Mobile Suit Gundam: the Witch from Mercury S1E0: "Prologue"

This review was fast lane comissioned by @Vinegrape

In addition to the original Universal Century setting that a plurality of its series take place in, the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise has done a number of reimaginings over the decades. These alternative continuities vary quite a bit, but they always have a few common elements. It's always a medium-future scifi thing where humanity has started moving out into the solar system, but not yet beyond it. There's always a war being fought using giant spaceborne mecha, and those mecha always include the iconic gundam design, but the nature of the conflict and the technological justifications for using mechs in it are always different. There are often characters who look and act a lot like original Universal Century players, but their names and roles can be very far from those origins.

"The Witch from Mercury" is the most recent of these alternate MSG continuities, being entirely a product of the 2020's and currently ongoing. I know I've seen people talking about this one, but I didn't quite catch if it was in positive or negative terms. Could be bad, could be good, could be mixed. I assume that the planet Mercury will play some kind of role in the story, but other than that I have no idea what to expect besides the usual MSG elements.

The first episode of "Witch From Mercury" is a full-length 22 minute ep, but it's listed as "season 1 episode 0" and its title is "Prologue." Unusual. Anyway, this commission includes Prologue and the one after it that's listed as S1E1. I'm guessing E1 will be called "Pilot" or something.

Anyway, that's pretty much all the background I think this needs. Let's check it out.

We open, as many Gundam series do, on a pilot hunched over the controls of a dark, gloomy cockpit, the black eternity of space pressing in from all around. This particular pilot's space suit has a full, obscuring helmet, which both lends this scene a more grounded feeling than other series' more cartoony scifi aesthetics, and adds to the sense of claustrophobia and alienation.

After a few seconds of uncomfortable silence, she starts adressing her cockpit AI, verbally running through some sort of sensitive navigation or communication protocols. Or...maybe hacking? The dialogue centers around accessing and creating interconnections between multiple "layers," which makes me wonder if she's doing some kind of SIGINT mission near an enemy communications hub.

Everything's really pretty, also.

All the shiny equipment and ethereal holographic displays. It's an aesthetic I've always enjoyed. Additionally, it communicates that this spacecraft is fresh off the assembly platform. No battle damage or coffee stains or anything yet.

As she proceeds through the complicated networking task, which apparently involves the cheekily named "GUND Format," something starts to go wrong. Connections start falling in an erratic chain reaction, and the pilot's tone of voice increasingly contrasts with the AI's as she grows anxious while it retains its robotic monotone. She frantically tries to get a signal out to someone or something else, but the AI tells her that the test parameters do not include that. Huh, test. Field-testing a new technology out in space, or is this all just a simulation?

Turns out it's a simulation! A severe looking old woman in a well-lit lab room gives the order to end the session, and the claustrophobic cockpit opens up.

Heh, nice fakeout. Really managed to build a tense, desperate atmosphere in a very short amount of screentime, somehow making it feel like a slow rise even though it barely covered a minute.

Turns out the AI voice wasn't actually even an AI, heh. It was the severe old woman, who just has a very flat voice and wasn't getting nearly as caught up in the test as the rookie pilot was getting, heh. The rookie is named Elnora, as it turns out, and the boss lady is a Dr. Cardo. Either, both, or neither of them could be the titular "witch from Mercury." Elnora is annoyed that the doctor ended the test, because they really need to push this new GUND Format thing through development before the government gets impatient. Dr. Cardo just says that crippling Elnora for life is not a price she's willing to pay for a slightly faster design cycle.

It didn't look like the test was putting any kind of mechanical stress on Elnora's body, so the medical risks must be more esoteric.

Putting this together with the "linking layers" and "connection callback" talk, I suspect that GUND is a neural interface system. Probably meant to allow for direct pilot control of a mech as if it were their own body, or something along those lines.

Dr. Cardo says that another reason she doesn't want Elnora to get horribly damaged just now is because a visitor for her just arrived, and it would kinda suck if they had to see that. It seems Elnora is a little bit older than she looks, also, as the visitor in question turns out to be her four year old daughter. A daughter who has just disengaged her magboots and kicked herself off the wall, sending herself tumbling aimlessly around just below the ceiling while shouting for her mother's attention. Dawww, she has a little space suit and everything.

The kid is named Eri, apparently. Maybe it will be her, rather than one of the adults, who will one day become known as the witch of Mercury? That would explain why this is episode zero instead of episode one. And, you know. "My mother put a lot of herself into this mech I drive around" is a bit of a genre tradition. :p

Anyway, once Elnora gets over her annoyance at her husband for bringing their kid to the military munitions lab where she works AGAIN, she lets Eri guide the conversation topic to the project itself. Specifically, Eri wants to know if her little sister Lfrith is still sleeping, or if she's ready to get up and walk around and fly through space and be used for war crimes yet. No, Elnora tells her, not yet. The good doctor patiently cuts in to tell Eri that Lfrith isn't asleep, really. She's more like a newborn baby that isn't yet mobile; she can't even roll over in her crib yet. Elnora and the rest of the team are still teaching her how to move around and interact with the world.

Eri decides that Lfrith is technically her little sister.

