English Dub Review: Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX “Falling on the Moon”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Chalia recalls the closing days of the One Year War, when Char Aznable and the Red Gundam disappeared in the Zeknova. Later, Nyaan arrives at Zeon, has dinner with Kycillia, and is assigned to pilot a new Mobile Suit.

OUR TAKE

It’s hard to believe that we’re now two thirds of the way through this show with still so much that feels like it will take at least another dozen or so episodes to resolve, and even harder to believe that half of this episode was used for a mostly unrelated flashback, but…here we are. Yeah, as mentioned, now we have the rest of the Char focused flashback that was shown in the compilation movie back in January, so the parts that I remembered being in that which weren’t in the second episode show up here, including parts that hint at another character from the original Mobile Suit Gundam who had to be more involved in battles due to Amuro’s absence. I won’t go much into who that character is since it really only matters if you’ve seen that show, and I’m still pretty sure that GQuuuuuuX will explain her whole deal in time if it’s able. For now, this is basically just giving us a bit more insight into what Char was doing right before the Zeknova, which seemed to activate on its own inexplicably. So, ultimately not much new information from that, but we got some more mech fights in an episode that otherwise wouldn’t have them, so I’ll call it a wash. Also an odd framing device for Chalia since while he was present for most of these events, we also definitely see things only from Char’s perspective.

That just leaves us with one half of the episode that actually progresses the plot and is told pretty much entirely from Nyaan’s perspective, as she navigates being now made use of by Kycillia and the ripples made by that choice. As hinted at, the tensions between Gihren and Kycillia are continuing to escalate, with Gihren sending spies to assassinate any pilots Kycillia picks. Xavier becomes sort of an ally to Nyaan and even defending her when a fellow ensign turns out to be a spy, but Nyaan makes use of her Newtype abilities to activate the second GQuuuuuuX unit, GFred (who just straight up has EVA Unit 01 colors), to add to the list of weird-ass names of robots in this show. The spy is killed, but now Nyaan has her own Gundam to ride around in, which is good because apparently Machu has taken hers to Earth. I get the feeling, based on the preview, that we’ll probably see the same timespan next episode but from Machu’s eyes. And after that, only three episodes left in the season, possibly culminating in Machu and Nyaan finally coming to blows, and MAYBE Shuji coming back? Like don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty invested in what’s happening here, but I’ll just say right now that I’m going to have serious problems if this series is ONLY these twelve episodes. I guess we’ll see though.