ExoSquad S1E1: “Pirate Scourge”

This review was commissioned by @krinsbez.


Back into the wild world of early nineties American televised animation! This series appears to be from a different lineage than the Ninja Turtle Ripoff and Ninja Turtle Ripoff In Space genres that dominated the medium at the time, though, even if there's some obvious cross-pollination. This is an early example of what we nowadays call "animesque," with obvious aesthetic and story inspiration being drawn from space anime of the era. Just looking at the thumbnail images makes me think of as perfect middle point between GI Joes and the LotGH or MSG ova's.

Let's have a look. Episode one is titled "The Pirate Scourge," and is part of a larger early-season arc called "Fall of the Human Empire." Sounds dramatic!


The pilot's intro comes in the form of a history lesson. It's two hundred years in the future, and humanity has terraformed and colonized most of the inner solar system with the help of sturdy exosuit technology called e-frames. The resources and living spaces this created led to a prosperous golden age for humanity. Before we could really get to work on the outer system though, we were attacked by an overwhelming force.

...or, well. "Attacked." It's not aliens, like I thought the narrator was about to say. Rather, it's a slave revolt by a genetically engineered laborer caste called the neosapiens.

Well...serves us right, I guess?

The neosapiens - under the leadership of a brilliant tactician named Phaeton - have taken control of all three of the settled inner planets - Mars, Venus, and even Earth itself - with the forces of baseline humanity having been pushed into space. Now they're desperately trying to take the planets back, and we'll be following the exploits of an elite team of combat e-frame pilots as they do so.

Dang. This is even more "space anime" than the pictures made me think.

After the intro, we have...another intro, saying the exact same thing in different words. Well that's clumsy. This one goes into a little more detail about the nature of the early neosapiens rebellion though, including the fact that it started with an uprising by manual laborers in a Martial mining facility.

The language of the narrator is unsympathetic toward the rebels, but the visuals make it pretty hard not to side with them. Also...ah, okay, I see now. The narrator explains that the rebellion spread across Martian and Venusian industrial sites, but that humanity was saved when the neosapiens had no answer to the governments' state-of-the-art tactical e-frames. They might have been stronger and tougher, but the neosapiens lack of proper military tech ensured that the rebellion's attempts to gain orbital control were easily crushed, and e-frame squads then isolated and subdued the planetary hotspots one by one. Now, the specter of neosapiens rebellion is a thing of the past, and the former rebels are working themselves to death in the mines again.

So, this was talking about an earlier, failed rebellion. A prelude to the more successful one described in the OP. Nice bait and switch. And also more historically convincing than the alternative, I think.

We see that this second history lesson is coming from an in-universe broadcast. It's the anniversary of the rebellion's defeat, so there are radio specials being done about it. Said special is currently being listened to by a bored-looking freighter captain.

Said captain muses to himself that the newscaster's voice is almost as annoying as uppity neosapiens. Meanwhile, his pilot is watching a holographic porn vid while the autopilot does the job of cruising them along.

They radio Earth patrol to inform them that they'll be entering orbit in two days, and then continue sitting around doing nothing until an alarm snaps them out of it. Proximity alert; two ships incoming on an intercept course. The captain recognizes these ships as belonging to a notorious pirate captain named Sabacca who's been terrorizing the inframars routes recently, and gives the order to dash, but it's too late. The pirate ships close and start shooting out the freighter's engines the freighter sends out a distress signal just seconds before the pirates begin boarding.

Cut to a windy canyon system on the surface of Mars. A small group of custom looking e-frames are flying through a ravine. Or...some of them are flying. Others are doing extended jump-jet jumps. A couple are just doing rocket-assisted running along the bottom. There's one particularly bulky e-frame whose pilot seems to be having trouble maneuvering at high velocity, and the others are telling him to get his shit together already. I get the impression that he's a new recruit. We get close up looks at the pilots, but they shoot by too fast for me to get a good sense of them. Just that most of them have ridiculous nineties cartoon hairdos, and one of them is a neosapiens. I guess there are at least individual neosapiens who aren't slaves then, even if most still are.

