Legend of the Galactic Heroes - Die Neue These S1E11: "The Verge of Death (part one)"

The Alliance is doing an ill-advised all out attack in order to make the Empire seem a bit more reasonable to the audience. Wen-Li and his 13th fleet are going to be part of the invasion force, and he's been surreptitiously tasked with trying to sabotage the mission in a way that forces it to abort without too many people dying. Reinhard, meanwhile, might be planning to sabotage the Empire's defences himself to facilitate the end of the regime, or he might be playing to win in order to gain the power and influence needed to end it himself.

I hope it ends up with Wen-Li and Reinhard both trying to sabotage their own missions, and both of them failing at failing because of the other's own self-sabotaging hijinks. That would be great.

We open on a very, very pretty external shot of another invasion force subgroup, the 10th fleet, clustering in orbit of a ringed planet.

It's been a long time since I mentioned it, but I really do like the ship design in this series. They capture the sensibilities of each faction very well in a practical-looking (less so in the Empire's case, but still more or less) package. I think my favorite detail is that Alliance flagships look pretty much just like every other ship in the fleet, while the Imperial ones seem to be bigger and fancier than their basic line ships. Says so much with so little effort.

As a dramatic musical overture plays, the subfleet's commander gives an order, and landing craft full of troops begin to detach and descend into the gravity well. A view from the ground reveals the neo-luddite aesthetic of the Galactic Empire's peripheral subjects, with the people looking up at the rain of shooting stars coming to - presumably - liberate them.

I guess we've jumped ahead to the Alliance fleet having already moved through the Astarte Corridor and starting to take Imperial planets near the border. Hopefully they won't fuck up the hearts and minds campaign too badly, but from how the story has presented itself so far they most likely will.

Quite a teaser. Roll OP, start episode!

We reopen on the 8th fleet now, holding orbit of yet another Imperial planet. Looks like the Alliance hit a bunch of inhabited worlds simultaneously, and Reinhard's defence-in-depth approach has meant that their initial conquests were pretty much unopposed. Like I said before, the smart thing for them to do here would be to hold and fortify this region of space, weather the inevitable Imperial counterattack when it comes, and only then try to bite off more. I don't think they're going to though.

Also, I think there's a translation hiccup in the report the 8th fleet commander is getting from his underlings. He's told that the nobles all fled this planet in advance of the Alliance's arrival, and that "only the ruling-class citizens remain." Is that supposed to be lower class? Or is he referring to some other caste of high-status-but-not-quite-noblemen people in Imperial society who the nobles didn't bother to bring with them? Not sure. Either way, there was nobody really important left on this planet by the time the 8th fleet claimed it.

Cut to the ground on one of the conquered planets. An Alliance officer announces to a crowd of downtrodden-looking factory workers that they are now citizens of the Free Planets Alliance, with all associated rights and privileges. So far, we don't see any war crimes happening. The occupation forces appear to be behaving themselves, and the civilians seem no worse than neutrally disposed toward them in turn. Better than I'd expected!

The 8th, 10th, 12th, and 13th fleets all encounter the same situation on different planets. Nobles gone. Military forces pulled back. Populace ranging from apathetic to cautiously optimistic. It would all be smooth sailing if not for one problem.

We see one of the occupation officers telling some community leaders that their people will be expected to hold elections and appoint some representatives to the Alliance government. The answer he gets is that democracy sounds pretty cash money and all, but before they get that there's something else they need from the Alliance.

All the conquered planets are on the brink of starvation.

It seems like the nobles did take something with them when they fled those systems, using the ship space that would otherwise have been taken up by middle classers. They probably burned everything they couldn't steal.

So, now the Alliance is stuck dealing with a humanitarian crisis of interstellar proportions. And if they don't adress it, there goes all of their ability to be seen as saviours. It doubt it could take that long to bring local agriculture back up to self-sufficiency unless the nobles outright salted the earth, but still...

...actually, come to think of it, these planets might have only had primitive agricultural infrastructure to begin with. Given the way the Empire runs things, any advanced super-hydroponics or protein recyclers or whatever that they have are probably the exclusive property of the military. Civilian populations are probably getting by on whatever they can grow with irrigation ditches and ox ploughs. Getting enough food to feed their own populations again might take these planets an entire year, in that case. The Alliance would have to build high-tech food production infrastructure from the ground up, and bring in a whole fuckload of experts (which they're already short on) to teach the locals how to use it.

