ExoSquad S1E4: "Blitzkrieg"

Really just laying on the nazi coding now, I see. Still, at least it's an accurate description of the Martian tactics seen thus far.


After the "last time on," we open on the Martian flagship Olympus Mons in high Earth orbit. Phaeton, still in his decorated powered armor suit that I guess he's decided is his war uniform, is being updated by one of his generals on the ground. General Shiva (the neosapiens really like their mythological names) reports largely successful e-frame and armored infantry assaults on Earth's major administrative centers. The majority of the cities are now under Martian control, and the remainder are in ruins.

I wonder if he had special orders to preemptively level Chicago.​

Phaeton praises the general's work, and tells him to keep up the aggression and move on to any secondary military resistance centres before the enemy can get its bearings. Shiva acknowledges the order. And also addresses Phaeton as "commander" rather than "governor-general." I guess he's made up some new titles for himself, or else the writers just got clumsy.

Phaeton then receives another report, from a General Tutonis leading the assault on Venus. The invaders appear to be suffering greater losses there, even if Tutonis assures Phaeton that their timetable isn't at risk. He also comes across as a gloryhound, which Phaeton quickly takes him to task over. He changes his tune once the Governor-General (who is addressed by his actual station this time, heh) starts giving him the look.

After the updates, Phaeton has a conversation with the Olympus Mons' captain, Typhonis, about his decision to lead from the front instead of commanding the fleets from the safety of Mars. It's not so much a morale/principles thing, but rather a desire to actually see the realization of neosapiens destiny up close as it happens. As Phaeton continues giving another of his meandering speeches about justice, destiny, and a new equitable age for humanity, we get a montage of Martian e-frames blowing shit up around Earth. In addition to military targets and civilians who get in the way, they also seem to be making a point of targeting historic monuments. The sphinx, the Taj Mahal, and the US Capitol building all get lasered to the ground. We didn't see Phaeton give the order to target cultural heritage sites, but it's pretty hard for all those monuments to have been hit by accident, so we can infer that this was either official policy or the result of widespread consensus among the Martian ground forces.

And, sure enough, Chicago is all on fire, heh.

Jump back to the exofleet on route back to the inner system from Saturn. Their communications array took some damage in the Battle of Enceladus, so they've been having trouble getting updates since that initial call from Earth. Um...they do still have more than one ship, going by the external shot. Shouldn't at least one of them still have working comms? Eh whatever. Captain Marcus gets mad at his comm officer for not being able to get it working again and sends him off the bridge in disgust. And also tells Marsela to get off the bridge too, because he doesn't feel like looking at a neosapiens right now.

I guess caring about international law and troop discipline doesn't preclude Marcus from being as racist as everyone else outside of that. I'd say that I shouldn't be surprised by this since giving him any positive traits would be off-brand, except that I'm not entirely sure if this show thinks that racism against neosapiens isn't a positive trait in the first place, so...who knows.

Marsh starts to tells Captain Marcus to lay off, but Marsala cuts him off and tells him that that's fine, the captain's emotional state is understandable given the circumstances. He then exits the bridge. Masala is one of the good ones.

As they get another engineer working on trying to fix the comms, Masala descends into Abel Squad's habitation area and finds Burns angrily slamming some sensitive equipment around. When he asks her what the fuck, she just says that she's having trouble dealing with the anxiety of her family being on Venus during this massive attack. He wouldn't be able to understand, of course.

Marsala's face when:

Visibly holding in his impatience, Marsala explains that while neosapiens don't have families the way that baseline terrans do, they are grown in groups of a hundred or so who develop strong emotional bonds during post-decanting socialization. A lot like human siblings. The fact that many of his broodmates are likely to be fighting on the opposite side of this war, and that there's a nonzero chance he might end up having to kill one of them personally, is in fact weighing on him very heavily thanks for asking.