They're coming up on Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in the solar system. The neosapiens narrates this in a strange accent and enunciation that...hmm. I want to say that it sounds vaguely like some former English sub-Saharan colony accent, but that's not quite it. I like this, it sounds legitimately foreign and futuristic. It remains to be seen if this is a regional accent, or a general neosapiens thing. He then muses out loud about how this plateau, at the foot of the great mountain, is where the final battle of the rebellion was fought fifty years ago today.

As they stare contemplatively over the plateau and up at the towering mountain, a trio of hovering tank-like vehicles fly up onto the plateau and start firing warning shots. The e-frame pilots remark that they're going to have to cut this illegal pilgrimage of theirs short. Unfortunate, but they couldn't get permits, so oh well. They fly awkwardly up into space just as the hovertanks appear to start shooting to kill.

As they return to orbit, one of the E-frame pilots says that this was just a "preview." Next time, they come back to Olympus Mons, they're conquering it. Until then, they'll be keeping this little excursion a secret.

So, these guys just violated a treaty purely for the lulz.

The show is really doing everything it can to paint the status quo as decadent, pigheaded, and jingoistic to the point of near-delusion. I hope I'm not expected to like these people or anything.

Cut to an orbiting exo-carrier ship called the Resolute. Very anime-like captioning with the exterior shot; western live action shows have always done this, but I don't think many western cartoons did at the time. On a further animoo note, the exo team lands in the hangar, which includes air traffic controllers moving around the whacky cartoony landing sequences around in what could best be described as a "SatAm Gundam" fashion. Then we go to the bridge, where the captain is watching the distress message from that freighter. The message ends with the most eighties-looking space pirates ever breaking through to the freighter's bridge and shooting out the comm system.

Holy shit seriously just look at these kings:

Perfection. Crime has never and will never look this appealing again.

The captain gives the order to hurry to the freighter's last known position, now that their mysteriously absent exosuits and pilots are mysteriously back aboard. As they start moving, the truant pilots enter the bridge to receive their richly deserved chewing-out. Or at least the squad leaders do. Captain Marcus asks them what the hell that was all about, and is told by the offending lieutenants - Marsh and Burns - that they were just doing some "training exercises." Marcus asks them who the fuck authorized training exercises on the Neosapiens-governed region of Mars. Before they can answer, an Admiral currently aboard the ship says that he did it, with an impish grin.

The captain is perplexed at this, but has little choice but to stand down and defer to his superior officer's bizarre and internationally illegal judgement.

Well, at least that means that there's at least one region of semi-independent neosapiens who are no longer enslaved. Instead, they just have jingoistic baseline military officers literally stomping on their national historic sites while fantasizing about reconquering them for fun and getting off with barely a slap on the wrist.

Back to the task at hand, they're moving in on that stricken freighter. The admiral, Winfield, instructs all exo-frame squad leaders to prepare their suits for combat, except for the returning Lieutenant Marsh. His group, named as "Abel Squad," are going to be ready to board the freighter and liberate it if possible. Something that can't be done in e-frames; instead, they'll be putting on normal hardsuits and taking a shuttle over. I'm not sure if this is a punitive measure, or just a "how about we don't let them use their mechs after they just demonstrated they can't be trusted with them" measure.

As they leave the bridge, Admiral Winfield follows Marsh and whispers to him that he's not going to cover for him again after this. Marsh thanks him and hurries off to relay the orders.

Well, here's hoping that Winfield dies horribly and Captain Marcus beats our not-that-heroic-yet heroes into proper shape.

Marsh and his second in command lady, Torres, head down to regroup with their squad in a...hmm. I'm not sure what this room is, honestly, but it's the place where they meet up. We see some of the pilots interacting a little on their own before they arrive. There's Takagi the boring one, Bronsky the loutish asshole who burps all the time, Weston the crabby one, and Marcella, the one neosapiens member of the team who delivered the history blurb back on the surface. Marcella is polite, helpful, and courteous to a fault.

