Gundam: The Witch from Mercury – Episode 02

Just gonna float within arm’s reach of you and watch you eat, if you don’t mind

Episode Synopsis:

Suletta and Aerial are captured by the front management company immediately after dismantling Guel’s mobile suit. The representative for the division of the conglomerate that assembled Aerial is summoned for an inquiry, where we learn that the mobile suit exhibits some characteristics peculiar to the forbidden GUND-ARM technology, but not all of them. Miorine gives up on a second chance to be smuggled to Earth and barges into the inquiry to challenge her father to a duel for their fate.  A stinger reveals that the company may have access to a mobile suit that will provide significantly more challenge than the last one.

Episode Review:

This episode is kind of all over the place trying to continue the set-up from episode one. There are a lot of short scenes making sure minor characters and plot points are being properly introduced (notably a cafeteria altercation easing us into the class divide between elite spacians and land-lubbing Earthians, which is the opposite of what I was expecting) while the gears turn to bring Miorine’s challenge in at the end. My main take-away is that the Mercury-based Shin Sei Development Corporation seems to have maintained plausible deniability by deliberately obscuring the origins of Aerial from Suletta herself. No doubt we won’t learn what their true intentions are until we learn the nature of the understanding between their representative, Lady Prospera, and Guel’s father.

Actually, scratch that – my main takeaway is that the Benerit Group has terrible security.
I guess it’s plausible that one dude keeping a loose eye on the entrance to the women’s restrooms (while the other dude retrieves his phone from the atrium ceiling) might not notice Miorine slinking out in a disguise, but who let her just barge into a business meeting with thirty people? It’s not like she’s on any kind of terms with her father that the goons should even be worried about her trying to get them reprimanded.

Regardless of the outcome of whatever duel nonsense proceeds to happen, I’d be incredibly uncomfortable to have been anyone else in that inquiry and have heard the company patriarch end a discussion with “Because I said so” (maybe this is less weird in a more authoritarian corporate culture like I assume Japan has) – and that was before Miorine put him on blast for moving the goalposts on her marriage arrangements, which he responded to with an even more concerning power trip. Also, how does the idea of having other engineers go over the tech specs not come up until the tail end of this meeting? I’d have a resumé put together, is all I’m saying.

Tangentially, what exactly is Permet? Lady Prospera mentions that there are mines for it on Mercury, so better questions might be what Permet influx values are in the context of mobile suits and what it means that they vary.

I did learn something about Mercury, though – when Lady Prospera mentions that she lost body parts to the planet’s magnetic field, the way that the translation is phrased makes it read like something about the field itself harmed her, but, in real life, the field is weak enough that parts of it can undergo magnetic reconnection and allow the solar wind to strike the surface unimpeded, which would indeed be a recipe for a bad time.

To end on a less grim note, it amuses me that the guy in charge of the dueling committee just has to say the name of his his subordinate(?) to get him to start looking something up, but, also, the only thing the latter actually does is then prompt his spherical computer to do it for him by saying its name. That there is some quality A.I.

Summary:

The show’s still trying to meter out the worldbuilding while contriving the plot – I don’t know if I’m sold yet, but there’s still time.

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