Yeah, Eri is our real protagonist. She and her sister gonna' avenge their mom against the space nazis or whatever in twenty years.

And, the GUND thing seems to be a cybernetic control system for the new mech, as I inferred. At least, that's the most obvious reading of "your mom is teaching her how to move around." Anyway, these weapons engineers sure are tolerant of the kid tumbling around through the hangar space lol.

External shot of the space station this is all taking place on. Then, a newscast! The Third Sector Autonomous Front has just approved the purchase of the Ochs Earth Corporation's brand new Gundam-class mobile suits. This revolutionary new war machine had a controversial development, due to some bioethical issues with its control systems, but those aren't enough to outweigh the necessity of having a fleet of these bad boys. The demonstrations we're seeing footage of might be from back during the testing phase, or they may be current. Based on the signs they're holding, the risks to the gundams' pilots still aren't tooootally worked out.

Although..."bioethical issues." Not "safety risks." "Ethical issues." Hmmmm. This may be weirder than it initially seemed. Maybe that Evangelion joke was closer to the mark than I realized.

The source of these concerns is the GUND Format, a neural cybernetics technology that was originally developed for medical purposes, counteracting the degrading effects of life in space on the human neuromusculoskeletal system. When the company developing GUND was acquired by the massive Ochs Earth corporation, the still-in-progress research was repurposed toward military ends. No word on whether or not the medical aspect continued, but it's implied that it at least suffered delays due to the weaponizable aspects now being given precedence. The company rushed that through development and got one or more governments to buy it before it was truly ready, which resulted in scores of pilots suffering severe brain damage from their own mechs.

Whether or not these issues have since been supposedly worked out isn't clear. Either they allegedly have, or the Third Sector Autonomous Front just sees the eventuality of a certain percentage of pilots turning into vegetables as a worthy price to pay for keeping its military up to par. In any case, this purchase is causing many to fear that the Earth government will feel threatened by the spacer force buildup, and start increasing its own mobile suit production in turn.

It doesn't explicitly say that the same corporations are arming both sides, but the proximity of those statements does come with subtext. And, setting up a capitalist military industrial complex as the real villain behind this series' conflict would be more or less par for the course with MSG.

Also, the newscast shows some poll results about issues that Earthers and Spacers (spacers in general, or just the sector three autonomous people? It's not yet clear how many countries or political blocs we're dealing with here) respectively care about, and it's not looking good.

Earth people are worried about poverty and social stability. Space people are wealthy enough that the basic necessities aren't being worried about, but defence is.

For context, the background of the original Universal Century setting's conflict was "Earth government fucks up its own economy and starts squeezing the orbital colonies extra hard to compensate." This one looks like a similar setup, though possibly with sleazy ironmongers as a much bigger factor than in UC.

...

Something I like about Gundam (though some iterations pull it off better than others) is that it understands the two important facts about the causes of war. The first: that wars in which both sides don't have legitimate grievances are rare in history. The second: that wars in which one side doesn't have much MORE legitimate grievances than the other are virtually mythical.

We'll see how that works out in this series, though granted it can be hard to tell that from just the first two episodes.

...

It turns out that the newscast is being watched by Elnora's husband, and interrupted by her and Eri coming home. It's someone's (either Eri's or Elnora's) birthday, it turns out, and...I guess Eri *wasn't* brought to the weapons facility by her father? Did she just wander over there by herself? That seems inattentive, to say the least, on her parents' part lol.

When the adults have a moment out of Eri's earshot, they exchange some worried whispers about their work situation. Apparently, husband Nadim is a financier for this new Lfrith project. Are they working for the same company that released the Gundam using a rushed version of the interface? I don't think so. My guess is that they're working for a different organization (corporate or otherwise) that's trying to make their own improved version of the GUND-controlled mobile suit. At any rate, whoever their bosses are, they're in a hurry to finish the Lfrith, and hopefully that won't lead them to make the same mistakes that Ochs Earth did with the Gundam.

Cut to another asteroid base, where a group of sinister-looking men are meeting in a sinister-looking bluelit room. They're talking about the probable fall of the Ochs Earth corporation (I'm guessing due to something other than the Gundam fiasco, considering that governments are still buying those from them despite the serious issues). They seem to be happy about the prospect of Ochs going under, but also unsure about when it'll happen and whether they'll actually be able to exploit this. I guess this is the boardroom of a rival corporation, then.

Whatever it is they're planning to do, they're worried that Dr. Cardo might not go along with it, which would make things harder for them. There's also a concern raised by one of them that their plan pushes against the limits of what the private sector may even be permitted to do, though the others smugly poo-poo him. Apparently, they're confident enough in corporate power at this point to believe they can do whatever this plan of theirs is with legal impunity.

Literal hostile takeover of Ochs Earth assets during this nadir of its financial and public relations strength, allegedly in the name of disappointed investors and/or claimants? Literal as in "with guns and spaceships and stuff?" Maybe. Kind of feels like that might be what they're talking about. Full on intercorporate hot war without any governments being directly involved.

Which, of course, means that those corporations effectively ARE governments. That's probably why the one naysayer guy was getting laughed at; for not having realized this yet.

