English Dub Review: Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX “Machu in Clan Battle”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Machi meets Shuji Ito, the mysterious pilot of the Red Gundam, and convinces him to be her partner in Clan Battles with the Pomeranians. They win the match, but Commander Bull sees the fight on TV.

OUR TAKE

That wraps up the episodes that were shown in the movie and fully establishes the status quo for the next…nine episodes? Machu is now the fully committed long term pilot of the GQuuuuuux, is officially with the Pomeranians, and even won her first match with her new teammate! Things are looking great for her except for being spotted on live television. We also meet the Red Gundam’s pilot, Shuji, who is kind of an enigma at the moment but has a strange but strong connection to his machine. Clearly there is a lot of stuff that happened between Char disappearing with it and Shuji finding it, but we’ll probably have to wait awhile before that gets filled in. For now, I guess it’ll just be about moving up the ranks with Clan Battles and building up the Pomeranian’s rep, which I am totally down for if it means we get to see more underground mech fights. And since this is pretty much all of the footage I saw already, now I’m in the same place as most viewers and can go into the rest of the series totally blind, so that’ll be fun! At least as long as the show is good, which it probably will.

As a viewer of previous Gundam shows set in this timeline (or rather the one it broke off from), it’s also neat to speculate what old elements that didn’t pop up last episode might get implemented later on in different ways. In terms of years, this is still in between the time period when the original Mobile Suit Gundam ended and the events of its sequel, Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, occurred seven years later. Obviously, with Zeon winning the war instead, pretty much none of those events can happen now as the originally did, but the characters who were around during that time could still be out there, including Amuro Ray, the original pilot of the now Red Gundam who never appeared in this show’s version of the war. On one hand, as much as I find this alternate timeline interesting and opening up neat possibilities, I do want to make sure that the story stays focused on the characters that were made for this show like Machu, Shuji, Nyann, and so on. But if they can pull a Spider-Man: No Way Home and give returning characters a unique relationship to the new protagonists that makes sense within the context of this show alone, then that’s a lot more to look forward to. I guess we’ll find out as we enter uncharted territory next episode!