment, or even what that moment means. We could cut away after Riker says “Fire!”, provided that act – the act of firing on Picard’s ship – set in motion something irrevocable. If the next season opened with the Enterprise damaging the Borg ship and killing Picard, yet not actually destroying the ship itself, imagine the intense episode we’d have gotten as Riker must continue to fight knowing that he has failed to end the threat, instead only killing his own captain?
A cliffhanger that convinces your audience to be even more excited by the next has to change something. It doesn’t need to be what the audience expects to change, but if all you’ve done is made people wait for things to snap back to the status quo, you haven’t played fair. Putting your heroes in danger for a cliffhanger doesn’t require their deaths when you return, provided their rescue costs something. There are only so many costless, clever escapes an audience can take before they stop feeling the suspense.
In fact, if you play fair, you can get away with a cliffhanger pretty much as often as you want. Code Geass ended almost half of its episodes in cliffhangers. They never got old, either, because every single one changed the series. Instead, since they let every cliffhanger push the series forward, the effect was more of an escalation; every one had you more anxious, because you knew how much getting out of the last one cost.
Guy Gavriel Kay and George R. R. Martin do much the same thing, ending chapter after chapter in a nail-biter of a scene. But since they never cheat, nor do they allow their heroes to escape them all unscathed, each successive cliffhanger ratchets the tension further. So their books are really, really good.
Use cliffhangers. Use them liberally. But try to forget how they were used when the term was coined.
“You adults are always making up excuses! That’s why you’d destroy the Earth without a second thought!“
This is the kind of review that will make me unpopular with most Gundam fans who read it. Rather than cushion the blow, let’s just get the worst of it out of the way up front.
Char’s Counterattack is not a very good movie. Not even by Gundam standards.
There. That’s out of the way. Now I can think clearly.
By the time Gundam ZZ was into its run, Sunrise realized they had a hit franchise on their hands. It was time for a feature film. At that time, the only Gundam films in theaters were the partially reanimated compilation films that have been am inexplicable staple in the anime industry for a long time. (Side note: Could you imagine any American television show being compiled into 3 or 4 theatrically released films? Exactly.) So Tomino Yoshiyuki began work on Char’s Counterattack. More than just another entry into the Universal Century timeline, the film would both bring to an end the long-standing rivalry between Amuro Ray and Char Aznable as well as resolve the on-and-off war between Earth and Zeon. So, kind of a big deal.
My larger feelings for this film aside, getting to see a Gundam story with a feature animation budget is a pleasure. When you see a well animated television anime, it’s easy to forget what a difference the extra money can make. Zeta Gundam looked great when it came out, but it can’t hold a candle to the level of detail and craft on screen in this film. The characters look great and the mecha looks better. Real, honest to god anime films are rare enough that you have to appreciate them even when they’re a failure. Like when I managed to sit through all of Ghost in the Shell: Innocence without falling asleep.
Unfortunately, my praise for Char’s Counterattack stops there. It’s great to finally get a resolution to Char and Amuro’s relationship in theory. They’re the heart of the U.C. Gundam timeline and deserve a true finale. Their role in Zeta Gundam was interesting, but the time was never given to truly develop who these men had become after the One Year War. I liked that Amuro and Char became rival allies for the show, even if that relationship was never mined enough for my tastes. Giving them center stage again was a good idea. Just, perhaps, not this particular stage.
The sad fact is, Tomino never got a good handle on how to make a good film. His instincts seem geared toward episodic storytelling. Given a single, two-hour block with which to work, he loses his way. You see this not just in Char’s Counterattack, but also in the Zeta New Translation remakes. Though the latter were more successful, they share Counterattacks’ tendency to choose the wrong things to focus on at the wrong times. The opening of Char’s Counterattack just drops us into the middle of a situation that really, really needed set up.