Here the episode title, "On the Verge of Death," drops.

Yeah. Fuck.

...

Did Reinhard order this?

It seems like he must have, if all of these planets are in the exact same situation and he's in charge of the Empire's military as a whole. But, trying to reconcile this with everything we've been shown about him, I just...

I guess it could have been a theater commander acting on their own initiative. Or a conspiracy among the local planetary dukes or whtever to coordinate this. Reinhard IS pretty far away from the front lines at present, after all.

If Reinhard really is the one who ordered this, then the series has fundamentally changed. None of his alleged good intentions and aspirations to end the tyranny even remotely matter anymore. He's just the villain, and Wen-Li is just the hero.

...

Back at Iserlohn, now the Alliance's invasion logistics hub, a grim-faced admiral is given the bad news. They're going to need 180 days worth of food, for 50 million people, until they can get the planets self-sufficient again. That's assuming they can bring all the prefabbed structures they need out here and set them up at a reasonable pace. Otherwise, they'll need even more. It's probably safe to assume that Imperial raiding fleets will be descending like arrows trying to intercept the supply convoys in the space between the Astarte entrance and the imperilled planets. For some of those planets, that's quite a bit of space for the Alliance to have to defend.

They can probably do it. Probably. It'll put even more strain on the Alliance's already strained economy, though, and it'll mean no more progress into imperial territory for at least a year while they get this crisis sorted out.

Which, well. That seems fine to me, honestly. And probably also with Wen-Li, considering his own ideas about what they should be doing, even if he wished the solution didn't come with the baggage of so many starving civilians. No need to expand the liberated territory further, just sit on what they've got and try to get over this supply hump before the Empire rebuilds its fleet.

The one young dipshit admiral who pitched this invasion plan to the Alliance government in the first place isn't willing to hear any of this naysaying, though.

The guy who he bitches out and calls a coward just grimaces and hopes Wen-Li can find a way to save the Alliance from its own stupidity here.

Back on Heinessen, the Alliance government panics at the news. A vote is called, for the eleven executive high councillors to decide whether or not to keep prosecuting the war or to pull the fleet back and return to the post Battle of Iserlohn status quo. The result is even harder for me to believe than anything else we've been shown about the Alliance's politics.

The leading pro-invasion vote comes from the cartoonishly evil "we need to win this election" lady. Because apparently she still thinks they need to conquer even more territory in order for the election to be secure. And that losing the fleet AND the liberated populations to starvation will impress the voters.

And um. Who the fuck votes "abstain" on a decision like this one? Councilors Amir Sharif and Miguel Calvo do, apparently, but I mean. Like. Why? How?

Also, was the choice really just between "pull all our forces back" and "keep pressing forward?" Was there no "secure most or all of the space we've taken and pause until we solve the food crisis" option? Was that meant to be implicit? I hope so, because it sure wasn't EXplicit.

...hell, shouldn't there also be a "pull back from the planets that will be trickiest to resupply and hope the Empire decides to feed them itself now, and consolidate a more secure hold over a smaller number of starving planets closest to the corridor" option?

Why? How?

...

This would work really well as a parody of liberal democracy in decline in isolation. Like, I can see the author channeling all his frustration at the contemporary Japanese government, and at the American one that backs it, into the Alliance ruling council.

But this is just not what a democracy that's been in an existential war for years and years would look like. Not even close.

And, I mean, okay, for parody's sake I can still see putting this government in this situation. But only if the story was ABOUT this clownshoes regime trying to survive an existential conflict. LotGH also gives us an outside perspective from the point of view of the Empire, though. And doesn't seem to be joking when it implies that the two might be equally bad, even when it has to furiously spin its wheels to MAKE the Alliance as bad as it is.

Like, this entire sequence is framed as an ideological failure of the Alliance's. Not as a reminder of the Empire's monstrosity. Even the Alliance characters aren't expressing any shock or horror at the Empire having done this. The conversations are all written in a way that carefully talks around the source of the crisis.

You'd expect the more gung-ho Alliance officers to be going on and on about how the Empire did this to its own people, right? They should be saying "this is just even more proof of why we can't let the Empire remain in power over more people" or "any starvation deaths in our wake are on the Empire's shoulders, not ours." They should be milking this for all its worth to weasel out of their share of responsibility and their obligation to the civilians. But somehow, no one - not even the Alliance characters that we're clearly meant to hate - even says the word "Empire" when talking about how to deal with this famine.