Also, this council is apparently the "Mobile Suit Development Council" that we heard Elnora and Co talking about earlier. I'm not sure if this council is a department leadership of a specific corporation, or a council OF corporations that have some degree of coordination within the arms industry. The name sounds like a government thing, but they're explicitly not a government thing.

Also, the one super military looking guy at the meeting (possibly a representative of one of the actual countries' militaries, or maybe just a revolving door private sector/military ghoul) ends the meeting with a surprisingly idealistic declaration of purpose.

Mmmhmm. Not sure if I should take that at face value. Or even if I should believe that he believes it (and, if he does, if "humanity" might really just mean the astropolitical interests of one specific group). But, I could be wrong. Maybe this army guy actually is just trying to do his best to reign in the profiteering ironmongers and turn their greed toward less destructive outcomes. Successfully or otherwise.

Or he might not actually be military, despite looking and talking all soldierly, in which case he could be just about anything and his words could mean just about anything.

Anyway, he says that defending human peace and prosperity in this case will mean "wielding the hammer of witches." I looked up the name "Lfrith" to see if the name comes from anything witch-related, but all I could find was Gundam stuff, so I guess not. In that case, the only "hammer of witches" I know of would be the Malleus Maleficarum, a truly unhinged 15th century witch-hunters' manual. So...we're talking about witch hunts? Figuratively, I assume, but maybe literally? Or something else? We'll see.

Cut back to the happy wholesome weapon engineering family, celebrating the birthday. It's Eri's birthday, not Elnora's, as it turns out. So, she only just turned four. Elnora's hand malfunctions when she tries to light the candles, so the cutting of the cake is interrupted much to Eri's frustration. It looks like Elnora's entire arm is either prosthetic, or just so riddled with cybernetic components that it might as well be.

Presumably, only cyborgs like her have the needed neural interface systems to test the new and improved GUND suits they're working on. And, implicitly, those systems are invasive enough that hardly anyone would want to get them if they didn't already need to for medical reasons.

Also, Dr. Cardo apparently was the one who saved Elnora's life, back when she was a test patient for the (at the time) still in progress first generation medical GUND system. Ah, okay then. So Dr. Cardo was part of the original original biomedical research team, before their company got bought out by Ochs Earth and their invention weaponized. They're either still Ochs Earth employees, or they've jumped ship and are now working for a rival, but either way the neural-interface side of the GUNDam mobile suits is still their project. Eri refers to Dr. Cardo as "granny," so I guess they're all close enough for it to be slightly less weird for Eri to just be wandering around the lab complex. Still weird, but slightly less so.

...also, is Eri the only kid her age on this station? There are no friends at her birthday party, just her parents. That's sad. :(

Even sadder than this is the fact that, no sooner than her mom has fixed her arm, dad gets an important phone call. A *very* important phone call. One that leads him away from the table at once, and forces mom to reassure Eri that no, really, she WILL get to blow out the candles and eat the cake soon. As Eri whines (pretty reasonably, at this point), Nadim goes in back and switches to videocall. It turns out the person on the other end is a contact within the Mobile Suit Development Council, and he says that they might have really bad news coming soon. Delling, the ex-military guy who took the lead during the shady meeting room scene, has gotten the other execs to agree to...something. It isn't said what. But it's bad.

Anyway, that guy was named Delling. And, from the description, "revolving door MIC slimeball" seems to be about right. Though he may still have an ideology on top of that. Anyway, he's about to do something bad.

Cut to a transport ship arriving at the station. The station's cargo unloading crew suits up and gets ready for the new arrival. While talking politics to give us a bit more background.

The space colonists seem to be cornering ever more of the shipping industry. Earth-loyalist economy is just getting worse and worse. Now there's a trade war going on, with tariffs. It definitely seems like a desperate Earth might launch a first strike. Or like the "spacians" might anticipate a first strike and launch a preemptive attack of their own.

Nadim hurriedly relays a message to the station's administrators. Meanwhile, Eri slips away from her abortive birthday ceremony while Elnora isn't looking. She's mad that neither of her parents seem able to concentrate on her birthday, and it all seems to have something to do with her little sister in the lab. Dad's phone call had something to do with the people ordering that project. Mom's arm is related to the project. Etc. So, Eri once again slips into the lab - now after hours - to yell at the Lfrith to just wake up already and stop monopolizing everyone's time.

It's starting to seem like their family living room is maybe 3-4 doors away from the mech. And like none of those doors are typically locked.

...

From the way they do things, I'd have surmised that this was some ragtag little scavenger tribe trying to jailbreak a stolen mobile suit they somehow got their hands on. Apparently though, these are not only megacorp employees at an aboveboard lab station, but include some of the very same scientists who first put the GUND system together. These are hard things for me to reconcile.

...

While Eri scolds the mech, Dr. Cardo emerges from the cockpit she'd been doing some nondescript work in and asks why Eri is sneaking into the lab yet again.

Doc. The doors. Put locks on them.

Eri asks "Granny" why this mech is so important anyway. Especially when the two others parked against each other at the far side of the lab are just gathering dust while everyone fusses over Lfrith. Methinks Eri is identifying with the other two mechs, but I also don't think she'd be happy if all three of them started taking her parents' attention from her instead of just the one lol. Doctor Cardo's answer is...a bit confusing. She says that what humankind needs is adaptable bodies that will let them thrive in space so they can spread across the solar system and eventually beyond, not just weapons. Lfrith, she claims, is what GUND was originally supposed to be. Not a weapon, but a step in human evolution.

