English Dub Review: Mobile Suit Gundam the Origin: Advent of the Red Comet “Encounter with Lalah”

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Back on Earth, a mysterious gambler is seen outrunning a pack of angry mobsters. In his arms, he carries an Indian girl who he is desperate to keep safe. After outrunning a few dozen goons, he finds himself in the same city as Casval who is quietly living as the disgraced Char Aznable.

Casval is working at a construction site as a mobile worker operator. His coworkers are impressed with his ability to control the mighty machine, unaware that he can control so much more. That night, he’s on full tilt at the casino when the gambler walks in. The Indian girl—who we’ve been seeing in the closing credits for the past few weeks—magically helps her master win at gambling until a fanciful lady dealer takes over the roulette table and they lose everything.

Casval, who’s shown off his dark side over the past few episodes, is surprisingly sympathetic of the girl’s plight and wishes to help her. But before he can do anything, the mafia blows up the gambler’s yacht and pursues him throughout the city. The gang hides at the construction site until the gambler’s right-hand man arrives on the scene and decapitates his boss with a shiny chakram. When the traitor tries to take the girl, Casval steps in. The mighty chakram is far too powerful a weapon and almost kills Casval. Luckily, the Indian girl—Lalah—uses her telepathic powers to help Casval avoid the chakram until he can brutally kill the traitor.

Unfortunately, the mobsters refuse to play nice because they really want this special girl. This forces Casval to kill many of them with a mobile worker and unofficially quit his quiet, small-town job. Realizing she’s a marked woman—and very powerful/useful—Casval brings the girl to space. They wind up in Granada whereas a lowly private he gets to control a powerful red mobile suit. Coincidentally, this is exactly where the Gundam project’s head scientist, Dr. Minovsky, has defected to.

Ramba Ral, who leads a small unit of mobile suits, orders his men to protect the doctor from the Federation who are trying to kill him. With only four mobile suits—five with Casval—their team is greatly outnumbered compared to the Federation’s many mobile suits. However, the Federation doesn’t actually have mobile suits but rather a factory full of fakes. This allows Ramba’s crew to annihilate the Federation’s forces while Casval goes berserk and kills many, many enemies, including a fair amount of high-ranking officers.

But in the end, it’s all for naught as Dr. Minovsky is killed by mistake. Oops!

Our Take

The change of tonality between the first and second half of this episode was so abrupt it could’ve given whiplash to even the strongest of necks. On one side, we have a very personal story—a meet-cute even—involving Casval and Lalah that’s bound to last throughout this origin story and into the main narrative. And then we have explosion-palooza with confusing, shaky cam, robot-on-robot violence. At least Casval slowed down the scene every so often to brood or we’d never have had a moment to catch our breaths.

This was also a diversion from a lot of the little stories this series has taken such care in setting up. What happened with Dozle’s proposal to Zenna Mia? How goes Garma’s rise to power? Where is Artesia? Is she okay? How come the real Char’s parents never check on him? Back in Texas colony, they seemed like such a tight-knit family. Are all these threads connected to the primary series? Are they cute little winks and nods to the camera that I know nothing about having not seen the original Mobile Suit Gundam? Stay tuned, I suppose.

After only a brief appearance, I already like Lalah very much. She’s one of the few pure characters in this epic tale and she seems to legitimately care about her family and the lives of others. Which means Casval is going to seriously screw her over before too long. It’s what he does, after all. Because Casval is a very bad boy and the more Jimba and others raised him to be a hero, the stronger his villainous intentions became. This would be a perfect tragic tale if Casval wasn’t such a whiny little whelp.