I finally realized my issue with the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise just as I came to the end of watching Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, widely lauded as one of the premier core installments of the Universal Century timeline. When the credits rolled and I sat down to write this review, I couldn’t think of a single scene that had occurred more than an episode or two ago. Every single scene fell neatly into one of a small handful of categories, either action, romance, plot exposition, light comedic banter, or two people yelling hyperbole at one another from their mobile suits. Beyond these overarching categories, there is little by way of location, character diversity, or even more minor changes and idiosyncrasies to set different scenes apart. And so I will write to the characters and the general aesthetic of the show, because even after reviewing the episodes once more I still could barely produce a list of five scenes I remember, even if you were to put a gun to my head.
Instead of the previous season’s Amuro Rey as the angsty teenage Newtype whose ordinary life is disrupted by a terrorist attack, forcing him into piloting the mythical Gundam mobile suit and sending him on a journey on board a military ship that propels him towards his destiny as the one who will bring an end to a prolonged and brutal conflict against the brutal hegemonic forces of evil, the writers just took the Amuro character, colored his hair blue, and called him Kamille Bidan. The real twist on the old formula is that where Amuro fought with the Earth against the rebel Zeon forces in space, Kamille ends up joining the rebel AEUG forces in space to fight against the Earth. Of course the archetypes are the same, with the AEUG looking almost identical to the Earth Federation in Mobile Suit Gundam and the brutal Titans who lead the Earth Federation in Zeta Gundam much more like the dictatorial Zabi family than their former selves. As if to push this point, old Captain Bright and Amuro himself are pulled out of retirement to do their part for the AEUG forces in the fight against their former employers.
But series headliner Char Aznable remains a rebel in space, meaning that the feared antagonist of last season is now an ally, a central figure in the AEUG and a mentor to Kamille. Much like the scenes of Zeta Gundam , the central figures of the Gundam universe always falling into a handful of categories, from the petulant teenage leads to the sinister scheming antagonists, from the overly masculine battle-obsessed men to the capable women who end up pigeonholed into proving their competence only to fall into romance and weaken in skill, eventually serving as a dramatic sacrifice to unlock the protagonists’ true potentials. Among those archetypal characters Char is a rarity, a man who can remain calm and calculating under pressure but who also cares deeply about humanity’s survival, a brilliant fighter and strategist who is still fallible and imperfect. Watching his orchestrations and internal narrations is the best way to keep our fingers on the pulse of the world’s state of play, and on top of that he’s just damn fun to watch, both on the battlefield and off.
Unfortunately, despite getting more Char on screen as compared to Mobile Suit Gundam , along with major animation upgrades, there isn’t much else that has been improved. The stage weaves in between space and the Earth as usual, addressing combat and political differences between the two, but everything in space feels the same as everything else in space, while everything on Earth feels the same as everything else on Earth. Characters come into central focus for a moment or two before stepping back, and so no one has a chance for development to go beyond their archetypes, and so we watch static unchanging figures for the whole fifty episodes. On top of that, every side character feels completely disposable, shallow enough to be thrown away without the show losing focus on Kamille, Char, and the two true enemies they struggle to reach, who themselves only show up in stages towards the middle of the show. All the other enemies and allies feel like they are ticking time bombs, slated to either die dramatically or to permanently leave the screen for whatever contrived reason the show bothers to come up with.
The worst offenders are the host of female characters, most of which serve as love interests of some kind. Kamille’s childhood friend Fa ends up failing as a pilot and defaulting to child care on board the space cruiser Argama, spending most of her time emotionally yelling at Kamille about how he doesn’t understand a woman’s heart. The ace pilot and spy Reccoa and the Titan defector Emma seem like well-built female pilots, albeit one-dimensional, but Reccoa suddenly loses her ability to think clearly for no defined reason, changing sides and becoming morally conflicted in some vague sense, while Emma barely has any screen time until the final battle. Even worse are Kamille’s love interests, Four and Rosamia, who have no defining characteristics outside being enemy pilots obsessed with Kamille’s happiness. When a confusing sequence in the last few episodes leads Kamille to mix the two up and conflate them with one another, I felt like laughing because the show finally admitted it: they were the same character put through a slightly different filter. Even a minor AEUG pilot manages to be the object of infatuation for one of the Titan pilots, who becomes less impactful than her loser love interest simply because the show decided it would be so.
None of this was handled particularly worse than the first season, and fans of the series will find more to enjoy this time around, with a somewhat darker tone and a focus on the people at play rather than the conflict. Ultimately I have to hold the original in higher regard for a number of reasons. First off, the improvements were not nearly enough for six more years of practice with the OVA series’. Second off, I have no attachments to the Gundam formula nor the actors in the Universal Century timeline, save for Char. That last one is important: if Zeta Gundam can’t write good characters—or at least won’t—then I have no use for a character-driven piece. When the camera zooms out and shows the shifting factions, and the opportunists who stay in touch with the changing tides in order to strike at the right moment, the show is engaging and worthy of attention and thought. Even if Zeta Gundam managed to do those moments better, they were too few and far between compared to its predecessor. Personally I’ll stick with the mobile suit battles and the politics.