Gundam Wing, Disc 5 (episodes 20-25)

[rachelmanija]

But first, an important Gundam Wing announcement:

yhlee and I will be watching the show from the beginning, starting this Saturday. If you were thinking of checking it out, now will be a good time, as she will be posting non-spoilery (except for those episodes, of course) recaps and hopefully hilarious screencaps. Join in the fun! And please comment if you post your own commentary!

This disc which I am about to recap contains a startling plot development which I had been partially spoiled for back when I didn't think I would watch the show, and which I had been waiting for with great anticipation. The execution of this plotline so surpassed my expectations that I can only imagine the joy it would bring to someone who was completely surprised by it. Therefore, if you haven't yet seen the series and there's even the slightest chance that you might, DO NOT CLICK ON THE CUT-TAG.

However, I know some of you have been enjoying the spoilery recaps, so rather than completely deprive you of your GW fix for the day, I will post an important psychoanalytic insight I had about Heero above the cut. Since it involves recurrent patterns of behavior rather than specific incidents, I don't think it's too spoilery.

I was watching an episode over the phone with Oyce last night when we had the following exchange:

Me: "Why is Quatre suddenly embracing Heero?"

Oyce: "He's not hugging him, he's helping him walk... Heero must still be weak from getting beat down in the last scene."

Me: "What, again?"

It was then that I remembered the theory that when a person exhibits a certain pattern of behavior which elicits consistent reactions from others, there is a good chance that subconsciously, even if the behavior overall is quite destructive, there is something about the reactions that is gratifying and encourages them to repeat the behavior.

When Heero gets injured, he consistently receives admiration for his courage and stoicism, expressions of affection and concern, tender physical contact, and offers to do his chores fight the bad guys for him. And he gets all of this gratifying caring and proof of love without ever having to ask for it or verbally express unmanly neediness: he falls over or clutches his bleeding arm, and others spring to his side without him having to say a word!

Even more significantly, Heero hardly ever turns down or even makes a token protest to any of this. Contrast that to your typical shounen hero, say Ichigo Kurosaki, who reacts more like this: "Let go of my arm, I'm fine!!" (Falls over.) I suspect that Heero was raised by the mad cyborg hand scientist and was deprived of normal expressions of love as a child. If he dared to say that he wanted a hug, he probably got a new Gundam with an extra-cushiony interior.

So while I do think that Heero is genuinely suicidal, I think he's also getting something out of his failed attempts that makes him keep trying way past the point when he must realize that he's unlikely to succeed. For Heero, even a sprained ankle can be its own reward.

On to the spoilers! Seriously, don't click if you don't already know!



If anyone knows what in the world was wrong with Quatre that made him need to get rescued from dying in the shuttle, please tell me. He seemed fine when he jumped out of Sandrock, then he was inexplicably dying. It is driving me crazy that I don't know.

Quatre wakes up, being tended by a doctor who reveals that she is one of his clone-sisters. They are like Bujold's sister-clone-doctors, the Durona Group! An uncharacteristically helpful narration explains that Quatre's father is a pacifist. Uh-oh. This can't end well. Quatre and his father have the following exchange:

Quatre (reasonable and mature): "I know you don't agree, but I became a Gundam pilot because I believed it was the right thing to do."

Winner Senior: "I give you everything, and do you appreciate it? No! You just had to go to Earth as a terrorist in a mobile suit!"

OZ or maybe Romefeller takes over the colony. Winner Senior opposes the colonists' desire to give in because he's a pacifist. Or something. From the spaceship they're inexplicably on, Quatre and his clone sister watch a viewscreen in horror as the colonists blow up his Dad-- the inevitable fate of non-Relena pacifists in the Gundam-verse. Their ship is hit in the backlash, and the sister is thrown into a wall. She closes her eyes: dead? unconscious? fainted from grief? Who knows?

Quatre, quite reasonably, screams, "NOOOOOOO! DAAAAD! NOOOOO! I'm gonna get you for killing my Dad!!"