It sure looks like a weapon to me, ngl. What is the doctor getting at? Are they trying to figure out how to upload human consciousnesses into fully synthetic bodies using the GUND as a conduit, or something? Is the plan to create a race of sentient, posthuman Gundams?

...she just wants Transformers to be real, doesn't she? I realized as I was typing the above paragraph that that's basically what I'm describing.

Whatever it is Cardo is working toward, I'm not entirely sure if the company knows that that's what she's doing on their dime. Or, if they do, maybe that ties into why people are making bold moves in response to it within that Council.

Eri doesn't understand what Cardo is talking about. Which isn't too surprising, since I'm not sure that I understand what Cardo is talking about. Dr. Cardo decides that the best way to sate Eri's curiosity and discontent would be to encourage her to "talk" to Lfrith.

She gets the mech to identify Eri's handprint scan as that of a recognized user. Um. Doctor, I really, REALLY don't think this is a good idea. Well, at the very least, I don't think the kid has a full GUND rig, so I doubt she can actually control it (or have her brain fucked up by it), but still. Encouraging this is. Yeah. Doctor Cardo strikes me more and more as a mad scientist who's lost touch.

Eri (or Ericht, as she now provides her full name to be) starts lecturing the mech about her day. Dr. Cardo seems to be satisfied with this, for now. Suddenly, while Eri babbles away in the cockpit, Dr. Cardo gets a call. The station's administrators are relaying what Nadim told them, and also reporting that the Mobile Suit Development Council is holding a surprise press conference that nobody - including RnD people like themselves - had any idea about.

Apparently, the Council is in fact made up of several different arms manufacturer corporations. Ochs Earth is one of those corporations, but apparently their representatives are NOT appearing in this press conference. It looks like they've been cut out entirely. Ah, I see. The Ochs Earth corp proved itself burdensome to the ironmonger community with its recent flubs, so they're being surprise-kicked out. Alright then.

Dr. Cardo makes Eri promise that she'll go right home now, and then turns her back and hurries out of the room with Eri still sitting in the cockpit.

-______-

She's just plain senile.

Eri keeps telling the mech about her birthday cake. Cardo hurries to watch the press conference or try to get through to corporate or whatever she thinks she needs to do. The cargo ship that we saw start to come in for docking earlier finally reaches the airlock. It looks awfully Mass Effect.

I suspect that it's going to be full of mercenaries here to seize the facility on behalf of the other corps.

As the ship that looks a lot like the SSV Normandy locks itself in place, its captain is on the phone with Delling the shady ex-military corporate guy. FTL communications have never been a thing in any Gundam verse, as far as I know, and their conversation doesn't have any noticeable lag, so these two space stations must be pretty near each other. Delling seems to be coordinating several simultaneous raids on Ochs Earth facilities, including multiple R&D stations like this one as well as their main corporate headquarters.

Even his own thugs think this is a little bold, but he assures them that he'll take full accountability if the rest of the Council (or the government/s) end up not approving of what they're about to do.

Sounds like the other council members are either ignorant of the full extent of this, or got Delling to agree to grant them plausible deniability.

Meanwhile, another council member gets up in front of the cameras and announces live on the air that all organizations that are members of the Mobile Suit Development Council will be ceasing production of GUNDam class suits immediately. Additionally, they will be seizing the assets of the original developer, Ochs Earth Corporation, and rendering that company de facto if not legally nonexistent. According to this guy, they're empowered to do this by something called the Business Administrative Act (though we know that behind the scenes, the council isn't actually sure that this interpretation of the BAA would hold water in court).

On the station, the staff all panic. Dr. Cardo hurriedly asks the comms guy if they have any ships scheduled to dock with them soon, and he says that yes, there's a transport ship starting the procedure right as they speak. Unfortunately, they realize what's going on juuuuust too late to react. And, even more unfortunately, the raiders are considerably more gung-ho than I was expecting. As in, company thugs open the airlock door in full armor and immediately shoot the unarmed station spacedock staff in cold blood, without speaking a word.

That, um. Is an approach. It's definitely a method of doing things.

The press conference announces the creation of a new "auditing" organization to handle the council's internal investigations and policy enforcement, headed by Delling, while the mercs pour out of their ship and through the corridors of the RnD station.

Nadim, still in his home office, is being told some even more forbidding details by his contact (well, most of it is just through implication; the dialogue here does a very good job of avoiding "as you know," which I appreciate). Whatever's about to happen, it's not just a matter of the other MSDC member companies coming to see Ochs Earth as a financial or legal liability. What we're dealing with here is worse than just plain old corporate stinginess. Ochs Earth was the only one of the major member organizations to be Earth based, rather than being space based and led and (mostly) owned by spacers. There's something almost analogous to an ethnic component starting to come into play. And, likely, a political one, given which government(s) are likely to have more leverage over the space-based companies if there's an actual war with Earth.

The call is cut short as the invaders reach the station's communications array and shut it off.