Marsh apologizes, and says that she didn't realize. Marsala tells her not to worry about it; there's no way she could have understood.

Except. You know. By asking. Or like. Bothering to learn even the most basic, general, intro-level shit about the people who populate a third of the inner system. Including individuals who serve alongside her in battle. But other than that, yeah, there's no way she could have possibly known - or even guessed really - that neosapiens aren't soulless robots who don't have families they care about. Innocent misunderstanding.

...

Just kill all these people Phaeton, please.

...

Back to the bridge. They got the comm array working again (is the Resolute really the only remaining ship in the fleet with a reparable communications array? Really? :/), and Captain Marcus whines at them for not having done it fast enough before turning it on. They manage to get in contact with a small orbital station around Earth; the major military command centers are no longer transmitting, so it's only smaller bases like this one that can get a message to them. In the 48 hours since their last update, Earth has more or less fallen. The Martian forces are systematically sweeping the surface and orbitals for remaining military bases and ship concentrations, and it's only a matter of time until this station gets taken out like all the rest.

It's notable that this show accounts for lightspeed communications delay. No back-and-forth conversations over radio between the Resolute and Earth at this distance. For a cartoon, or even an anime, this is an unusual thing to not just handwave with mystery supertech comms. That's a cool detail.

Marcus orders the fleet to move in on Earth at full speed and deploy all e-frames, trying to retake the orbitals in a blitz of their own. Marsh speaks up and tells him that no, that's a terrible idea.

Apparently, bigger ships are faster than smaller ones in this setting. This means that if the fleet moves in at full speed, the e-frame carriers will arrive first, with the frigates and destroyers trailing a bit behind them. They'll be able to deploy the e-frames and start dishing out damage, but without the destroyers those carriers will be pretty much sitting ducks for enemy counterattacks. Against a force as large as the Martian fleet currently parked over Earth, that kind of trading-blows tactic would be suicide.

...

Thinking about strategy myself here, while the current positions of the planets might preclude this, I think the best move would actually be to make a beeline for Mars. If Phaeton has made an all-out attack against Earth and Venus, then he can't have more than a fraction of his forces guarding the home front. Get in geosynchronous orbit over Mars' major cities, and Phaeton will be forced to either negotiate, or withdraw his fleets from Earth and Venus and give them a chance to regroup.

Maybe this is infeasible for whatever reason, but based on the information we've been provided it seems like the wisest strategy to me at least.

...

We find out if Marsh was going to propose something along the lines of my idea, because Captain Marcus immediately blows up at Marsh and threatens to have him sanctioned for insubordination. When Marsh doesn't back down, Marcus calls it an outright mutiny and has him thrown in the brig while complaining about how he won't be lectured on strategy by some random fighter pilot. As Marsh is dragged away, the fleet keeps making its suicidal high-speed advance toward Earth.

Because Captain Marcus isn't allowed to ever be right or reasonable about anything, no matter how little sense it makes.

Cut from there to sickbay, where Masala is checking in on Admiral Winfield. The medic - another neosapiens, interestingly - tells him that the admiral has been in and out of consciousness for the entire two days since the battle so far. Holy fuck how much C-4 did they have packed into that computer console?

She also says that the amount of anaesthetic she's given him should have a human out cold, but "his will is too strong." Interpret that within the context of this show's politics and the portrayal of these characters as you wish.

We also see Winfield stir in his sleep, and mumble feverishly to himself. Giving orders to helmsmen and gunners, calling for frigates to reposition themselves, etc. I think this is meant to communicate Winfield's sense of duty, that he refuses to stop fighting the battle that he was trying to save his fleet in. But, when you remember that it's supposed to have been at least two full days since then, it becomes indistinguishable from a parody of excessively gung-ho military types. I'm not sure that Winfield actually comes off as any saner than Marcus within this particular sequence.

