The updated Gundam Aerial Rebuild from the last episode of the first season.
The end of the first season for Gundam: The Witch from Mercury is finally here and it finally picks up from where the prologue left off.
The initial prologue episode set up a very dark world for this anime to inhabit, which was seemingly left alone once the series started proper. There were good reasons for this though, as the nature of that darkness needed to be expanded upon. Something the various school-based duelling episodes helped to cover, but we didn’t really get the world building pay-off until this episode.
In that, it’s clear that Earth is under the boot of Spacian corporations, who actually ruined Earth as they chased profit across our Solar System. This was where the events in the prologue episode showed that Earth was trying to make this setup more equitable, through the use of perfected GUND Format technology.
Naturally the greedy corporations blocked that, murdered everyone and seemingly wiped out the technology in the process.
That was until the Aerial and Suletta Mercury turned up over a decade later and revealed that the GUND Format technology had indeed been perfected, but what’s interesting here is how the rest of the world setting evolved alongside that.
Firstly, we have the Dawn of Fold terrorist group, who are meant to represent the disgruntled denizens of Earth but are in fact pawns of the Spacian corporations.
However, they also wield two Gundam Lfrith mobile suits, the Ur and Thorn. These are noteworthy as they use the outdated GUND Format technology, but to a higher level that would normally kill their pilots but somehow don’t.
The Gundam Aerial is a very different unit though and its GUND Format technology lacks these issues and subsequently manages to hold its own against the older versions quite easily.
However, this is where all the human drama kicks in, and what was once a somewhat cute school related story has now gone full classical Gundam. It’s very much a bait and switch, but it works and it’s not as though the prologue didn’t warn everyone beforehand that this was going to be the “real” story of the show at some point.
What is both shocking and intriguing is how Suletta is not at all what she seems. While many fans were having fun with her being some kind of cute and clumsy human tanuki type character, there is something seriously wrong here and Miorine is left understandably horrified.
There’s also a ton of parental horrors going on as well, from full blown patricide to whole power structures seemingly being blown away in just one episode. This is very much typical Gundam though in terms of its tone and delivery, and I am very glad we’re finally here.
This is not to say that the school related episodes were boring, they weren’t at all, but I wasn’t sure where the series was really going. Whereas now the politics and power plays are all very much in the foreground again and that’s a welcome development.
I am also loving the updated Gundam Aerial Rebuild design (shown above) and we got to see a little of what it can do, but what with the retreat of the Dawn of Fold forces at the end of the episode we will all have to wait until the next season to see where The Witch From Mercury will take us.
Gundam: The Witch from Mercury is currently available to watch via Crunchyroll.
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