Like I said. Most of that stuff about spacer/earthling tension is just subtextual. And reinforced by Nadim swearing about spacers in general as he hurriedly gets up after the call drops. It's done pretty darned well in terms of balancing believable dialogue with conveying exposition of stuff that's much more obvious to the characters than it is to the audience.

...

One thing I will complain about, though, is that the show seems to be consistently using the terms "Earthian" and "Spacian" to refer to the two groups. This isn't the subtitles awkwardly trying to tackle a Japanese neologism either; the voice actors are saying the words "Earthian" and "Spacian" through their thick Japanese accents.

Maybe this doesn't sound as unnatural and ugly to someone who doesn't know what English is meant to sound like, but...if you're going to use English-based neologisms for your scifi thing, please for the love of god get a native speaker's input.

...

Nadim hurries out of his office, and finds the rest of the apartment empty. The cake left, uncut, on the table. I guess either this part of the station has pseudogravity, or that cake is magnetically adhered to the table lol. There's no indication of what happened to Elnora, so I assume she ran out to look for Eri when she realized the girl had slipped away again.

Heh, so much cutting around. It's hard to remember that it's only been a couple of in-universe minutes since Eri's birthday cake got postponed.

As Nadim hurries out himself to hopefully find his wife and daughter, the enemy mothership (looks like it was just a smaller shuttle that carried over the mercs; that wasn't clear at first) launches a mobile suit to patrol the space around the station and make sure nobody escapes and no sneaky rescue shuttles get in.

This is starting to go from "excessive" to "just plain insane."

I wonder if the council suspects Ochs Earth of having some kind of secret deal with an Earthian government? That would explain why they're not taking any risks and jumping straight to "shoot to kill," if they're under the impression that the station has a whole black ops security crew guarding it. It would also explain why they're using a mobile suit (in pretty much all MSG settings, these are basically the equivalent of a high performance fighter plane or tank) to secure the airspace; those GUNDams they're running bugfixes on might secretly have their weapons fully loaded and military pilots just waiting to jump in their cockpits.

They didn't mention anything about this in the council meeting scene, so I might be giving the show too much credit, but it would explain a lot.

...hmm. Maybe it's not the Earthians they're actually worried about, but that "third sector autonomy" state that just ordered a whole bunch of Ochs Earth GUNDams. The show did make a point of telling us about this, after all. In that case, the astropolitics might be a bit more complicated than just "earth vs. space colonies."

Aboard the station, the slaughter continues; everyone in the entire spacedock section is getting gunned down. As alarms start to sound and automated security systems come online, Nadim manages to find Elnora again. Not sure where they are or how they ran into each other; I guess it depends on where Elnora thought Eri had run off to. In any case, she evidently guessed wrong, because she doesn't have Eri with her.

Nadim tells her to keep looking for Eri while he gets into the Lfrith and tries to fight back. Huh, looks like the attackers might have had something to worry about after all; the mechs they're tinkering with ARE battle-ready and armed. And...I guess Nadim is a pilot? I thought he was just a financier who got involved with a test pilot/patient? I guess it's a longer story than that. And, I guess he either has a GUND setup himself, or the Lfrith has a backup manual control system (in the latter case, it's probably going to be pretty clunky; the whole point of the GUNDam line is that it was built around the whacky transhuman control system).

It looks like either Eri has found her way out of the cockpit by the time her father gets to it, or she's curled up and hiding under the built-in coffee maker or something, because there's no sign of her. Including after he launches Lfrith out the hangar followed by the one or two other GUNDams (or are they just other generic mobile suits? either or) that they had on hand piloted by other station staff. It seems like Nadim DOES in fact have a GUND implant, because the enemies are frankly intimidated by the kind of agility and reaction times his mech is capable of. Very quickly, he and his comrades outmanoeuvre and destroy the besieging mechs. That's not going to help them deal with the marines who are currently tearing their way through the station, but it will hopefully allow for an evacuation and flight.

Also...Nadim starts getting sort of creepy as he watches the enemy mobile suits go up in nuclear flames.

Okay dude. You, uh. You do you.

Lol, imagine if Eri really is curled up under the coffee maker, and is seeing and hearing everything.

Unfortunately, the council mothership has more mechs aboard. Including some fancy new one with way too many spikes and baubles on it that leads this second wave.

Not sure why they didn't launch all these suits to begin with, if they bothered to bring them. Weird mix of overkill and corner-cutting, here. Which I guess shouldn't be too surprising from a corporation, but still, it feels really weird.

Meanwhile, in the press conference, Delling starts giving a bizarre speech. One that none of his fellow councillors seem to have been expecting, going by their reactions.

Trying to sift through the shock and grandiosity, I thiiiiiink what he's saying in this speech is that arms development has started to put its fingers where they don't belong. The GUNDam project, aside from being as much of a danger to its own damned pilots as it is to the enemy, represents an insidious sort of melding of military and civilian research. Why is the forefront of medical and transhuman research being done by a weapons company, on a weapon platform? Trying to water down the military and make it serve too many functions is just going to normalize and trivialize the application of weaponry where it isn't needed.