...

The viewer *is* supposed to want the neosapiens to just wipe out baseline humanity and take the entire solar system for themselves, right?

...

Marsh and Torres arrive and delegate people to equipment checks, and work out a buddy system for the boarding operation if it ends up happening. Bronsky keeps burping and being a jerk to everyone. Whatever.

Jump ahead to them catching up with the freighter. It looks like the pirates were either unable or unwilling to abscond with the ship itself; they just took as much valuable shit as they could carry on their own ships and dashed, leaving the freighter adrift. The other e-frame squads stand by in case the pirates return, unlikely a prospect though that might be, while Abel Squad takes their shuttle over to the battered derelict.​

What they find is grim. Power shot, in a manner that suggests that the pirates might have stolen some engine parts. Communications shot, literally, with a laser pistol. Artificial gravity offline, with articles, bits of half-melted bulkhead, and dead human bodies floating freely through the corridors. The episode direction is careful not to show a corpse head-on, probably due to nineties censorship laws, but you see enough bits of hair or fingertip floating by the edge of the screen - as well as the reactions of Abel Squad - to get the point. It's pretty well done, all things considered. The music is spot on; would fit just as well in a live action scifi-horror movie or show. Even the freighter pilot's stupid porno-holoprojector floating past just adds to the gravitas. Also, the music that holoshow comes with sounds a lot like the Mario tunnel theme. Was that intentional? Either way, it's funny.

On the other hand, Bronsky struggles with zero G in a way that I think is supposed to be funny, but really, between this and everything else I'm seriously wondering why the others even tolerate him. Or, like. How he even made the cut as a military e-frame pilot. Well, anyway.

They search the ship for survivors, but find none. These pirates are pretty damned ruthless, it seems; that's probably why the freighter crew panicked extra upon identifying Sabacca's ships, the guy has a well deserved reputation. They find the freighter captain's body pinned under something. Weird...the gravity isn't working, how is something pressing down on him? He also, after a moment, proves to still be breathing, which is probably why the animators are allowed to show him head on.

Takagi, the boring guy, starts to lift the gravitationally perplexing piece of metal off of the wounded survivor. Lieutenant Marsh spots something and shouts for Takagi to stop, but Takagi lifts the thing up anyway. The freighter captain's arm drifts free from the button it had been pushing down, initiating the freighter's self-destruct.

-_-

What the fuck kind of design is that?

And...why was the artificial gravity still working for just that one piece of debris, again?

So, they have sixty seconds until the freighter's fusion reactor overheats and blows itself up. The squad tears ass back to their shuttle, dragging the unconscious freighter captain with them. Unfortunately, they already cleared the freighter for the engineering team to come over after them and get it moving again, and the reactor meltdown is putting out so much radiation that they can't get a clear radio signal out to warn the engineers to turn back around. Woops.

They buzz the incoming engineering shuttle in a warning gesture as they shoot passed. The engineers get the message and turn their shuttle around, but there's only seconds to spare, and they need to turn all the way around and reverse direction mid-approach in order to get clear of the blast. When the explosion comes, Abel Squad's shuttle is safely out of the blast zone, but the engineers are not. Only one of the two boarding vessels returns to the Resolute.

Part of me wants to say that Abel Squad has proven themselves incompetent, negligent, and unruly enough at this point that they should all be discharged and possibly imprisoned.

But, another part of me is so baffled by how that self destruct got kicked off, the apparent inability of the other ships to detect the heat of a fucking fusion reactor meltdown in progress, and them losing all radio comms THAT QUICKLY after the self destruct initiated, that I don't really see how you can blame them. Or, like. Anyone else in their position.

IS this an embarrassing, career-ruining fuckup for them? I honestly can't tell. The only obvious mistake any of them made was Takagi continuing to lift up the physics-warping mystery rubble after Marsh told him to stop...but he was already in the process of lifting it when Marsh saw the danger and shouted the warning, so I'm not sure if I can condemn him just for having slightly-too-slow reflexes. And, they did put their own lives at greater risk in order to drag the unconscious freighter captain after them, so that much at least is outright admirable.