After checking in on Winfield, Masala heads to the brig, where he tells Marsh that he's been assigned to defend him in his upcoming court-martial. Well, that's certainly prompt. After an excessively long bit where we're reminded that neosapiens don't get jokes the way baseline humans do, Marsh tells Marsala that he's sure he'd be an excellent legal counsel, but it doesn't really matter in this case, because Marcus is going to get them all vaporized before the trial can even happen. Marsala replies that has a plan to prevent this from happening, and Marsh asks him what he has cooking in "that finely tuned neosapiens brain" of his. He actually says those words.

Cut to Chicago, where ex-officer Acab and a group of other ragged-looking terrans are struggling their way across the burning city. They're carrying supplies, and some of them are armed (albeit lightly), so I guess they're attempting resistance. Unfortunately, they cross an open plaza of bombed-out rubble just as a squad of Martian fighters make a low pass overhead, and they quickly get corralled in by suppressive fire, and those who shoot back are killed. Acab gets stunned by a nearby blast just as the fighters make way for a heavy E-frame to land and take the group into custody.

Okay, so. This next scene now. This is going to challenge my powers of description, but I will make the attempt.

Jump ahead to Acab and his companions, along with a bunch of other terrans, being lined up inside a barbed wire fence-protected compound in what's left of Chicago's industrial district. They're addressed by a towering neosapiens officer who has a cockney accent completely unlike any of the others' for some reason. He's also almost twice the SIZE of the other neos, come to think of it. Maybe he's from a specialized "heavy lifting" strain or something? No idea.

Anyway, this bizarre individual walks up and down along the line of captured terrans and gives them this pointless speech about how the age of baseline humanity is ended, and the time of the orc neosapiens is upon them, yadda yadda, but thanks to the benevolence of Governor-General Phaeton they will not be exterminated as they likely deserve. Instead, they will be able to justify their continued existence via their labor. If they refuse to perform their work, Cockney The Uruq-Hai tells them, they have "a permanent solution for the terran problem" that can be implemented instead.

...

You know, the pieces for a proper Nazi analogue ARE all here. We have Mars humiliated in a previous military conflict that was followed by economic hardship. We have the politics of resentment that follow from that. The transhuman nature of the Martian population can also tie in pretty neatly with the pseudo-Nietzschean aspect of Nazi ideology with the genetic superiority and such.

But it's also Apartheid South Africa with the Martians as the natives.

Which, you know. Not really a reconcilable pair of historical inspirations. Unless you're a conservative Afrikaner inventing a paranoid fantasy to justify your politics.

Moving beyond the batshit politics on display here, I'm struggling to wrap my mind around the logistics. I'm going to assume for the sake of my own sanity that these labor camps are just for terrans who continue to resist the occupation, not for the entire terran population. The way Cockney The Uruk-Hai is making it sound, they're doing this to the entire population. Which means, um...how goddamned many of these camps? How much neosapiens manpower needed to oversee them all?

That absurdity also snakes its way BACK into politics, though, and in a really insidious way.

See, sending enemy partisans and guerrillas to the gulags? That's something a lot of conquerors throughout history have done. It's not a GOOD thing to do, obviously, but it's a pretty mundane and unremarkable kind of evil. More importantly though, it also offers the conquered a carrot as well as a stick. Don't resist the occupation, and you'll be allowed to continue living something closer to your previous life. Poorer and less free, perhaps, but tolerable. The labor camps exist just as much to disincentive revolt as they do to actually get needed work done. In other words, surrendering to the conquerors is something a sane person might do, and compliance with the new management might be the least bad option for the conquered.

If everyone goes to the camps, though, then surrender is not an option. There is absolutely no possible way for peaceful coexistence to take place between the two groups under such a regime.

And there can't be a way for peaceful coexistence to take place under Martian rule. Because if there was, then we'd have to admit that Phaeton might be in the right. If the underclass is allowed freedom and power, the revenge they wreak on their former oppressors has to be much WORSE than anything that's been done to them, because otherwise there's no excuse not to free and empower them. They can't just be conquerors. They have to be NAZIS.