Or...that might actually be a steelman of his argument, honestly. In fact, he might be using that (very reasonable) concern as a shield for the other, much less logical, stuff. Like, he rambles about how it needs to be humans, not machines, who decide when killing is being done, how there can be no abstracting of responsibility etc. Even though the GUNDam has absolutely nothing to do with automation. Hell, it's pretty much the *opposite* of automation, letting pilots essentially become their vehicles temporarily and committing their (hopefully necessary) evils in a far more personal and less abstract way than the last few centuries' norm.

As he speaks, his colleagues get an update on what their own minions are currently doing to the Ochs Earth facilities, and look completely horrified. While I suspect the horror reaction is more because of fear of legal consequences than any actual concern for the people being killed (these are arms dealers, after all), it nonetheless is made very clear that they all underestimated Delling. A feeling that sinks in deeper as his speech grows progressively more unhinged.

As he talks about necessity, and personal responsibility, we see footage of some murdered scientists floating around the lab. Scientists that, we've been explicitly told, were at least in some cases forcibly reassigned to GUNDam research and away from the peaceful medical GUND stuff they'd started with. I can only assume that a corporation would normally want to capture high-value people like scientists and engineers instead of just killing them, so these orders likely came straight from the top.

Also, that fancy new mech that they deploy to deal with the GUNDams apparently uses a drone network to create some sort of energy field that screws with the GUND link.

So much for being against automated weapons lol.

Yeah. The points Delling is making don't actually follow logically from one another, or even really connect to each other at all, in addition to being belied by his actions. And it's only the initial point he made that really makes any sense. Like, he butters his audience up to agree with him, and then tries to slip other shit passed their defences.

It seems like he's an idealogue for some kind of pseudo-Luddite fascism. Actually looking at his statements side by side, the only common thread is "transhumanism bad." That also squares with his actions in trying to destroy the research and kill all the scientists, rather than just de-coupling them from the bastardized munitions angle that Ochs Earth forced them into. In fact, we soon see that the mercs have special orders to kill Dr. Cardo specifically.

Some of his mouth noises sound like they could be warning against corporate overreach when it comes to mixing weapons and life-enhancing cybernetics, but he never actually says anything about corporate greed or callousness as a whole. Of course he can't do that; he's a company man himself, whatever other ideological weirdness he has going on.

Basically, it's the space cyberpunk version of "I know how miserable you all are slaving away in poverty and alienation under these neoliberal corporations. We need to END corporate wokeness now, and force these elites to stop forcing their ideology of queerness, antiracism, social welfare, minimum wages, and workplace safety regulations on us!" Almost a 1:1 equivalent.

Delling himself seems to be a true believer in this pseudo-luddite anti transhumanism thing, rather than just a cynical businessman hitching his train to that. That's probably one of the main things that sets him apart from the other council members.

Now, how this whole reactionary anti-transhumanism interacts with the Earthian vs. Spaceian tensions is something I'm curious about. It seemed like the spaceians were the more transhumanist ones in general, but now it's a bunch of mostly spaceian corporations scapegoating an earthian one from behind a curtain of luddite rhetoric. Which military did Delling used to be part of? It never said if he's from an Earth-based polity or a space one. Of course, how much difference does that even make when we're looking at the elites whose interests don't necessarily overlap with those of the people in the polls?

...

If the writers know what they're doing with this it could be an extremely interesting and intricate setup with realistic historical contradictions and nuances. If they don't know what they're doing with this, it's going to be an incoherent mess. What I've seen so far makes me optimistic, but I'll keep my fingers crossed; these anime writers would hardly be the firsts to bite off more sociology than they could chew.

...

There's a little bit of back and forth between Dr. Cardo and the attackers. And, going by the dialogue, I'm actually no longer sure that these are just rent-a-mooks like I thought. When she tries to defend herself by saying she just wanted to aid human development so they can truly adapt to space, the squad leader counters that she's just using that as an excuse to invent technology that gives people brain damage.

Like, he seems to think that giving brain damage to some random mech pilots was her actual goal. Rather than it being a consequence of the corporation rushing her invention through development into a role she didn't even originally intend it for. This tells me that both a) are ideologically committed to the same cause as Delling, and b) that cause is definitely something fascism-adjacent, because this is literally blood libel type shit just with cyborgs instead of (((globalists))).

The back and forth only lasts a couple of rounds, though. After that, they abandon abandon verbal condemnations in favor of bullets. Cardo is quick on the draw, but that doesn't mean much when she's just got the pistol hidden in her desk drawer and they've got three guys in full body armor with machine guns. So much for Dr. Cardo. She might have lost her marbles in her final years, but given the stresses she was placed under by the corporation that would eventually get her killed that's kind of understandable.

The battle is turning against the defenders again across the board. The spiky mobile suit with the impossible French name has disabled or destroyed all the defending GUNDams. Nadim is still alive inside what's left of the Lfreth, but its weapons are shot to hell and its strained maneuvering thrusters are just barely keeping it out of the pursuers' reach. Then we cut back to the lab, where...okay, are there two different mechs called "Lfreth?" Nadim specifically said he was taking Lfreth out, and it was Lfreth's cockpit that Dr. Cardo left Eri in. But now Elnora reaches the lab, and Eri is still hiding inside of that cockpit.