For instance, Char is now the leader of Neo Zeon. How did this happen? Where was he during the whole war between Earth and Neo-Zeon that took place during ZZ? What caused him to change from a confused, reluctant leader into a man so focused on driving humanity into space that he’s willing to ruin the Earth to do it? Not only are these questions left mostly unanswered, they’re also poorly addressed. Everything just kind of starts, and the film feel shallow for its lack of context.
Char, you see, has decided Newtypes are the future, and that by staying tied to a dying homeworld, humanity is retarding its needed evolution. And so he has reformed Neo Zeon with the express purpose of dropping its massive asteroid-space station onto Earth. His plan is discovered by the single most oddly named organization in the history of Gundam: Londo Bell. Commanded by the perennially in-the-mix Noa Bright and supported by Amuro Ray, Londo Bell races to stop Axis – that’s the battleship asteroid thing – and end the Zeonic threat once and for all.
There’s a lot of plot jammed into Char’s Counterattack. So much that none of it has much impact, even when it should. for instance, just before the battle Amuro is given an unexpected mobile suit upgrade: The Nu Gundam. (Side Note: I don’t love this film, but Nu Gundam might be my favorite Gundam name ever). It’s equipped with an experimental psychoframe system that allows Newtypes unprecedented control over the suit. Somewhere along the line we learn that the technology was given to Londo Bell by none other than Char himself so that he can face Amuro one, final time on equal terms. It’s a cool idea, but the whole thing is so badly set up that it feels like an unnecessary complication on an already confused story.
We meet Bright’s son, Hathaway, who falls in love with a female Newtype named Quess. Unfortunately, Quess falls under Char’s spell, and the two are forced to face each other in battle. If this sound suspiciously like the story of Katz and Sarah from Zeta Gundam, you’ve just found another problem with Char’s Counterattack. I expect a certain amount of theme recycling in Gundam, but many aspects of this film feel almost lazy. I wasn’t a tremendous fan of the Katz/Sarah plot in Zeta, but at least there it was given time to develop. In this, Quess’s motivations are too murky to understand, and thus Hathaway is impossible to sympathize with.
With the exception of the ending fight between Amuro and Char, everything about Char’s Counterattack feels empty, overused and nihilistic. It’s as if the worst of Tomino’s storytelling ideas all got crammed into this script, from maudlin, doomed romances to unnecessarily character deaths to a victory so hollow that suicide seems the next logical choice for the surviving heroes. Do we want to see Hathaway Bright left so distraught that he’d attack and kill an ally? I don’t know, but better motivation would have helped either way.
As for the battle royale, it’s not a classic, but it is pretty good. It involves not just mobile suit acrobatics but some well planned trickery by Amuro. It was also the only time in the film I felt any real momentum. While the reversion of their relationship back to Lalah Sune-obsessed enemies is yet another unmotivated plot point, it does let the characters get out some things they probably should have dealt with back in Zeta. And the final moments, involving Amuro’s attempt to stop the fall of Axis, is thankfully almost as moving as it is confusing.
I know this film is a favorite for many people, but this film really didn’t work for me. There are problems with Tomino-era Gundam that people don’t like to address, and those problems are on proud display in Char’s Counterattack. Every writer brings their personal problems into their writing, but Tomino was rarely able to mine his own depression for compelling stories. Sadly, it only got worse from here.
If you’ve watched U.C. Gundam, Char’s Counterattack is a must to complete the story. Considering other people’s reactions, there’ s a good chance you’ll like it more than me, too.
In honor of my 200th post, let’s spend a moment honoring the number 200. I have no special love for the number 200, but a milestone is a milestone. Also I missed 100 and that still bugs the heck out of me. Never again, I promised myself.
Never again.
200 is the HTTP status code that got sent if you’re seeing this page.
In 200 C.E., the Alexandrian mathematician Diophantus was born. Called “the father of algebra” by some, his is a name more junior high math students should know and despise.
That year, the population of the Earth is estimated to have been about 257 million.
Four centuries prior to that, a Greek mathematician named Erastosthenes calculated the distance from the Earth to the sun. For those having trouble with the math, that would place us in 200 B.C.E.
That same year the Great Wall of China was completed.