So yeah, I'm just going to hope that that's NOT actually what the show is trying to suggest here, and that it's just rebels who are being sent to these camps. This isn't even me being charitable, honestly, it's me being sane. The logistical absurdity of doing this to the whole planetary population, regardless of how rancid the Doylistic political message behind it would be, is something that I need more than one speech from one camp warden before accepting as truth within the world of the story. Because holy shit even for a cartoon that's completely stupid and absurd.

...

Cut briefly to the Homeworlds General Assembly space station in Earth's orbit, where the delegates from Earth, Venus, and the minor colonies are making their formal surrender to the Martian Commonwealth.

It's a perfunctory affair, where the terran delegates are literally looking down the barrels of Martian laserguns and Phaeton does pretty much all of the talking. He ends the meeting by dissolving the assembly as an institution. Honestly, this whole scene is kind of redundant.

Back to the gulag. The neosapiens are making the terrans do menial physical labor that they're struggling with, and that the neos could very obviously do trivially themselves with their enhanced strength. So yeah, there's not really any point to this at all, it's just petty revenge and humiliation. When Cockney and Friends are distracted by bullying an old man who collapsed in the middle of the floor, Acab takes the opportunity to jump into one of the damaged E-frames that they've been having them fix. An E-frame that they left unlocked, fueled, and without needing so much as a damned car key to turn on.

Also, they don't have any heavy weapons (or, like, fully functional e-frames with pilots in them) onhand to deal with this inevitability. So, Acab just shrugs off their pistol shots and ploughs through the lot of them before Kool-Aiding his way out the wall.

On one hand, they had no way of knowing they had a former e-frame pilot among the prisoners. On the other, even an untrained civilian could have caused some serious damage just by mashing buttons.

He breaches the fence, but gets his e-frame's remaining arm blown off by mounted defences in the process, leaving it both literally and figuratively disarmed. 🥁 Unable to fight, he just flees into the battered city.

Eventually, his power runs low, and he loses speed. A Martian fighter spots him and starts shooting, forcing him to bail out of the e-frame before it disintegrates completely and flee into the sewers to hide. Fortunately, he's only down in the sewers for a few seconds before seeing the flashlights of other resistors.

Or..."resistors." Apparently these people aren't fighting back at all. Just hiding.

Which is another piece of evidence for the neosapiens actually trying to stuff the entire baseline human population into barbed-wire-and-concrete labor camps.

I'm still holding out a little bit of hope that the show isn't trying to get me to swallow that, but it's fading rapidly.

Acab tells them that it's time to start fighting back. With their damned fists if they have to. Anything is better than accepting defeat to the neos.

For him, this is wish fulfilment of "literally living out a porno" proportions. The neosapiens actually are evil, the dumb squares who kicked him off the force are all dead or enslaved for their stupidity (especially that wonderful person mayor who got pissy at him for being rude to Literally Blue Hitler), and now he gets to tell everyone else what to do by virtue of being a violent manly action man. If only it weren't for his oath of duty forcing him to take that bullet for Literally Blue Hitler before, maybe none of this would be necessary. Well, now he gets to hopefully make up for that!

Cut back to the ExoFleet. Marsh turns out to have been a little off in his timetable, as his court-martial is scheduled for well before the carriers' arrival in Earth orbit. Granted, it might not make much of a difference if things keep going the way they've been going. The court is convened, and Marsala provides the absolute worst defence I could have expected for Marsh.

First, he asks Marsh why he tried to belay the captain's orders. Marsh explains that sending the carriers in ass first would just get them all wiped out. Then, he reminds the court that a soldier is permitted - and, indeed, required - to disobey orders if he assesses them to be immoral or criminal in nature. Marsala asks Marsh if Captain Marcus' orders meet those criteria, and Marsh says that yes, they actually meet BOTH criteria and are both immoral and criminal.