I think they should all face a court martial for that Olympus Mons stunt, but I really don't know if this incident should be added to their list of sins or not.

Cut to the Space UN council chamber, in a station orbiting Earth. Some very badly voice acted politicians are arguing over whether it's time to start taking the "pirate clans" seriously as a threat. This last attack seems to have ruffled more feathers than previous ones, possibly due to the deadly mishap that occurred during search and rescue. That part wasn't directly caused by the pirates, of course, but indirect consequences are still consequences. Also, these politicians are really badly voiced. Some representatives want to go whole hog and mobilize an allied war fleet to wipe out the pirate clans. Others think that appeasement might be less costly in both lives and resources than war, and that the pragmatic option might just be to pay Danegeld to not have to worry about this.

Finally, governor-general Phaeton of the United Martian Commonwealth takes the stage. Huh. Do the neosapiens control ALL of Mars, then? It kinda seems like it. Okay, things definitely have gotten much better for them since the failed uprising half a century ago then, even if the other human militaries violate their territory for fun. It could also be that the Commonwealth is divided into human and neosapiens dominated provinces, but still, the fact that their (from the sound of it) head of state is a neo is a good sign.

The OP already gave away that Phaeton is going to lead a second neo uprising, though at this point I'm not sure enough of the status quo and recent history for "uprising" to necessarily be the right term. Anyway, for now he's the president of Mars, and is so much better voice acted than the other politicians that I'd probably root for him regardless of the background history.

Phaeton takes the podium and says that while the neos know better than anyone the cost of war, and while the Martian Commonwealth is largely prevented by treaty from developing much of a space force of its own, he believes that not taking a stand against the growing piracy problem will only encourage more and more troublemakers. They have to protect their people, not negotiate their security. As such, he favors an aggressive anti-pirate push, and pledges to put Mars' full industrial and financial support behind such an operation even if it doesn't have much of a military of its own.

What the others should probably be finding suspicious about this is that Phaeton isn't trying to get concessions in return for this. It seems like this would be a perfect time for him to negotiate for easing the restrictions on neo military buildup, both because he has something to offer the others and because there's a current military threat that he can reasonably point to to justify such a request. Although, on the other hand, there seems to be enough ambivalence about going to war with the pirates that him asking for something in return might just cause the antiwar faction to win out, in which case no one gets anything. So, maybe not so suspicious then.

Regardless, the others find his arguments persuasive, and they start talking about pooling ships to go fuck up pirates with. Phaeton just does this sort of surreptitious fiendish smile, like he's planning to use this opportunity for something evil. Whatever it is that Phaeton is plotting, I support it.

Cut to Torres sending a video message to her family back on Venus, telling them that she's being sent into action in the outer system with most of the rest of the exofleet. She's clutching a stuffed bunny while she does this, which isn't quite enough to make me forget the whole "went joyriding in a heavily armed military vehicle and violated national borders badly enough to provoke a live fire response literally just out of boredom," but it's still kinda cute I guess.

Meanwhile, Marsh the squad leader checks in on Bronsky the fuckup. Looks like Bronsky was injured when the shockwave of that fusion explosion knocked their shuttle around, and hasn't yet recovered enough to go into battle. Still, he's close enough to recovery that he's expected to be battle-ready in time to participate in at least part of the campaign, and he's very eager to do so, so he's recovering in the Resolute's sickbay instead of being left behind on Venus or whatever. Bronsky has a bad attitude about being stuck in sickbay, because he has a bad attitude about everything, but when he tries to fake an early recovery Marsh puts him in his place.

Bronsky protests, but softens when Marsh points out that they lost enough crewmates in that fustercluck of a search and rescue mission already, and he really doesn't want to lose a squadmate because of it now too. This sobers Bronsky up, and he sadly remarks that he liked some of those engineers. A humanizing moment for the most obnoxious and juvenilely written of the main cast members, and also a look at Marsh having good leadership skills and knowing his way around his underlings.

...