My favorite, often unused film speed, is 200 ISO. Pictures look great at 200, but my hatred of flashes keeps me stuck at 400 ISO. So it goes.
200 is the number of words in this post.
My research on this post was done using the awesome and always correct source of sources: Wikipedia. I used the pages 200, 200 (number) and 200 BC.
Look, I get it. It’s fun to feel smart. It’s nice to think there’s some everyday use for the time spent reading that book on logic a few years ago. The one that you didn’t actually finish but still have your bookmark in where you left off and are totally going to pick it back up one day. It makes you feel like you caught your debate partner in a bear trap, that you’ve proven you are more correct (or at least more intellectually honest) than them.
Sadly, that superior feeling you’ve got is probably undeserved. The cute, possibly Latin, assault you’ve launched may not apply to the situation. If you’re lucky, it might almost apply, but your desire to score some points as an intellectual has likely clouded your judgment. In other words: There’s a good chance you’re doing it wrong.
So I propose to you these rules. Rules that I will do my best to follow as well. They’re for our own good.
If you are not sure what that logical fallacy means, don’t use it.
After the premature cancellation of Mobile Suit Gundam, a series of films were made retelling the story of the series. This was done using some animation from the series itself and some new animation in parts where they could afford to re-animate. The films, unlike the series, proved to be popular. So popular that by the third, concluding film in 1982, they were able to get the budget to reanimate about 3/4 of the ending.
Money changes everything. Now with a profitable property on their hands, Sunrise realized a sequel would be a good idea. So, in 1985, Tomino launched Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, set 8 years after the end of the original series. Zeta was the success the original never became. In fact, many people still consider Zeta to be the best all time Gundam series. I disagree, but I can see their point. Its popularity even today was strong enough to merit a series of three movies Tomino entitled A New Translation that, like the original Gundam movies, reanimated big chunks of the original story. Unlike the original series films, though, A New Translation drastically changes key plot elements.
It’s impossible for me to talk about my feelings on Zeta Gundam without also talking about how A New Translation changed them. As I said, Zeta was not a favorite of mine. Its animation was top notch and the story was dark and mature, but it had narrative problems the original did not. By the last third of the series, Zeta Gundam was reusing plot ideas from ten episodes before. Did you like when Four, Kamille’s enemy/love went crazy and turned on him then seemed to die? What if that happened a second time? And what if we brought in a crazy enemy/sister that piloted the exact same suit and acted the same way, too? Triple the fun, right?
Worse, the series seemed to revel in being as depressing as possible. By the end, I was numb to it all, especially in the final moments when the main character’s fate proves to be both ugly and pointless. Some of the deaths had real teeth, but others just felt perfunctory. I don’t think getting across “War sucks” is so difficult as to require that much nastiness. I find nihilism obnoxious in most fiction, and the Zeta Gundam television series was no exception. What could have been a strong series was ruined by endless meanness.
There were things I liked, but I had a hard time giving the series credit for them until Tomino launched A New Translation. Older, wiser and out of his own personal depression, Tomino seemed to recognize the same flaws in Zeta that tainted it for me. Rather than reproduce the show’s plot with extra pretty, he began a series of subtle tweaks to structure that culminated in a very different ending for the main character. Free of the nihilism, I found a new appreciation for the story.
8 years after the end of the One Year War, Earth has become space’s oppressor. Fearing a resurgence of Zeon, the Earth military has formed the Titans, an elite military unit tasked with hunting down the remaining Zeonic support in the colonies and crushing it. Free of limitations on their power, the Titans have become relentlessly cruel, murdering civilians and gassing colonies that refuse to comply.
Fearful of the Titans work on a new Gundam unit, the Anti-Earth Union Group (AEUG) decide to steal it before it can go into use. Stumbling into the center of the battle is Kamille Bidan, a teenager who steals one the Titans’ new Gundams and joins AEUG to escape them. The series follows AEUG’s efforts to destroy the Titans and free space from Terran oppression.
