English Dub Review: Mobile Suit Gundam the Origin: Advent of the Red Comet “A Promise to Mother”

The Deikuns are on house arrest

Overview (Spoilers Below)

After Kycilia reports on Casval Deikun’s tenacity at the early age of eleven, the strife between the Deikuns and Zabis intensifies. The Deikun family is ordered into the manor’s tower at the bequest of the late Zeon’s legal wife. This ripple troubles Captain Ramba. If left in the castle, they’d become sitting ducks for the scheming Zabi family, so he and Hamon make a plan to transport the children to Earth with his father.

Young Artesia doesn’t like the idea of leaving her mother behind, but Astraia talks her daughter into the plan with fabulous stories of forests, animals, waterfalls, the stars, and the moon. Artesia is particularly interested in the wonders of the moon’s rotation.

The next day Hamon busts into the manor with a gigantic Robotech gun tank and takes the kids with their mother’s blessing. Meanwhile, Ramba is on the other side of town doing everything he can to hold back any enemy tanks. When faced with a quartet of Zabi gun tanks, the mercs Hamon hired to try to bilk her for extra money. After she kicks their asses, Casval jumps into the gunner’s chair and takes out all four tanks while receiving only minimal damage in return. Realizing their luck is about to run out, Hamon exits the massive tank with the kids (and their cat, Lucifer), leaving the greedy mercenaries to die.

At the rocket station, Lt. Tachi checks in a mysterious capsule and gets it through security without a thermal scan. The capsule, as you may have guessed, contains Jimba Ral, and the young Deikuns. Kycilia busts in—as she’s wont to do—and confronts Ramba. After threatening him, she allows the capsule to make its journey to Earth unmolested. Whatever her motivations are, she sure keeps them close to the vest.

Once the rocket is in orbit, the children exit the capsule and marvel in their own weightlessness. As soon as they get used to Zero-G, they look out the window to get their first true glimpse of the stars and the moon. Artesia is speechless, and they’re both shocked to see how their entire world exists in a spherical dome not far from Earth’s moon. It’s such a mind-blowing reveal for those inexperienced, yet adventurous young ones.

Our Take

If this prequel series was entirely about Hamon, that would be okay. This woman has layers, she’s tough as nails, and she almost always knows the right things to do and say. She can transform from a motherly type who helps calm Artesia’s nerves into a cold-hearted killer who drops bodies on the ground without a care. Her interactions with the mercs brought up a few uncomfortable questions. Did she use mercenaries because their resistance movement is too small to justify the manpower, or were her motivations slightly darker? If she knew to operate the gun tank was a suicide mission, did she readily send those men to their deaths without a second thought?

Compared to last week’s episode, this week was a slower affair despite the tank-battling action that dominated the story’s middle section. The scenes between Artesia and her mother were heartwarming and prepared her and the audience for their potentially long—if not permanent—separation. Regardless of all the political turmoil and uncertainty, Astraia proves she is a mother first and does a superb job of convincing her daughter not to ruin the family by continuing to fight against her relocation to Earth. Casval, on the other hand, was pissed off and there was nothing mother could’ve done to calm his increasingly volatile nerves.

While the end reveals likely wasn’t shocking to existing Gundam fans, the final moments of this episode did a great job of putting everything into perspective. The warring factions from where the children grew up dwarfed in comparison to how humongous and grand humanity’s origin planet appears from space. If only the human race hadn’t destroyed the majestic globe with pollution and warring centuries before this story began.