I'm pretty sure that I'm not supposed to hate these guys now. I'd been under the impression that they were supposed to be unlikeable to start with and have redemption arcs over the course of the early series, but now it seems more likely that the writers just had a massive brainfart with failing to think through the implications of their opening scene.

This is likely a consequence of the show's mixed inspirations. In a slapstick semi-comedic American SatAm cartoon from this era, a character doing something like that comes across as just charming rogueishness. In space anime, which often tackles themes like nationalism, slavery, war, etc in an at least somewhat mature way, a character doing this would be meant to reflect very badly on the character. It might not be taken with as much seriousness as a soldier pulling that shit in real life, but it would still highlight the possible consequences of such actions, and be intended to paint that character as reckless and untrustworthy at the very least.

The ExoSquad pilot's intro put the astropolitics and social justice front and center, so I was primed for that kind of more mature story. The pirate attack scene that followed this was also pretty serious and dark. So, having a whiplash into He-Man-Punches-Skeletor logic right after that really threw me off.

Hopefully, dissonant moments like this will happen less often as the show finds its footing.

That said, I'm still pretty strongly on the neosapiens' side, and will probably remain so unless the fifty years of history since the rebellion get filled in in a way that changes the calculus a LOT.

...

Cut to Abel Squad having dinner together in a mess hall that looks ominously like the one from "Alien."

Seriously. Even the camera angle of the opening shot.​

Bronsky is telling a joke, which everyone besides Marsella gets. The way it's framed makes it seem like neos just don't *get* jokes in general. Do they have a different sort of humor, or just no concept of it at all, I wonder? Just how neurologically as opposed to physically different from baseline humans are they?

As they chat and eat, a news reporter comes in unannounced and has his floating camera drone get right in everyone's faces. Oh boy, we're doing the "news media is enemies of the heroic soldiers who need everyone else to shut up and let them do whatever they want" thing? Maybe I was too quick to attribute the Mars scene to SatAm silliness.

Anyway, the show does the "news media is enemies of the heroic soldiers who need everyone else to shut up and let them do whatever they want" thing.

The reporter says that he needs to get the perspective of the team who "started" the war by fucking up that freighter rescue. Um. Wow. There's strawmanning the media, and then there's fucking this.

Like, is it true that the mishap that cost soldiers' lives might have been the last straw that turned this pirate attack into an inciting incident for war? Possibly. However, if one botched rescue mission was all it took to cause this, then how long would it have taken anyway? One more pirate attack? Two? Not much more, I don't think.

...

Seriously, when they're holding the military's feet to the fire is the one time you absolutely SHOULDN'T strawman the media.

...

The reporter also asks to speak to the soldier who caused the engineers' lives to be lost, which is the last straw for Marsh, who tells him that that soldier acted appropriately given the knowledge available at the time. Um...maybe? Takagi may or may not have fucked up there, that whole sequence was too weird for me to really judge.

So, that scene was a thing that happened. And it didn't even have any xenomorphs in the end. Moving on.

The combined fleet, commanded by the same Admiral Winfield who we met before, enters the asteroid belt. This is where most of these "pirate clans" are supposed to be based. Cut to the bridge of Sabacca's ship, where we learn that this guy is a significantly bigger deal than it first implied. He's not just the leader of a pirate clan; he's become some sort of warchief for a whole bunch of them. Which is understandable, of course. How could you possibly not follow the leadership of this man?

Even if the mutton chops the size of his beard and the scalloped double pauldron layer don't crush your will to disobey, that mustache and mullet combo his second-in-command is rocking will compel you in the end. Oh my god and they actually have Jolly Rodgers on their bandoliers too!

Like I said. Perfection.

Anyway, those unusually daring freighter raids he's been conducting were actually meant to antagonize the planetary governments. The Dread Pirate He-Man has assembled his entire confederation's worth of ships and has them laying in wait, cloaked, using the cover of asteroids for extra stealth as they prepare an ambush. This guy might just be planning to go from raider to conqueror by the looks of it. Or maybe he's in league with Phaeton, and the latter is basically doing a Palpatine. That would fit pretty well. In any case, he was expecting a big fleet to be sent his way, and he's confident he can take it out.