Zeta Gundam is perhaps the franchise’s most nuanced entry. Rather than play as a straight war story as the original did, Zeta is more concerned with the personal failings of its heroes. Char Aznable, ace pilot of Zeron, is now a member of AEUG. Once again he’s gone undercover, this time naming himself Quatro Bagina. His disguise? Red sunglasses. Somehow, no one ever connects his ace piloting in a red mobile suit to the old “Red Comet” from the One Year War. Just because. Char isn’t the man he was back then. His revenge complete, he’s reluctant to be the leader he’s capable of becoming. Even his piloting skills seem weaker, less confident than in his younger days.
Kamille has problems of his own. He’s an angry kid, bitter at the loss of his parents. The worse the battles get, the more disillusioned he becomes with his elders. Is war all they’re capable of? Will they continue to ignore the concerns of the young men like him who are forced to be the tools of larger forces waging petty battles?
Unlike Zeon, the Titans are basically pure evil. They commit mass murder, experiment on innocent people to create artificial Newtypes (Cyber-Newtypes, to be specific) and generally do their best to drop some big object on some population center in an effort to crush AEUG. We spend time with some of their pilots, like the eternally failing Jerid or the really gross Yazan, but most of them lack the personality of the Zeon foes of Mobile Suit Gundam.
Things get more interesting when a fleet of advanced mobile suits arrive from deep space. It’s Neo-Zeon, led by the villainous Haman Karn. The Titans are evil, but Haman is a terrifying creation. Her imperial ambitions are clear, yet needing an edge to win the war, she’s suddenly courted by both sides. Which is perfect for her; she can do her best to help both sides destroy each other, then clean up the pieces. Around the same time as Haman Karn shows up, one of the oddest villains in all of Gundam rears his head: Paptimas Scirocco. You know he’s weird because he spent a lot of time on Jupiter.
There are many things I love about Zeta. The main characters are, for the most part, pretty good. The mecha designs are all over the place, but the show cranks out some real classics, especially Char’s awesome golden mobile suit, the Hyaku Shiki. Zeta is the series that introduces the Mid-Series Power-Up to Gundam, when Kamille dumps the Gundam Mk II for the transforming, eponymous Zeta Gundam.
On the other hand, we get saddled with a Giant Mobile Suit, the Psycho Gundam, which is both ugly and stupid. Bonus: It transforms into a box. This show has a real love affair with transforming mobile suits. It’s a bit obnoxious. It also brings out a new prototype mobile suit or two every few episodes, which starts to grate on the nerves. These suits are always piloted by boring, annoying pilots who stick around too long. Most of the battles with these kinds of suits involve both sides shooting at each other and missing. A lot. The writing for the female characters is shoddy, too; the worst is when Reccoa, an AEUG pilot, switches to the Titans because Scirocco makes her feel like a woman. I kid you not.
A New Translation cleans up much of this. Because of its shorter running time, the films cut a lot of the plot repetition and toss most of the stalemate battles. Four dies the first time and doesn’t come back for a second round. Even Yazan, king of the pointless battles, has far less screen time. Even better, the brisker plotting gives the ending deaths more teeth, as we’re hit with tragedy after tragedy, almost too fast to process. It’s less melodramatic, and more effective.
The third part, Love is the Pulse of the Stars, not only has the coolest title of all time. It’s also gorgeous to look at and filled with some really well animated mecha combat. It’s fast paced, intense and appropriately brutal to its characters. Tomino toned down some of the worst excesses of his depression, but kept in its most powerful moments. The best moment in the series is retained in the film: After the death of a friend, Kamille leaves the body and returns to his mobile suit with a quiet, sad version of Gundam’s typical launch call: “Kamille Bidan. Ikimasu.” It’s crushing.
Part of me wants to say not to bother with the series itself, but that might not be fair. Zeta Gundam is a classic series, despite its flaws. Even before seeing A New Translation I was glad I watched it. But if you decide to see the series, be sure to at least watch the third film. The new ending for Kamille is deserved, and the animation for the battle for the Gryps Colony Laser is incredible. The final moments of Kamille’s battle with Scirocco are killer, far better than in the series itself.