I looked back, and before he went out Nadim said that he was going to take "THE Lfreth." Implying that it's the name of one specific mech, rather than a class or line of them. And, looking back before that at the scene where Dr. Cardo was teaching Eri to "talk" to the cockpit interface, that mech was also explicitly named as Lfreth.

Now I'm more confused than I was before lol. Part of this might be down to localization hiccups (ie, the word "the" might not have actually belonged before "Lfreth" in Nadim's line), but that doesn't help me much.

For want of anywhere else to flee to, and having listened in on radio chatter that suggests the enemy might be getting orders to just blow the station up after they've confirmed the deaths of all the key researchers (what...they're thinking about just throwing away a fucking SPACE STATION for no reason? How insane are these people?), Elnora secures her and Eri's helmets and seals the cockpit. Her daughter's panicked tears, the news of longtime friend and found family member Dr. Cardo's death, and the probable-though-not-yet-confirmed death of her husband as well all play themselves out in Elnora's face and eyes.

And then...the Lfrith's newfangled version of the GUND control system announces that it's finished securing all her neural connections. Including the ones that she wasn't able to safely make during the tests.

Either it's a crazy one-in-a-million coincidence that it would happen to work this time rather than any of the previous times, or it turns out that GUND works much better on a brain that's paralyzed with grief and terror.

...okay, if it's the second one then I actually am going to start wondering if the bad guys might have been on to something with Dr. Cardo's motivations lol.

Anyway, (the?) Lfrith is now fully integrated and fully responsive. Elnora is not pushing buttons, or even issuing mental commands. For the time being at least, she IS the mobile suit, and her body is the only thing shielding her daughter from death.

The attackers, who thought they had accounted for every one of the mobile suits Ochs Earth was supposed to have here, are caught with their pants down.

...

Hmm, this Lfrith wasn't on the records? Yeah, it's starting to seem like Dr. Cardo and her colleagues really had managed to go rogue and reappropriate some company resources without the higher ups learning about it.

That goes along with what she said earlier, about how this custom Lfreth was going to be her way of de-militarizing her research again. It's a war machine, and seemingly a fully armed one, but the research she was doing with it was geared toward general man-machine integration rather than anything specifically military. It's just what she had to work with.

I really am not sure how she could have managed this, though. You'd think mobile suits - especially powerful cutting edge ones - are something the company would take real pains to keep track of. Well, then again...recent real life history shows that there are absolutely zero corners a corporation won't cut if they think it'll save them a zillionth of a percent in short term expenses, so this might actually be plausible. Maybe I just need to do a better job keeping my naivete in check.

...

The enemy is flat footed. Right out the hangar door, Elnora is able to shoot out the couple of supporting mechs or gunships that they have flying around the station. Eri, looking out at the cockpit's secondary visual display of its surroundings, stops crying and reveals herself to truly be her father's daughter.

There is some real bloodlust running through the family, at least on Nadim's side. Same creepy grin and everything.

...

I somehow missed this on my first watch, but. The glowing on Eri's face, which her mother is NOT currently sharing, is not coming from reflected outside lights. Also, it showed Eri's name on the monitor, rather than Elnora's, when the connections finally sorted themselves out and brought the Lfrith's cybernetic controls fully online.

So. It's not Elnora's brain being in a state of grief that's allowing this. It's Eri successfully integrating with the mech where her mother couldn't.

Possibly a property of child brain, which the Doctor never really looked into for obvious ethical reasons that were too much even for megacorp directives to violate. Possibly some weird one-in-a-million trait specific to Eri.

Either way, this both makes Eri's creepy grin here about 5000% creepier than it already was, and also illustrates the full power of the GUND system. The two-way neural interface not only gives the user unrivalled reaction time and coordination with the device they're plugged into, but also instantly gives them perfect knowledge of what the platform can do and how to use it. Zero training required. Successful integration makes you instantly an ace pilot even if you're never so much as picked up a videogame controller before.

This aspect of the GUND is the one that raises by far the most bioethical concerns. If GUND links can instantly put that much data directly inside of your brain and make it an intuitive part of your mental self, then they can also be used for some real Black Mirror shit, and I'm not talking about the lesbian beach party episode. The risk of brain damage that the bad guys are making this whole scene over is nothing compared to this.

...

Before Eri can finish lighting her replacement birthday candles, the big spiky mech with the special anti-GUND weapons comes charging out of space. It does its EMP swarm thingy, and Eri is stunned. No brain damage from the neural feedback or anything, fortunately, but she's back in her body in the cockpit for as long as it takes Lfrith's computers to reboot. Which is enough time for the attacker to destroy their weapons and start blasting its way into the hull.

But then! The other (barely) surviving GUNDam/Lfrith(?) comes rocketing in from the debris cloud it had been hiding in. Nadim's mech has also been disarmed and battered, but he has enough room to build up good acceleration, and a clear shot at Le Spikiere. Using his suit as an improvised missile, he knocks Le Spikiere away and then entangles his suit's remaining limbs around its ridiculous spiney protrusions and redlines his engines. Forcing both mechs to go tumbling back toward the enemy mother ship. The enemy doesn't have any fighters left active, so this gives Elnora and/or Eri the window they need to GTFO and go as far and as fast as their Lfrith's fuel reserves can take them. Elnora is hardly eager to leave him behind, but she can't argue. Eventually, either Le Spikiere will free itself or the mothership captain will get frustrated and just blast both mechs apart with the ship's weapons, and neither his nor the other Lfrith have enough functional weapons left to do meaningful damage in return. One of them is going to have to try and run, and Elnora is the one who has their daughter in her suit, so there's really no question.