Then there's a disturbing little pause. Quatre's face takes on an expression of utter raving lunacy. He proceeds to laugh the single most maniacal laugh I have heard in thirty-four years of watching TV, movies, and anime, and also of knowing real-life crazy people. The maniacal laugh goes on and on. And on. The editors cut away from Quatre and show random images of planets. He's still laughing insanely. Finally, realizing that he could go on indefinitely, they cut him off by cutting to the next scene.

Meanwhile, Trowa is still in deep cover as an OZ pilot. He gets them to let the captured Heero pilot for them by having them give Trowa remote control of Heero's self-detonate button! Trowa is so awesome.

Zechs shows up, randomly fights Heero and Trowa, then goes off to be a peace ambassador (!) under the name of Milliardo Peacecraft. Every single person he meets recognizes him as Zechs anyway. Guess the bird mask was totally useless!

Treize is still crazy and pompous. He and Une have a long conversation about destiny and the future. They said "mirai" and "unmei" so many times that I began to flash to X/1999. Treize tells Zechs that Une developed split personalities because she loved Treize. This actually sort of makes sense. Treize begs Zechs to save her. Zechs agrees, and then proceeds to do absolutely nothing useful in that regard for the rest of the disc.

Some underling of Lady Colonel Une's stages a coup. I think he's going to destroy a colony because Zechs is on it, and to prove that war is bad. Wu Fei, adrift without weapons or fuel, sensibly allows himself to be captured on the theory that they'll repair his Gundam and then he can escape in it. Trowa continues to be awesome, having conversations with Lady Colonel Une that remind me of Death Note in their layers of secrecy and manipulativeness.

Duo goes to the lunar colony to blow up a mobile doll factory. Great action sequence here. Unfortunately, he runs into the five mutant freakish cyborg scientists, who are secretly repairing his Gundam and Wu Fei's Gundam. To preserve their secret, he lets them beat the hell out of him and turn him over to the enemy. He is flung into a cell with Wu Fei and Heero. From the floor, he makes a long, rambling speech. Every time he paused, I expected him to pass out, but every time, he collected himself and kept on going. Heero and Wu Fei stare in incredulous silence until Duo finally runs out of gas.

Quatre reappears with Zero, a super-Gundam which he built from a blueprint. He is totally raving out of his mind. He is so crazy, he is crazier than the sum of the craziness of every other character up to this point. (I had known he went crazy, but had mistakenly thought it wasn't him going crazy, but that his Gundam had been upgraded with Vista or something and he got affected by it. Not really, he was not in it when he laughed the CRAZY LAUGH.)

The vocal performance here is fantastic: he sounds almost like he always does, still soft-spoken and gentle, but with a slight underlying edge of TOTAL INSANITY. It's genuinely creepy.

Quatre transmits a blueprint of his Gundam and his intention to blow shit up. He blows up a research station. Then he blows up a colony! Trowa goes to the cell to get Heero to go fight Quatre with him. Duo protests that he wants to go. Trowa tells him he's still not recovered from his beat-down. Duo argues. Trowa decks him!

In their Gundams, Trowa explains to Heero that if Quatre's Gundam is powerful enough, they'll rebel then and there; if not, they'll fake a fight and bide their time. It does not occur to Trowa that Quatre is a raving maniac. It does occur to Heero.

Quatre goes to a colony and stomps on a playground! Then he goes to meet Heero and Trowa.

Quatre: "The soul of outer space told me to kill you all."

Trowa: "Quatre, I don't think I heard you right. Can you repeat that?"

Trowa has a very hard time accepting what's going on, and tries to reason with Quatre. Heero decides to kill Quatre. Quatre fires a deadly beam at Heero! Trowa jumps his Gundam in front of Heero and takes it for him!

Trowa's Gundam is now about to explode. Rather than bailing out, he stays in, desperately trying to talk Quatre down. He's gentle and reasonable and sounds very much like a therapist. Then his Gundam blows up. He ejects at the last minute and floats in space in a spacesuit.