A final note. The last shot of the Zeta Gundam series is a classic, hinting at Char’s presence in the follow-up series, Gundam ZZ. That was the plan, too, until Tomino got the budget secured for a feature film, Char’s Counterattack, in the middle of working on ZZ. So if you go into ZZ hoping for the continuation of Zeta, you’re not going to get everything you’re hoping for.
You hear a lot of things about original Gundam before you actually watch it. Things about its history (it had its run cut short by 10 episodes but rushed to an ending so it could conclude) and about its animation quality (it sucks). You hear that it found its audience only after it was canceled, just like the original Star Trek. You hear how its creator, Tomino Yoshiyuki, was forced to add in mecha purely so new toys could be sold.
What you hear most often, though is something like this:
Yeah, the animation quality sucks, but if you get past that it’s one of the best Gundam series’ ever. Maybe one of the best mecha series’ of all time, too.
Then you watch the first episode, see the 70′s character designs and shoddy animation and you think, “Get past the animation? Yeah right. This looks like garbage.” And you go on thinking that for an episode or two, right up until the point where you start slamming through episodes as quickly as you can get your hands on them. Somehow, at some point, the writing in the series takes control of your brain and you just stop seeing the animation quality as a problem. The original Mobile Suit Gundam series, when it clicks, is so well written that I ended up remembering things looking far better than they actually do.
Mobile Suit Gundam introduces us to the Universal Century timeline. We join the world in 0079 (how much do you love a calender system that pads its year with zeros?), in the midst of the One Year War. As would become a cliche in the Gundam franchise, the war is between the Earth Federation and the government of one of its most powerful colonies, the Principality of Zeon. In its effort to claim its independence, Zeon launches a brutal war against Earth, killing millions of space colonists still loyal to Earth and, eventually, dropping one of its colonies onto the planet itself. After half the population of the Earth Sphere is killed, the Antarctic Treaty is signed, banning the further use of nuclear, biological weapons as well as outlawing further colony drops. Yet the war rages on.
The series itself begins with the war in stalemate between the technologically superior Zeon and the more populous Earth Federation. Zeon’s mobile suits have given it a tactical edge over the less powerful vehicles of the Earth Federation, leading Earth to launch Project V: the development of a mobile suit capable of closing the gap between itself and Zeon. But when Zeon learns of Project V’s existence, it sends its top pilot, Char Aznable, to steal the result of their research: The Gundam. The ensuing battle forces the Gundam designer’s son, Amuro Ray, to pilot the prototype suit and join the war against his will.
A lot of what makes up the spine of Mobile Suit Gundam is cliche mecha plotting. Young boy without training becomes pilot of super-advanced mecha and becomes the hero of the war. What made Mobile Suit Gundam so different was the darker, grittier take on the war itself. Rather than a introduce a purely good heroic faction to fight a pitch black nation of evil, Tomino muddied the moral lines. Zeon is definitely run by bad, bad people – the Zabi family who have taken it over are quite comfortable with using mass civilian casualties to achieve their ends – but like all armies their soldiers are mostly regular people forced into battle.
Many of the enemies Amuro faces through the series are sympathetic. Take Ramba Ral, the desert commander who harasses Amuro and the crew of White Base – the ship on which he travels – for a handful of episodes. Ral proves to be a loyal, career military man who’s hamstrung by his own commanding officers. Yes, he’s fighting for a nation we’ve identified as our enemy, but his focused dedication to the battle he’s been ordered to fight lets us feel for him even as we want Amuro to win the day.