The reason why they don't do this is obvious. If they did, then the audience would realize that no matter how flawed the Alliance is, they're still objectively the good guys, and that this isn't actually a morally ambiguous gray-on-gray conflict. The story knows this. It just doesn't want you to notice it. It's lying. Knowingly and on purpose.

I will say, thinking back on the one or two episodes of the OVA that I saw, that it's very possible this is entirely the fault of Die Neue These. For all that it was terribly written and terribly paced, the OVA was pretty damned clear about Reinhard being the bad guy, albeit possibly one with some redeeming qualities. If I'd gotten to this part of the plot in the OVA, with its own framing of the Empire and its onscreen representatives, I suspect I wouldn't have been nearly as critical of it.

I don't know which version is closer to the original novel's. Which means I don't know if this is the author's fault, or the studio's fault. It's definitely someone's fault though. This is not the kind of manipulativeness a story can do by accident.

...

Wen-Li is less than thrilled to hear about the government's decision, naturally. Especially when it turns out that some brainlets back on Heinessen are still going "why not just go deeper into enemy territory and raid them for supplies?"

To make matters worse, if the Alliance withdraws and the Empire opts to not let all those planets keep on starving, the people there will see the Imperial Navy as their savior and associate the Alliance with famine.

...erm, wasn't it also the Imperial Navy who took all the food in the first place?

Maybe it wasn't, actually? If not, then yeah, this was probably a conspiracy among the local noblemen and their personal fleets acting without approval from central command. That definitely would make Reinhard (and the story as a whole, consequently) look better, to say the least. Also, if that is what happened, then this is actually perfect for Reinhard's own ambitions. If he comes in after the Alliance withdraws, feeds all those people, and punishes the nobles who did this, then he immediately cements himself as the Good Tzar. Protector of the people from both corrupt nobles and foreign invaders.

...hell, if he was a mega-super-cynical chessmaster villain it would make sense for him to ORDER those nobles to do that, then pretend they did it on their own and throw them under the bus (granted, he'd need to get the Kaizer to believe his version of the story over theirs, which might be a challenge). That's less likely than any other possibility that I've considered thus far, but for another character it would make a brutal sense.

Well, whoever's fault this is, it's clear that the sooner the Alliance accepts the L, the smaller of an L it will be. Wen-Li gets in touch with the other vice-admirals, seeing that this is the time to abort the mission or at least downsize it, and that if all the admirals on location decide to pull back the government will look very bad if it makes the chiefs of staff overrule them. Also, apparently Wen-Li is the only one of the fleet commanders who realizes the Empire is deliberately planning to starve them and then attack when they're hungry and dealing with hungry civilians. Because, as has been made clear from the first episode onward, every commander who isn't Reinhard, Wen-Li, or a hand-picked understudy of one of theirs is a complete strawman moron who exists solely to be wrong about all things at all times.

Still, Wen-Li eventually gets them to see the obvious, and also convinces the main admiral dude that they should probably withdraw back to Iserlohn.

Wen-Li does have one extra suggestion that doesn't seem completely obvious even to a military layperson like me. And it's one that plays into his history of using misdirection and false assumptions - both among his own forces and his enemies - to his advantage. Withdrawing the occupation forces back onto the ships and making an orderly retreat will leave them vulnerable to Imperial counterattack while they're putting everything away. So, instead, Wen-Li thinks they should route. Just scramble to get all their soldiers back aboard the ships ASAP, leaving equipment and supplies behind, and then have all their ships tear off back down the Astarte Corridor as fast as possible.

It'll be so perfect, so obvious and easy of a target, that Reinhard will be sure that it's a trap.

Definitely a very risky gamble, because if Reinhard ends up calling the bluff and attacks anyway, their losses are liabe to be much worse than they would have been if attacked during an orderly withdrawal. But, Wen-Li has so far done pretty well when the two of them have clashed, so hopefully he's one step ahead of him here as well.

Anyway, Wen-Li convinces the main task force commander, and he sends word back to Iserlohn (who relays the message back to the Chiefs of Staff on Heinessen) of what they plan to do. Meanwhile, revolts and riots start to break out on the planet that the 8th fleet is hovering over, resulting in outright clashes between Alliance soldiers and starving rioters.

Wait...already? I thought they still had enough for a week or so, assuming they don't push further...