The pirate ambush starts by launching asteroids with hidden rockets embedded in them at the fleet. While the exofleet's point defenses are occupied by these surprise improvised missiles, the pirate ships decloak and slide out from behind the larger asteroids in a flanking maneuver, trying to deal as much damage in the opening salvo as possible before getting back into cover.

And, frankly, it's a damned successful maneuver.

The fleet takes nasty losses in that opening salvo. Captain Marcus thinks that sending out e-frames in these conditions will just get them shredded by pirate fire before they can fight back, but Admiral Winfield decides that that's still their best shot for getting around the pirates' flanking and cover advantages. So, the mechs flood out of their hangars and start engaging the pirate ships in close combat.

It's again very noticeable that Abel Squad's mechs are all very different-looking from one another. Does every pilot in the fleet get to customize their e-frame? Or is it more a matter of each squad having a certain standardized composition to fill different roles? Maybe you're just not expected to think about that kind of thing, idk. Metatextually, it's probably to sell more toys.

Despite the captain's misgivings, the e-frames prove nimble enough to avoid getting shot down as they leave their hangars, and at least most of them get far enough to round the big asteroids and start shooting back. Sebacca (or is it SeMbacca, with an M? I think I heard an M, but I'm not sure) has a lot of guns strapped to those corsairs of his, but they don't have as much armor as proper warships. The e-frames, including Abel Squad, are therefore able to start inflicting casualties back on the pirates in pretty short order once they get close.

However, what the pirates lack in armor, they make up for with healthy point-defense batteries of their own. E-frame casualties also start racking up in the melee, and one member of Abel Squad - Bronsky, of course. I guess he should have spent more time in sickbay lol - gets disabled and goes flying out of control into the asteroid belt. End episode.


There was a lot I liked here, and also quite a lot that I disliked.

The setup and premise are good. The art and animation are at least decent, and by the standards of their era probably much closer to the "good" end of the spectrum. The music was usually kind of background and unobtrusive, but there were some real standout tracks like the derelict investigation scene's theme. Voice acting...pretty good, aside from the unnamed politicians (who probably aren't going to be recurring characters). Production values in general are pretty good.

The writing...I need to see more. The Abel Squad members are mostly pretty one-note and unlikeable so far, but they haven't had that much screentime yet. I have reservations about where this is going, though. Between the apparent antagonists being former slaves who still face discrimination on one hand and the repeated indications of distaste for laws and accountability on the other, this story has the potential to get really ugly. It also has the potential to NOT get really ugly, though. Again, I'd have to see more. Just, there are some possible warning signs.

For me, the highlight of the show was actually Sebacca. Not just because of he and his men's hilariously, unapologetically eighties visual design that must have looked dated even at the time of release (though that's part of it). He hardly had any screentime, but when you think about it this guy is a full-on evil genius. He managed to build an organized alliance of pirate clans without any intel agencies finding out, and then conducted a series of extra-murderous raids that LOOKED like just an escalation of the usual disorganized, opportunistic piracy. So, the big fleet comes charging into the asteroid belt prepared for a prolonged cat-and-mouse campaign rooting out the pirates clan by clan, and completely unprepared for an ambush by a large force. He's almost like a space Genghis Khan.

He may be in league with Phaeton, of course, in which case the plan could have been mostly the latter's. But, either way, I always appreciate a strong opening show of competence by antagonists that cements them as worthy foes.

I just hope that the alleged good guys are able to measure up. So far, while they did get some better characterization toward the end of the episode, they're not there yet. Having Bronsky, the most obnoxious team member, be the one to get in trouble for the cliffhanger wasn't a great move either. On the other hand, I look forward to seeing more about the neosapiens perspective via Marsella. Hopefully he'll add some nuance to the coming conflict, rather than being a Blake Belladonna. Hopefully.

So, this could get really good, or really bad. We'll see in the coming episodes!