English Dub Review: Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX “The Rose of Sharon”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Machu escapes Chalia’s ship to find Shuji on Earth, but ends up finding Lalah Sune, a Newtype living at a brothel who has memories of a different timeline. Chalia allows Machu to leave in order to find “The Rose of Sharon”, which they eventually do, revealing it to be Zeon ship from the war, and another Lalah sleeping inside.

OUR TAKE

Since last week’s episode (or at least the latter half of last week’s episode) was pretty much just from Nyaan’s perspective, this week brings us back to Machu’s viewpoint to see how she’s been holding up since the big incident on Side 6. Turns out she’s not doing awesome, but at least not terribly, as she holds her ground against Comoli. But she gets mysterious texts from a figure who beckons her to Earth, and since Machu has not shown the best survival instincts thus far, she naturally heads out to find this person and hopefully Shuji, but Chalia is not a fool and keeps track of her. This leads Machu to find Lalah Sune who, like Chalia, is also a Newtype from the later episodes of the original Gundam series who died shortly after her first appearance. But unlike Chalia, who disappeared into obscurity after his first death, Lalah’s death at Amuro’s hands created a hatred and further rivalry between him and Char for the rest of their lives, where Char even infamously said that Lalah “could’ve been like a mother to him” despite her clearly being years older. But in this timeline, Lalah never needed to use her abilities for the war effort and managed to survive, at least for now, while also having constant visions of the how the timeline is meant to go, especially involving Amuro and Char

But wait, you Universal Century fans, if you liked having ONE Lalah, then wait until you see there’s TWO! Yeah, apparently the thing Chalia has been looking for as a means of hopefully finding Char again is this weird energy called the Rose of Sharon, which is then revealed to be…the Elmeth, a mobile armor made specifically for Lalah to fight. In this timeline, it was never finished because it wasn’t needed, but this one is fully complete and has another version of Lalah inside. Given how the one in the actually first show was killed, not just disappeared, this may be a situation where the AU person is just from a VERY SIMILAR version of the original story, just with slight tweaks. Now that she’s in custody, we’re probably gonna find out what those tweaks were. And we’re going to have to figure that out quickly, because we only have three more episodes left in this season! And the GFred is on its way to kick some Quxing Ass!