Did something get cut out of the adaptation here? It seems like the food situation suddenly got much worse than the characters were all saying it was.

Also, what the fuck buildings are the people even torching? Where would the Alliance be storing food planetside without immediately distributing it?

Anyway, Alliance soldiers end up shooting some desperate, skinny, wide-eyed rioters. So much for the tolerant left or whatever.

Also, while I get that the main focus of Legend of the Galactic Heros is on spacefleet combat, I'm a little disappointed by the glimpses we get of ground combat.

Just guys in uniform with tactical vests, using what seems to be projectile rifles. No robots. No powered armor. No stun bombs or crowd control masers. It's literally just a late twentieth century urban counterinsurgency scene, without even any aesthetic trappings of futurism. It's not the usual zeerust thing, where old scifi ends up putting some ridiculously far-out technologies while failing to predict other near-future developments, it's a failure to even do scifi at all in this scene.

Anyway. The task force commander gets in touch with Heinessen and asks permission to end this doomed expedition.

He wants to talk to the...Supreme Commander? I guess that's basically the SecDef, or the chairman of the joint chiefs or something along those lines...about a withdrawal. Unfortunately, once he gets a commlink going through to the Space Pentagon, and...wait, no, I guess I misunderstood something before. The Chief of Staff they need to talk to IS the task force commander, and he's currently overseeing the invasion from Iserlohn. The one who Wen-Li is getting to do the talking on behalf of all the other vice-admirals is just the oldest and most respected of the lot who has the best chance of being listened to. Okay, my bad.

So, Bewcock the older vice-admiral gets a line to the bigshot at Iserlohn. Unfortunately, the one who picks up the phone is the extra-cartoony douchebag who dismissed their logistical concerns back at the start with accusations of cowardice and/or treachery.

And he just outright refuses to let anyone talk directly to the admiral. Citing protocol and decorum, while making it absurdly obvious that he won't relay anything he doesn't want the admiral to hear and almost challenging the vice admiral dude to call him out on it.

If this series didn't already have a well-established pattern of filling both armies with ridiculous strawman obstructionists, I'd be sure that this guy was an Imperial agent. Or a Fezzani one, actually. That would make more sense in terms of why he's only doing obvious sabotage now, since Rubinsky thinks the Empire needs more help at this point. And it would make that whole subplot a lot more immediately relevant to the characters, if Fezzani infiltrators are fucking with one or both of them directly. But, the series does have a well-established pattern of everyone not joined at the hip to Reinhard or Wen-Li of being like this for no ulterior reason, so oh well.

Staff Officer Scarecrow gives a dumb little speech about how they're fighting for freedom and democracy, and that means no retreating no matter what, and also no talking directly to Admiral Lobos because fuck you that's why. At this point, Bewcock loses patience and tells the agricultural pest intimidator that in that case, fine, he'll shuttle back to Iserlohn in person and demand that HE take his place on the front lines if he's so eager to fight evil or whatever.

And then explicitly calls him a chickenhawk. I'm...not sure I've ever seen this accusation be made WITHIN the military, rather than between the military and civilian warmongers but there are probably other examples out there. Surprisingly (or...not really that surprisingly, given the way this series is written) Scarecrow goes totally blankfaced with stunned incomprehension at being called out and starts literally stammering with rage.

Okay. Seriously. Even WITH the precedents set by the story so far. Is this guy an undercover enemy agent? His reaction here makes much more sense if you read it as "oh shit I think they're on to me I'm going to be executed now" than it does as anything else.

Then when Bewcock raises his voice and outright insults him, he does this:

Triumphant, heroic music plays in the background as Bewcock continues bitching him out and he vibrates in place making gurgling noises. When Bewcock finishes, the other guy lets out an agonized roar, rolls his eyes up into his head, and sinks out of view like the wicked witch of the west in a rainstorm. The triumphant heroic music gets louder, and Bewcock smiles.

...

Is this a parody?

I'm almost thinking of, like, the Starship Troopers movie, where the creators decided they hated the book and they were going to make a satire of it instead of a faithful adaptation.

I haven't read the book in this case, so I don't know what the tone of it was like. But...I can't believe that this scene in the show is supposed to be taken even remotely seriously.

It's almost literally the "and then everyone clapped" meme.

...

A minute later, another officer appears on the screen and apologizes to Bewcock for him having to see that. It appears that Commodore Strawman has suffered a stress-induced seizure.