Even better, look at the interplay between Char Aznable, arguably the main antagonist of the series, and Garma Zabi, another short-term hunter of White Base. Both have complex reasons for fighting the war. For Garma, the youngest son of Zeon’s Glorious Leader, he is desperate to prove himself. So desperate, that when the opportunity arises to sop White Base and capture the Gundam, he loses sight of all other dangers. When Char Aznable offers to help in the pursuit, he accepts, though Char’s motives have little do with the Gundam. Char, we learn, is the eldest son of Zeon Deikun, the founder of the Principality of Zeon. He’s kept his identity secret, for Deikun was assassinated by the man who now rules Zeon: Degwin Zabi. Father of Garma. And he wants revenge against the people who killed his father.
What makes the interplay between Char and Garma so interesting is that Char likes Garma. Char has no love of Earth, and in fact is more than happy to see it defeated. But both of those desires take a back seat to his desire for revenge, leading him to lure Garma into a trap where White Base and the Gundam can kill the son of his foe. Unlike the one dimensional villains most Mecha offered, Mobile Suit Gundam gave us antagonists that were arguably more interesting than the heroes.
Not that the heroes aren’t any fun. The cast of Mobile Suit Gundam might be the most iconic of the franchise. Noa Bright, commander of White Base, is so cool he appears in every major Universal Century story through Char’s Counterattack. Mirai serves as love interest to Bright, but is drawn as a strong enough female character to make an impression beyond mere romantic entanglements. Kai and Hayato, two crew members, start off looking like your standard, boring foils for the hero but develop into likable people by the end. Then there’s Sayla, the communication’s officer who turns out to be Char’s sister; remember, this came out two years after Star Wars. In case the beam sabre the Gundam carries around wasn’t a big enough clue.
I’m ignoring Amuro’s girlfriend Frau. I suggest you do the same.
Like many Tomino series’, Mobile Suit Gundam has a problem with too many stand alone episodes that feature pointless battles. It’s a rhythm Tomino never managed to shake through all the series’ he directed. Some of the battles, like the plots involving Ramba Ral and Garma Zabi, have real meat to them. Others, like the battle against the mecha that looks like medieval armor, are more forgettable.
Getting the cancellation notice early might have been the best thing to happen to the series, though. The last 10 or 15 episodes gain so much momentum it can be hard to keep up. We learn that people born in Space sometimes gain strange, psychic powers that enhance their combat abilities. Called Newtypes, they add a strange mystical element to humanity’s move to the stars. Both Amuro and Char are, unsurprisingly, Newtypes, and what that means to them is an important piece of their final encounters.
The series is good all around, but its ending is unmatched in the franchise. Most Gundam shows end with a big battle, but the original culminates in an encounter whose scope is comparable with the massive battle of Endor in Return of the Jedi, and there ain’t much that compares with that. Earth launches a full scale assault on Zeon’s military fortress, A Baoa Qu, throwing every single piece of war machinery they own into the maelstrom. As the battle rages, the personal feud between Char and Amuro comes to a head, leading first to a mecha duel between Gundam and Char’s incredibly bizarre looking Zeong, then to a mano-a-mano swordfight between the two men. A swordfight in zero gravity, using vernier jets to fly around as they battle. It’s pretty awesome.
Mobile Suit Gundam is, in many ways, one of the most nuanced and textured entries of the franchise. Though it came out in an era that didn’t care for the complexity of its story, it pushed out a story that many still feel is the best of all of Gundam. I’m not sure I agree, but it’s a position I respect. Mobile Suit Gundam is the real deal.
In fact, most of the cliches of the franchise found their start in this series. Char was the first masked mobile suit pilot, an archetype that can be found in every single Gundam show since. The struggle between Earth and Space and the debate over whether humanity should remain on Earth at all found its start here, as did the ever-present threat of dropping a colony onto Earth. The Gundam design would be reworked over and over again, but the distinctive head and overall shape of the Gundam would stay the same through most of the future shows.
If nothing else, Universal Century is a great universe, and it’s hard to understand its juiciest running plots without starting here, at the beginning. Its follow up series, Zeta Gundam, is another favorite, but many of its best bits tie back to character arcs set up in Mobile Suit. Force yourself through the first couple of episodes because you’ll appreciate the rest of Gundam much, much more if you do, but trust me: you’ll end up loving it without really meaning to.