Elnora tearfully does as he asks (seems like she's back in control now, at least of the basic propulsion systems). He says goodbye, and starts singing Eri happy birthday as he flies away from them toward the enemy ship.

And, in an truly, impressively, artfully karmic dick move, he also broadcasts his singing on all channels. Making sure that the attackers know that they're killing a little kid and her father, while he's singing her happy birthday. Just to cause them as much pain and moral anxiety as possible while they finish him off.

Amazing.

Granted, a lot of these guys are probably fanatical and/or ruthless enough to not be bothered by this sort of thing. "Company backbreaker" isn't a line of work that tends to attract the most scrupulous and empathetic types. But any of them who are capable of feeling shame and remorse or having trouble living with themselves are now doing so, because fuck them that's why.

I thought Nadim was bloodthirsty when he's shooting lasers and missiles and stuff, but it looks like that was just the beginning. Give this absolute savage a posthumous medal and record his name in the annals of commendable spite.

Le Spikier's pilot turns out to be a mercenary sociopath type, and kills Nadim as soon as he can disentangle his weapon limbs and get to a safe distance. But a bunch of the mothership's bridge crew are visibly effected, and that's going to have to be good enough.

Eri continues happily singing happy birthday to herself as her father's voice is cut off and her mother flies them out of engagement range. End prologue; the story is to be continued in the proper pilot. Which I'll also be reviewing sometime before the end of the month.

It's pretty ambitious, I'll definitely say that. Not just in terms of how much social, political, and technological high concept it's trying to engage with, but also in its relationship with the broader franchise.

Many of the Mobile Suit Gundam otherverses remix plot and character concepts from Universal Century, but I don't think I've heard of a previous one making such a holistic attempt at it. The cybernetic transhumanism that Witch From Mercury introduces, as well as the ideologies pushing for it or reacting against it, are all a pretty clear mirror to later Universal Century's psionic technology. The forwardthinking, but not entirely sane, space-gazing idealist who gets murdered and leaves a (biological and/or ideological) heir is an obvious reimagining of Zeon and Casval (all the way down to the heir's mother playing a major role in protecting them from the coup). Heck, even the name of that space government that's doing a big military buildup against Earth, the "third sector autonomy," is a play on Universal Century's breakaway O'Neill colony swarm of "side 3." The pieces are arranged differently, but they're all present.

At the same time though, this isn't just a UC reboot, and there's a REASON it isn't just a UC reboot.

The original Mobile Suit Gundam anime started running in 1979. It told the story of a bipolar world. An Earth ridden with greed, complacency, and corruption, and an orbital society whose revolutionary idealism keeps getting hijacked by bloody-handed authoritarians. The biggest driving forces of the conflict are nationalism, utopianism, and imperial ambition. The initial main antagonist's rise to power is a close parallel of Stalin's ascent after the death of Lenin. The supremacist ideology that comes into the forefront a little later on are evocative of naziism. The hypocritical, exploitative Earth government struggling to cling to its many tributaries as they fight back with increasing efficacy mirrors the breakup of the British Empire and America's partial adoption of its global role. Specific battles throughout the many instalments aesthetically evoke everything from the island hopping of World War 2 to the jungle battles of Southeast Asia to the grinding desert proxy wars of the Middle East. The big spectre hanging over everything was that of country-killing superweapons - colony drops and cylinder decompressions. The Universal Century is the twentieth century, just with mechs and psychic powers.

I've only seen the first episode (or zeroth episode, heh) of Witch From Mercury, but it's pretty clear what it's going for. Nationalism is an important factor, but it's really just a shadowplay obscuring the face of a much weirder ideological conflict born of capitalism run amok and darkly, but not always even intentionally, politicizing everything it purchases. The big new thing is man-machine integration, and accompanying fears (grounded or otherwise) about artificial intelligence, human identity, and where the reigns of power actually pull. The wars are a consequence of a military industrial complex coming to call the shots, with the boundaries between national and ideological actors growing murky in its shadow. The tensions come from formerly peripheral polities increasing their military strength to eclipse that of Earth, causing anxiety among (already economically anxious) Earthians as their unipolar world is pulled apart. Rather than the enormous pitched battles and national revolutions that kicked off Universal Century, this new timeline starts with a bungled black operation that crushes innocent people between the blind idiot fists of distant plutocrats while a rambling lunatic gives nonsensical, diversionary speeches about it on TV. Notably, the main characters - particularly those on the revolutionary side - are mostly women this time.

I see now that it's not remotely coincidental that "Witch From Mercury's" advertising calls a lot of attention to it being the first entirely original 2020's Gundam timeline. This series really, really, really wants to be the 21st century's own UC.

Does it succeed at this? I don't know. If nothing else, this was a pretty entertaining mech anime pilot, even if the plot came with a few big headscratchers. I'd have to see much more to tell if the show's reach measures up to its ambition, but so far (mostly) so good.