Mobile Suit Gundam SEED (Episode 34)



I’m a big fan of the Japanese giant robot franchise Gundam. That’s why it pains me to admit that the new series Mobile Suit Gundam SEED (airs early Saturday morning on Cartoon Network) is leaving me cold. It’s basically little more than a talky, slow-motion remake of 1979’s Mobile Suit Gundam. As of last week, the first 34 episodes have aried.



I covered the first episode of Gundam SEED back when it first aired. Since then the series as continued as you might expect. Kira Yamato, pilot of the Gundam Strike, is pressed into service on board the experimental Earth Alliance battleship Archangel. Masked ZAFT commander Le Creuset pursues the Archangel with his team, which includes four young pilots with their own stolen Gundams. Eventually the Archangel is forced to make a dangerous re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, where it is stranded in a desert. Like Amuro before him, Kira has a crisis of faith and leaves his crewmates, but after meeting a philosophically inclined enemy officer he rejoins the war effort. The Archangel escapes the desert and starts an ocean crossing when the Le Creuset team catches up with them again. After a large battle the Gundam Strike is destroyed and Kira goes missing. The Archangel makes it to the Earth Alliance headquarters in Alaska, just as ZAFT prepares to hit the base with a large invasion force. Meanwhile Kira has somehow ended up on a space colony (huh?), where he is being nursed back to health by the daughter of a high ranking ZAFT official (double huh?), who then helps him steal the brand new ZAFT Gundam Freedom (triple huh?).

The main innovation in Gundam SEED is that one of the enemy Gundam pilots is Kira’s childhood friend Athrun. This at least explains how these two can meet on the battlefield over and over again but they never quite get around to killing each other. It’s also obvious that they will eventually reconcile and join to fight the more extreme members of ZAFT, but I’m getting ahead of myself.



Gundam SEED wouldn’t be that bad if it had more action. Whole episodes go by with no action. Recap episodes every 20 or so episodes have become standard in long form anime, but Gundam SEED takes it to new extremes. There are recap/flash back episodes every ten episodes, and episodes 31 - 34 featured no new action at all. Instead the various young recruits talk endlessly about their feelings, going over the same ground repeatedly. I’m still interested to see how this all works out, but this in one Gundam series I’ll never need to see again.

Posted: Wed - December 15, 2004 at      

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