Quatre comes to his senses. He expresses this by trying to commit suicide: "Kill me quickly, Heero, so you can go rescue Trowa!" But Heero is already wounded and passes out in his Gundam.

Meanwhile, a Romefeller guy has staged a coup and cut off Wu Fei and Duo's oxygen. Wu Fei sensibly tries to conserve his in the hope of a rescue. Duo, who has apparently reached his breaking point, gives up and flops over to die. But Une gets there in time and saves them! But woe! She is shot by the Romefeller guy! Duo and Wu Fei grab their Gundams and run, never knowing who saved them. Woe!

Quatre pulls Heero out of his Gundam, cradles him in his arms, cups some water in his hands, and tenderly feeds it to him. See my theory above about Heero's hurt/comfort complex.

Gundam status: Zechs has Tallgeese. Trowa's Heavyarms is still MIA. Trowa's new Gundam blew up. Heero's new Gundam is damaged. Heero's first Gundam is still on Earth. Zero is intact. Shenlong and Deathscythe are being repaired. Sandrock is being repaired on Earth.

Suicide attempts:

Trowa: Hard to say. I vote for no, since he had an overriding goal and he did eject at the last minute.

Quatre: 1. ("Kill me, Heero!")

Heero: None, wow!

Duo: Um... not really, but he sure wasn't very proactive about not dying, either.

Wu Fei: Still none, in the whole series!

Comments

[oyceter]

Oh, I should not read these at work because I am now attempting to stifle fits of giggling and my stomach hurts!

Guess the bird mask was totally useless!

I feel if you are going to go around with platinum blonde hair going down to your WAIST, bird masks just aren't going to do that much for you regardless. Zechs: betrayed by his hair!

Have nothing to say about your recounting of Quatre's insanity except that it is awesome and I am so sad my DVD wouldn't play those episodes!

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

You must do your own write-up! I realized while doing this one that all the awesome glowy spoilery sanity aura stuff is on the next disc, not this one.

[oyceter]

Yes, I will! Once stuff slows down a little.

The sparkly!

[weirdquark]

Hair, shmair. I could recognize Koyasu if I heard him cough in a pitch black room.

No, really. We were listening to the Count Cain drama CD because we had heard Koyasu played Rif, and we were listening and a guy was talking to a girl, and he was talking to the girl, and he was talking to the girl and then all of a sudden the guy says something and someone else says "Haa."

And we all fall over because we recognized Koyasu when he basically just grunted.

[tirwen.livejournal.com]

I'd suggest you check out Saiunkoku (he's Lin Senya), but whether any more will be released is up in the air (and Geneon kinda dumbed it down), but you can also find him in Viva Tales (there's quite a few on YouTube)... I do know what you mean about the voice, though... we were watching Samurai Deeper Kyo and going "I know that voice!"

[weirdquark]

Yup, I watched the fansubs of that before the first disk came out and noticed him right off. ::g::

[rurounitriv.livejournal.com]

Trowa was pretty much in denial throughout the whole Quatre-fight. Not the same thing as suicidal IMO.

Duo trusts his controller, to a certain extent. They have very similar goals (1: kill lots of Alliance/Oz/Romefellers 2: try not to kill tons of innocent civilians in the process) and G's smart enough not to try the kind of heavyhanded tactics J uses on Heero.

Interesting point on the hurt/comfort thing. I hadn't noticed that, but it makes a certain sick kind of sense, at least in Heero-land.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Who is whose controller? (I know them by designations like fake-nose guy, etc, rather than initials.)

I felt so bad for Trowa during that whole fight. He practically had a neon sign flashing over his head reading, "This is not happening."

