“At least this beats “Death to America.” No flag burning or effigies either.”

Oh, you miss it ? Here : “Nuke the USia”. *burns the ugly star-striped flag*
Better now ?

Man, first episode I really was excited to watch and can’t wait to see what happens next week. Maybe they borrowed some writers from the Code Geass staff eh, there was real strategy here. I really like how the commander that tried to be way too cute and complicated with her strategies and predictions got beat by a balls to the wall tactical move by the otome lover.

Man, Christina deserves 30 lashes for abandoning her post in battle. You are on a fucking warship, and you didn’t expect to fight? Go into a different line of work, you shame those that died as a result of the Gundams attacking by your cowardice. It’s ok not to freak out when you are directing the killing but when someone bloodies your nose you have a breakdown? Patton would beat the shit out of you.

I am looking forward to loco Hallelujah next week, and maybe pink shirt man will pull out his special sauce and blow his load all over the attempts to capture him. Regardless, finally some good writing.

@Karry
Don’t be silly only a fool would nuke USia with he who shall not be named in charge. Be reasonable the USian arsenal alone could blow up every major city twice over and then some. Why give them an excuse to use it all to bring the rapture early? Though that is much better though you have much to learn about protesting. You forgot your Che Guevarra T-shirt, the Little Red Book, pictures of Stalin, Beria, Dzerzhinsky, Brezhenev, and five large portraits of Mao Zedong.

Because in Soviet Union flag burns you! =P

@Kabitizin
Without a doubt, since everything indicates that Green Haro is also a trap.

@Calawain
Patton would have shot her like snake for misbehaving before the enemy. Crazy Rapist Hallelujah will ride to war for the first time, though I still hope Soma proves her superiority with her snazzy helmet and her dead pan powered mecha.

@manga
They at least have to give 3 minutes. Little blinking lights are not going to call attention to itself, they need an audio warning system that includes a klaxon. A ship is not a ship without the sound of ah-ooh-gah.

We already have Louise and Saji, there are enough cowards as it stands. As I said before she should have been more careful with the budget.

What?! Lockon is bi? Do you surmise the same of his twin? State thy proof!!

Yeah, yeah, I liked that commie SirGay (sp?) guy from episode 1. His scar makes him so a peeling (or so they say). Asides, he fights just like a wild bear, provided that bear wasn’t wild or a bear (or scarred). I predict that his scar will pull through and win him the battle. Any takers? (I called it here first).

On one hand, anyone that has even an ounce of dislike for the show has to admit that this is the first “good” episode (even the first episode was a bore). On the other hand, this episode’s strengths is based by what you can only call a snowball effect of coincidences that would otherwise never happen if things were supposed to be what they were supposed to be. Yes, I am saying this scenario should have never happened AT ALL.

1. The whole ‘Christina’ bit has been covered - but for an organization that has a stealth carrier big enough to house four Gundams, including the Obese Gundam, own four Gundams, keep up with their maintenance and upgrades, retain a global intelligence network, and finance the musings of our beloved Bond villain, Ms. Wang, then you’d think hiring a few extra hands wouldn’t hurt the pocket books.

I mean look, if CB is clever enough to employ Haros as maintenance repair bots, they can obviously be used for other means - personnel on the bridge, space probes, alarms across the ship, cocktail mixers, etc etc etc. The lack thereof highlights either ineptitude or laziness.

2. And there is a very small chance to suspect laziness in CB (like 0.0001%) - I mean, they probably had an undefeated record for months, the crew probably felt ‘nothing would happen to them’, and Mr. Wild Bear of Russia just happened to catch the Ptlomey with its’ pants down (figuratively speaking). But seriously, what kind of captain - what kind of CREW would leave the radar station unmanned? Do they do this everyday? Is the show telling me that, despite White Dumbasses #1 and #2 holding the bridge by themselves in previous episodes, only the chicks with big breasts actually check the radar? This episode would have gone smoother if they just showed White Dumbass #1 fapping to hentai comics of Lacus Clyne, because at least it would have made sense in a show that has very little of it.

