Gundam 00: “If we’re in similar units, I, who have never been shot down in combat exercises, have the advantage!”

Patrick is awesome. Best Gundam comic relief character ever. Also: emphasis on “exercises”.

So, it looks like the crew of the Ptolemy/Ptolemaios/whatever (It’s changed so much I can’t remember) has now officially gone rogue from Celestial Being as a whole. Or are they really Celestial Being? Or what? Why isn’t Alejandro wearing a mask? I don’t know! No one knows! Everyone get along! Get along! AAAAAAAAAA!

The plot has, shall we say, thickened considerably. Wang Lie Ming has gone off on her own, and Celestial Being is revealed for what it truly is: a front agency for something much, much deeper, a fact hinted at in the recap episode, and fully explored now. The obvious hypothesis here is that Aeolia Schenberg didn’t want to end war after all (how drab and dull of a plot by someone who has a sinister monocle), but something much more involved and complicated and probably involving cryogenics. I want the “boss Gundam” at the end of the series to be piloted by Aeola Schenberg’s talking head in a jar, monocle and all, but, alas, this is not Tengen Toppa Gurren-Lagann, so I must resign myself to disappointment, at least here.

The Sumeragi faction is probably going to split off and fight whatever Schenberg cooked up 200 years ago, and go from being the hated enemies of the world to being the saviors, or something like that. I like the direction it’s going–conspiracies always turn in upon themselves, and watching them do so is oh so fun. I expect there’s going to be quite a fair bit more to it than that, though, since we’ve got 29 episodes proper left in the series.

On Patrick: he is now my new character to cheer on relentlessly. He’s so…stupid. So wonderfully…stupid. He’s brilliant comic relief in a series that has excelled at comic relief, and even here, Patrick is a bit more than comic relief. It was he who stabbed Lockon in that battle, not Daryl, who would have been my peg for scoring the hit in this episode. But I forgive him for stabbing Lockon, because, well…he’s Patrick. He doesn’t have a clue what he’s done. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the beauty, the the bliss, and the stupid that is Patrick.

On Tieria: He’s gone from being a stuck-up bastard to being a pansified wuss, if you can somehow extract the negative connotation of both of those terms, do so,  as he’s now got real depth to his character. He’s even using “boku” to refer to himself instead of the harsher “ore”.Someone’s trying to compensate for something. It looks like Mizushima was correct once again: by the time this season is over with, we, the viewers, will be intimately familiar with the Meisters. Not bad for a series decried at the beginning for having the main characters be a bunch of personalityless bishounen. Now they’re bishounen with personality! (although I, personally, don’t really understand how you can apply the term “bishounen” to them, because they don’t look particularly willowy to me, but the lengths some people will go to to find an excuse to not watch Gundam 00…) Quite an improvement, don’t you think?