What show am I even watching right now?

To make things even weirder, the new guy says that they've already got the physician's advice. Medical relief from duty? No, not according to this guy. The doctor says that in order to help their patient recover as quickly as possible, everyone had best make sure that he doesn't experience any more frustration and try to ensure that things go his way.

...um. I can't even tell if the character is being sarcastic or if the show itself is, at this point.

Bewcock, unable to believe his ears, asks if he can finally talk to Admiral Lobos now that the other guy is out of the way. Beardy tells him that no, he can't. Admiral Lobos is asleep. Please call back later when he's woken up.

Bewcock just tells him to let Lobos know that the task force is en route back to Iserlohn for urgent resupply whenever he's awake enough to be given updates. And also that he hopes he had nice dreams. Bewcock then hangs up on Beardy before he can argue with him.

...

That was one of the weirdest scenes I have ever seen in anything. It's like the show suddenly turned into Doctor Strangelove for the length of one scene. But like, it's an important scene. It's not just a gag.

...

Jump to the planet Odin, where Reinhard is discussing the situation with his not remotely hetero lifelong companion Kircheis. Or, well. Really he's just giving Kircheis his orders. Seems like Reinhard is going to send him to lead the raiding fleet meant to poach the Alliance supply ships on their way out of the corridor. Kircheis is much less chipper than he was when Reinhard sent him on his last mission to put down that one dickhead nobleman's revolt. When asked, Kircheis says that this strategy is weighing very heavily on his conscience.

So. I guess that "Operation: Space Holodomor" actually was Reinhard's own orders.

Well. Okay then. I think I've already made my thoughts on the subject and how it will effect my experience of the story henceforth clear enough. No need to reiterate them.

Reinhard acknowledges that this plan is hurting the Empire's own people who they allegedly want to improve things for. However, consider the following counterpoint:

I mean. Yes. That is generally why armies do things (though I guess in this show it actually is more the exception than the rule come to think of it).

Like I said, this fits the OVA version of Reinhard like a glove. The DNT version, though, feels like there's an entire corruption arc that happened offscreen.

Kircheis perks up a little bit at Reinhard's insistence that this will all have been worth it in the end. Somehow. Then, we jump ahead to Reinhard talking to some other admirals about the main fleet action. After Kircheis does the convoy raiding and throws the Alliance fleet into panic, these guys are going to bring the Empire's full force to bear on the disarrayed invaders. And also bring back all the food they took, of course. No need to keep starving everyone after the Alliance's humanitarianism has already been cynically used against them.

How sweet of him.

Oberstein is the one explaining most of the details of the attack to the admirals here. In a totally unconcerned tone of voice, and an extra harsh gleaming of his cybernetic eyes.

Is the implication here supposed to be that Oberstein's advice has been turning Reinhard down a darker path, rather than the better way that Kircheis always pushed for? Maybe? If so, why the hell did it all happen offscreen?

Anyway, Reinhard leads everyone in a cringey neopagan ritual to pray for victory that he and Oberstein both probably hate themselves for having to go through the motions of. I can't really feel too bad for them right now, though.

Then the last five or so minutes of this episode is just a montage of Imperial ships launching from spacedock and moving into formation and Imperial officers making stern expressions.


It's not entirely the fault of the story that this episode was as hard for me to watch as it was. If I wasn't in this specific place, at this specific time, it wouldn't have been like this. At least, not as badly. It still would have gotten a big WTF from me, and I'd still be both more sceptical than ever of the show's politics and very confused about how it wants me to relate to Reinhard, but I wouldn't have had to stop watching midway through and stare at the wall for multiple hours.

Anyway. I don't think there's any good reason for me to continue watching Legend of the Galactic Heroes. Like I said before, I don't know how many of the problems are the book author's fault and how many are the anime team's, but in either case there's very little in this series that interests me besides some of the visuals. It's not well-written, aside from a couple of subplots. It's not good futurism. It's not good political commentary, unless something is going way over my head. It's not good military-tactics-brain-candy (hint: making everyone else impossibly stupid is NOT the way to write a genius). Its ethics are confused at best and contemptible at worst. I don't think it's going to get better from here.

I had one more episode in queue, but as @LilyWitch's own enthusiasm for the show has also declined considerably since the time she comissioned it she's switching it out for the MGRR "Jetstream" DLC.