Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury

Episodes 13-14

The manner of success for Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury has always been a funny little thing about it. It's Gundam! It's a national institution efficiently designed to be a fine-tuned marketing vehicle for itself and a wide-ranging line of tie-in plastic model kits. But there was a specific tenor that G-Witch got swept up in throughout its first season barely six months ago, bringing in legions of new fans and propelling the show to regular social media trending dominance and the establishment of a new international holiday in Suletta Sundays. It all means that, even more so than for the show's initial premiere, the pressure is on as this second season gets underway.

In that respect, I can see how it might have been disappointing how this season's debut seemed to play it safe in its big comeback. After the big blow-up of the first season finale, we find ourselves back in the school setting, all traces of combat once again relegated to structured, non-lethal duels. pixiv-art power couple Suletta and Miorine are pointedly apart, the air uncleared about Suletta pasting a guy in front of her bride. There's not even any sign of Anticassia's favorite son, Bob! Plenty of it is still engaging in how G-Witch knows how to be even in all-business plot-propulsion mode. Characters we've come to enjoy interact amusingly and skirt the camera suspiciously, as seen in how Nika's plot from late last season seamlessly continues toward its head. It's nice to be back because we like G-Witch in general, but a franchise like Gundam thrives on escalation, and this can almost feel like it's playing it too safe.

Dear readers, if you have seen Episode 14, you know how unfounded those kinds of worries turned out to be.

Just a week after settling back in, G-Witch is shattering its structure with so many upsets you'd think this was closer to the end of the series than the start of a new cour. This episode sees the dueling structure blown up by a live-combat terrorist attack. It's here that we, at last, learn the horrible truth of the Aerial and Prospera's daughter. In this one, Secelia Dote finally gets off the couch!. It can almost feel like sensory overload at times, we as viewers struggling to keep track of the mass of plot twists being lobbed at us, overwhelmed as Suletta herself is. But that only effectively contributes to the explosive atmosphere of such a momentous episode. Even if the characters manage to settle back into the school after all this, nothing will be the same.

It helps that there are some clear focal points for the most major goings on of the fourteenth episode. Anyone could guess that Sophie and Norea transferring into Anticassia meant they were up to no good. They were hardly screwing around already with the way they nearly squished poor Nika in Episode 13. But their presence is smart on a character level, even when they're not smashing things up in their mobile suits. Sophie, in particular, provides a vector for Suletta to play off of and develop while her fiancé is away. Villains who taunt the heroes with their supposed similarities are a well-worn concept, but Sophie wholly drives it home as both the audience and Suletta realize, usually at the same time, how right she actually is. Sophie listing off her wishes for the most basic amenities of a happy, comfortable life mirrors the simple aspirations of Suletta's anime-informed goals for a social school experience. The knife is twisted even further when Suletta is reminded that, just like Sophie, she has also killed in the name of the person she sees as her path to attaining those desires. In a vicious irony, it makes us and Suletta wonder if that means Sophie might be saved, but by then, it's too late.

That's the primary throughline of these opening couple of episodes that makes it all land so powerfully, but the wealth of other threads also compliments it. Characters continue to build off of turning points they arrived at during the plant attack at the end of the last season. ChuChu realizes she might not be as ready for violence prime time as she always acted, and Nika's self-sacrificing chickens are coming home to roost. I just really want her to be okay. The only major sticking point is that Miorine has been cordoned off to have Lady Prospera speak in portents at her. The tension of seeing where Miorine winds up and what her reunion with Suletta will even look like is a calculated kind of frustrating. And alongside that, Prospera's part confirms the plot twist we'd all guessed, but we can still be just as horrified as Belmeria to hear it confirmed. Eri and Suletta's status as separate individuals and the former's integration into the Aerial was a series of breadcrumbs the show had expertly dropped leading up to this, with the clear implications now set to be followed up in whatever wild ways G-Witch gets up to for the rest of this season. It's all presented with the polish confirming that G-Witch splitting its cours was the right call.

From a technical standpoint, some of the lines on the mobile suits still look looser than one might expect from 2D animated mecha, and there are at least a couple of shots where the staff resort to CGI for the robots. But when the action gets going alongside the swelling soundtrack, especially in the big blow-up in Episode 14, it's easy to get swept up and remember how thrilling this show could be in its best moments. It's complemented by some increasingly brilliant directorial decisions, with the fourteenth episode appropriately framing Sophie and Suletta (and Eri/Aerial) through eyes and reflections. And of course, I have got to shout out that new ending sequence, using gorgeous stylized visuals and symbolism that I can only hope foreshadows a sweeping arc for Suletta and Miorine's relationship. I don't know how effectively this series will keep up with what it kicked off within these first two episodes. But for now, to paraphrase Sir Elton John, "the Witch is back."

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Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Chris is keeping busy keeping up with the new anime season, and is excited to have you along. You can also find him writing about other stuff over on his blog, as well as spamming fanart retweets on his Twitter, for however much longer that lasts.

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Disclosure: Bandai Namco Filmworks Inc. (Sunrise) is a non-controlling, minority shareholder in Anime News Network Inc.