-____-

Um.

That is not what "criminal orders" refer to.

I don't know how that COULD be considered criminal, unless they actually have an interplanetary statute against being a shit tactician.

It's pretty consistent with the ethos of the show thus far, though. Laws should exist to protect soldiers from civilians, and police from residents. If the reverse happens, it means that something has gone wrong and disaster is likely to come as a result.

Un(?)fortunately, the court-martial finds this defence to be as laughably shoe-on-head backwards as I do. Marsh is found guilty of death, and sentenced to death with his execution to be carried out the following day. Mutiny during wartime is kind of a big deal, after all.

It seems like a much, much better defence would be to claim (with abundant proof) that Captain Marcus is unfit for duty. Oh well!

The guards drag Marsh back to the brig, and we return to Chicago. Acab is wearing some zany looking action hero getup, and laying on the ground pretending to be injured or unconscious. When a Martian light e-frame comes over to investigate, Acab throws a grenade at it and then gets up and books it.

He leads it into the shell of an old factory, where Acab's sewer buddies have prepared a Return of the Jedi-ish trap involving a huge slap of sharp metal on a swinging chain. And it apparently hits harder than most of the military-grade weapons we've seen used in the space battles, because the e-frame goes down when struck by it.

The pilot manages to eject, though, and while he isn't quite as gigantic as Cockney The Uruq-Hai he seems a bit bigger than average for a neosapiens, who are already big to begin with. Four terrans together aren't enough to tackle him; he's just straight up Jonathan Joestar on the rugby field. In the end, they have to run him over with a forklift to kill him.

...

Heh, amusing bit of coincidence. We did pretty much this exact same thing with a chaos marine once, in Dark Heresy. Industrial park battle. Took out his armor with successive claymore mine hits, and then our admech hacked a forklift and had it charge him.

We also used a forklift against Nurgle cultists one time.

And against genestealers.

We also had another bunch of chaos-worshippers armor a forklift and use it as moving cover that we had to get past. And there was one incident where a heritek put a feral AI into a forklift and released it into the wild, where we had to hunt it down before it could do any damage.

Our GM has a complex about forklifts.

ANYWAY.

...

The terrans make sure the pilot is dead, and then start stripping what's left of his e-frame for parts. Cut to the Olympus Mons, where Phaeton is juggling reports from his generals as they consolidate power on Earth and Venus, and also starting to hear about the ExoFleet's return from the outer system.

The fleet is still bigger than they hoped it would be after fighting the pirates. Five mostly-intact carriers, plus a troubling number of frigate and destroyer escorts. With the Martian forces divided, it could potentially pose a serious threat to the fleets over either Earth or Venus. Fortunately though, they're rushing in at maximum speed, which means the escorts are trailing well behind the critical e-frame carriers. A quick interception by heavily armed ships should be able to take the carriers out before the escorts catch up, and those escorts won't be much of a threat on their own.

Jump to the Resolute brig. Just as Marsh is being recovered from his cell and brought to whatever room they use to execute people in on a spaceship, the Resolute crashes into something. Specifically, a particle beam being fired from a Martian destroyer. Yeah, turns out they decided that "just as we meet the enemy fleet" was the best time to carry out Marsh's sentence.

I'm guessing some convenient collapsing bulkheads are going to kill the guards escorting Marsh and let him save part of the fleet or whatever. Or maybe another console will explode in sickbay, and hit Winfield with an explosion that has the opposite polarity of the previous one, healing him back up. Whatever. Hopefully they won't live too much longer in any case. End episode.


I did some poking around online about ExoSquad's politics.

The first hit that jumped out at me was from wikipedia, talking about how the show was praised for its very mature and serious handling of war and associated themes, as well as its nuanced examination of racism and bigotry.

The second hit that jumped out at me was from the InfoWars forum. They like it quite a lot over there. Big surprise.