[rurounitriv.livejournal.com]

J = cyborg arm guy = Heero's controller
G = mushroom with a nose = Duo's controller
S = fake-nose guy = Trowa's controller
H = short round guy with the mustache = Quatre's controller
O = huge muscled bald guy = Wufei's controller

*pets Trowa* Poor boy. Me too.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

The Une split-personality thing is why I think she was intended to be counted in the numbering system as eleven: one and one.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Does Treize seem less crazy in the version with better subtitles? Right now, he keeps making long speeches that are completely nutty.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Treize actually makes total sense. He is a scary, scary man, because he can make his philosophy alarmingly plausible, and it is a very frightening philosophy.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Is it basically as sub_divided says below?

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Sort of. I've actually been planning an All About Gundam post for a while, which I hope to have up soon, but there are a number of commonalities between all Gundam series (which is one reason I'm doing a write-up, as it is the longest-running and most well-developed series of AUs on the same themes I've ever seen, and without the language barrier would eat SF fandom).

Basically, in all Gundam series: there are space colonies. There is a war between the colonies and Earth. And there are-- well, in different series they're called different things; the original name is Newtype. Newtypes are humans who have been genetically enhanced. They are faster, stronger, smarter, better at synthesizing and integrating situations on the fly. And they have freaky-weird-random powers, such as telepathy, empathy, astral projection, the ability to leave a really bitchy and vengeful ghost, and suchlike. Also each show depends on Mobile Suits for combat, for the reasons sub_divided said. Therefore your standard Gundam series is these things chopped up different ways and complicated: the ramifications of a mad tech advancement and the destruction it can bring, plus a fight over colonialism, plus serious racial conflict between Newtype and Natural.

Gundam Wing's particular angle of the AU is to de-emphasize the genetics aspect. There's only one Newtype in the entirety of Wing, and that's Quatre. (See above re: freaky-weird powers). This means that, unlike in all the other series, the colonies do not automatically have an even shot in a war. In Gundam Seed, for example, twenty-four million people spend large portions of the series kicking the asses of six billion.

Treize, as sub_divided said, wants to return to a mode of battle where personal skill counts for something. This is still achievable (although it is not ideal) with mobile suits until the advent of the Gundams, which are so overwhelmingly well-armored, have such good weapons, etc. that they are a new and deadly step up in the arms race and come dangerously close to the old paradigm in which war could destroy the human race.

A separate brief Gundam note-- another series tradition is the mysterious masked leader, who is brilliant, charismatic, hiding a politically disadvantageous identity, etc. Char Aznable is the prototypical Gundam masked man. If you combine Zechs and Treize, you get Char; it's unusual in a Gundam series for the role to be split this way.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Ah-ha, very interesting. I eagerly await your Gundam Unified Theory post.

Newtypes: What about Heero? He is clearly enhanced physically (bends bars with his bare hands, is unaffected by electric security grid, takes a licking and keeps on ticking) but has not yet exhibited any non-physical powers. Unless you count his vision of Relena and Quatre's ability to do psychic... stuff to or with him.

I am not sure yet at this point whether Heero was genetically enhanced, or is genetically normal but was physically altered later, like Wolverine.

Side note: I have been told that when Sally Po is looking at Heero's specs, what's actually onscreen is the Adobe Acrobat user's manual, with which Heero was apparently programmed. That explains so much.

[keelieinblack.livejournal.com]

Someone once pointed to Quatre as a perfect example of why everyone should be wary of the gentle, quiet male characters in anime, the the type that are unfailingly polite and always use the "boku" pronoun. They're the ones who turn out to be the creepiest and most psychotic when they snap.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Hakkai!

[cyberpilate.livejournal.com]

He proceeds to laugh the single most maniacal laugh I have heard in thirty-four years of watching TV, movies, and anime, and also of knowing real-life crazy people.

There was this awesome bump/commercial for GW when they aired in on the first Toonami on Cartoon Network. The whole anime on the channel was still in its infant stages and there is this very simple promo they did with just Quatre floating in space, breathing. Everything is very still, you only see the lower half of his face, and he's just... breathing, slow, steady, HOLY FUCK UNNERVING.