3. This episode raises questions about the crew. You’d think with a terrori- errr freedom fighting organization like CB, this spaceship crew of four plus one captain are all battle hardened veterans of various military branches. But where my playthrough of Call of Duty 4’s singleplayer mode went so beautifully right, Sunrise once again thinks elite military branches are run by civilians that shop for clothes every two days. Christina’s panic attack really caught me off guard. - at this point, I had to ask aloud, where did Ms. Wang get these people?

4. For the past two episodes, I’ve been hoping for the series to turn Sumeragi into a clone of Misato from Evangelion. But even Misato bitchslapped Shinji into combat! Letting Christina continue to shit her pants during live battle was inexcusable - she was visibly scaring the hell out of the rest of the crew. Sumeragi should have thrown her into the hall to shit bricks and man the radar station herself. This is not Gundam Seed, we do not have the background information necessary to choose a reaction other than, “shut the hell up Christina”.

5. Back to the actual battle, in hindsight Sumeragi’s approach to make a stand against the ambush doesn’t make sense. I mean, you see the 2D maps in the episode, you see the flanking, and you see the probes. But they’re fighting in space. Full three dimensional space! If you’ve ever played the RTS game Homeworld, you’d realize that there are more ways to move than up, down, left, or right in space.

The show depicts the Ptlomey being cornered, putting some space station thing as the backdrop where the Ptlomey is sitting. We can make a number of assumptions concerning Sumeragi’s course of action:

- The Ptlomey was cornered with its back to the space station, making retreat somehow unfeasable. The first episode showed that the solar space stations only have mobile suits for self defense, so the station defenses could have been an issue - especially since the Big Three could have added additional defenses to their solar space stations over the past few months.
- The Ptlomey is too slow to flee from the ambushers, which is possible considering that almost everything about CB, from its ship to its maintenance crew to its bridge crew to the immigrants Ms. Wang keeps on her island resort fortress, was obviously done on the cheap.
- The Ptlomey is, for whatever reason, unable to flee away from the Earth.
- The Ptlomey only has its verniers on the rear of the ship - which might explain why fleeing would be unfeasable because it would take time to rotate the ship in the other direction. But it should not have taken that long.
- The Ptlomey is fragile enough for Sumeragi to try to divert the bulk of enemy fire away from the ship. If the four Gundams just stayed near the Ptlomey, the ship would definitely come under heavy fire because the enemy is shooting in its direction.

That’s a lot of assumptions to make for a ship that the audience has never been briefed on in any of the past eight episodes. The essential question here (for me) would be this - why didn’t Sumeragi retreat to space? The four Gundams could have simply kept the HRL at bay until they ran out of fuel or until their pilots were too tired to continue. Remember that the Ptlomey can sustain the Gundams in space, whereas the HRL did not have carriers that could keep them on the chase. Unless there are limits on the Ptlomey or the Gundams we don’t know about, Sumeragi could have flown to Mars and force the HRL to either return to the station or starve to death.

In light of the above scenario, I can only think of one reason why Sumeragi wouldn’t do such a thing: laziness. She saw 30+ normal mobile suits and didn’t see them as a threat - at least, not enough of a threat to justify moving the ship. She was also greedy: she wanted to take out the attacking force in one clean sweep by ambushing them from behind with Gundams, crushing the HRL force between the attacking and defending Gundam groups. She assumed this mobile suit force was as inept as all the other mobile suits her beloved Gundams had stepped on over the past few months.

And although I think the above paragraph was the whole point of the episode, we can all agree that this whole episode reeks of Downs Syndrome.

thanks for the review.

I doubt the HRL could afford to spare more than the 30+ mobile suits Sergei fetched on CB because of the zero sum game being played between the Big Three. Unless its stated elsewhere, I figured there is a limit to how many mobile suits a space station can have. Granted Sergei had a spare carrier ram the enemy’s defensive line, but the carriers wouldn’t have been much use anyway beyond getting Sergei’s strike force to the location. I think shoving the Ptolemaios into a corner was Sergei’s only window of opportunity to put the kind of pressure he needed on the enemy to provoke the Gundams. His whole strategy was to bait the Gundams into an offensive reaction at a location of his choosing.