So simple, and yet... so freaky from the youngest and sweetest of the bunch.
God I love Quatre.

[issen4.livejournal.com]

theory above about Heero's hurt/comfort complex

And a splendid theory it is! It makes a certain twisted sense... oh, Heero.

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

Very much enjoying your Gundam Wing commentaries. I have been meaning to re-watch this show forever, especially since learning a bit more about the history of the series (AT Gundam and UT Gundam and Turn A Gundam, etc).

Treize's crazy ideas about fighting wars with actual people makes more sense if you've seen original Gundam -- or at least, the narration before each episode. You see, in original Gundam, 90% of humanity lives in space, with only the elite still living on Earth. Just before the series starts, the strongest of the space colonies (Zion) begins an all-out war with Earth. The rub is that the war is fought as a modern total war between civilian populations, and since the space colonies are uniquely vulnerable to things like biologic and nuclear weapons, etc, 9/10 of the total human population dies in the first month of the fighting.

...Yeah. So the question becomes, how do we fight a war without totally destroying what's left of humanity? And the answer both sides come up with is With Mobile Suits -- they're more powerful than traditional weapons, but also much more tiresome to produce, requiring many times more resources, not to mention crazy-intense amounts of training to effectively pilot, so that the only people who can be involved in a fight with a Mobile Suit are other Mobile Suits -- in other words, other highly trained soldiers.

*deep breath* Soooo. Treize's objection is basically that if you have robots fighting other robots it basically becomes a matter of who has the deeper pockets (and better scientists and more advanced means of production), in which case both sides may as well compare resources from the get-go and save themselves the trouble, not to mention the gigantic expense, of actually duking it out. It's only when you have actual people battling that things like the Righteousness of Fighting for a Just Cause can come into play.

I think, basically, he's trying to turn back the clock to a time when war was an exercise conducted on a battlefield between opposing groups of professional soldiers, involving no civilians. And why not? Both sides are already using playbooks with most of the pages torn out.

You also start to understand why the colonies went the route they did (five suicidal teenage terrorists sent to Earth in absolute secrecy and with the very latest high-tech models -- though why the pilots had to be suicidal teenagers is a mystery). Obviously, if any of the colonies act openly against the Earth Sphere Alliance, they can be completely wiped off the face of space in an instant. The colonies instead needed to field independent agents who could in no way be traced back to their points of origin.

Not that this is ever satisfactorily explained in-series. ^^ In some ways Gundam Wing is a step up on original Gundam, which is one of those series where the creator has worked out the entire elaborate rationale for the construction of the world, which he then completely fails to share with the audience. XD Gundam Wing at least tries to share, but unfortunately, doesn't quite succeed in being, er, totally convincing.

Yessss. Quatre is my favorite! I always thought Trowa was kind of boring.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Wow, thanks. That was really useful.

[cicer.livejournal.com]

Love the psychoanalyzation of Heero's hurt/comfort complex. I think you're spot on there. Of course, the poor boy really does have more issues than the lifetime run of National Geographic, so it's hard to pick out exactly which one causes him to think it's a splendid idea to get himself beat up all the time. But I like that theory a lot.

And Quatre. Oh, Quatre. Honestly, I didn't like him much until I got to this point in the series. He just seemed bland to me. And then he snapped like a dried-out rubber band, and I fell in love. I will love any character who can do a good maniacal laugh and his is truly one of the best. God bless his crazy little heart.

[majinkarp.livejournal.com]

I'm loving your running commentary of the series; GW was my second anime and first real fandom, so this is bringing back a lot of memories. The "Quatre Goes Crazy" arc probably includes my favorite episodes in the series. You've inspired the boyfriend and I to start rewatching the series for old-times' sake (it was one of his first animes too).

I like to think that once upon a time, after enough viewings, I pretty much had all the characters' motivations and alliances worked out. But if that was ever true, if I ever did, it's long gone now.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Hi there, and thanks! You should report on your rewatch (Ha ha, I know.)