In hindsight, I think the cargo containers that slowed the Virtue and the Kyrios down were originally used to create the minefield. The two ships would remain on the ‘flanks’ until the HRL felt the Ptolemaios would make its stand - at which point they would disperse their cargo (space mines) on their interception course towards the two Gundams. The Virtue and Kyrios pilots probably assumed that because there were carriers at those two locations, a mobile suit force was not too far behind, forcing them to take extra caution and slowing down their advance to the HRL’s rear.

In my mind, supplies couldn’t possibly be an issue for the Ptolemaios, considering that the ship’s energy output is strong enough to generate that anti-beam shield - the same kind of seemingly limitless energy output that allows the Gundams to perform as well as they do. Unless Sumeragi felt she couldn’t keep the Gundams on rotation duty - cycle two Gundams out for a 12 hour shift, keep the other two in the bay for refuel and repairs, repeat - because of a lack of on-board supplies or limitations that weren’t explained, I don’t see how she could just keep the HRL strike force at bay; especially since getting closer to the Gundams = getting closer to being shot by the Gundams. The only other possibility is she didn’t think her Gundam pilots were up to the job - which is likely, considering that Setsuna F. Selei is an awful shot and Lockon couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn in the episode.

Sumeragi didn’t really need radar because there should have been a radar screen on her command seat (wasn’t there big radar dashboard on the wall?); but even if the big screen demanded her attention more, you can’t have Christina scaring the crew shitless during a life or death situation. It was surprising and it was stupid. It was also stereotypical for a Japanese staff to depict a female crewmember in that way. Just because the Gundams are the saviors of the show doesn’t mean the viewer should be subjected to panic attacks by the ship’s crew. Christina was pissing in her pants as a dramatic effect for the show, highlighting the need for the Gundam pilots to pull a victory out of their asses. As a character development it was disgusting, and as a depiction of a dedicated member of a militant organization which has fought a guerilla war for months it was offending, vulgar, and nonsensical.

@Soulshard
Yeah, CB was being stingy with the money or some one has been greasing palms. In Japan space is planar! I am against Sumeragi becoming Misato Mk II. I want her to become a Halsey or Patton, preferably Patton. I would however settle for a Sumeragi to Spruance or Manstein.

For the carrier to operate without maneuvering thrusters is categorically stupid. I do hope that they have something to deal with solar flares, and large spacial debris. It would have been interesting to see Sumeragi make a run for an asteroid field with a 3720 to 1 chance of successfully navigating it, but alas she was resting on her laurels. Since the HRL is using a multi role transport as the mainstay of its merchant marine I agree that they could have been used to set up a minefield, though mines a cheap enough defensive measure. I am surprised that Sumeragi also never instituted a continuous CAP. As carriers go Ptolemios is pretty low tier, at least Admiral Ackbar’s cruiser could generate 3-D maps for planning.

Christina deserves to be shot like a snake, if only Commissar Tieria would implement Order No. 227 (Not one step back!) and Order no. 270 (There are no prisoners). Christina’s cowardice cast a shadow over all that she has done and all that she shall.

@physics152
Good one, but you forgot to mention the lack of a company cook and that company meals not only cost more than 2 minutes with Boss Wang, but that it has destructive powers greater than the Teriyaki MRE.

@rollchan
Thanks.

@Anon
Mines can be adjusted and designed to be detonated under certain conditions such as mass. I am sure that since we can make mines to day that distinguish between vehicles and people that in the future we can modify mines in a similar manner. Mines aren’t nearly expensive as out fitting a company. Though they are incredibly expensive to clear.

As for Sumeragi’s cautious approach, she was not very good at being cautious besides timid commanders don’t win battles especially those with a raving coward taking up valuable oxygen.