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August 18, 2005
Gundam Seed Destiny episode 42 (review) - "With Freedom and Justice"
The Battle of Orb continues...
This episode had a lot of nice character development from the crew of Archangel, and some interesting developments with Meyrin and Athrun, Murrue and Mwu.
At the beginning of the episode, we get some catchup that is occuring during the events of last episode. Neo-Mwu is given a Sky Grasper by a tearful Murrue. Athrun tries to tell Meyrin to stay at a safe location, but her tears and plea not to leave her behind changes his mind. Archangel launches at the same time as Cagalli in Atkatsuki goes to engage Shinn in Destiny. And that's JUST before the intro...
The Cagalli-Shinn battle goes about as expected. Naturals just can't keep up longterm with Coordinators in Gundam battles. As that battle goes on, Archangel arrives at the battlefield and Minerva moves to engage them. I wonder why ZAFT bothers to build non-Minerva class ships, since it seems the only effective ship IS the Minerva and the others exist only to be sliced and diced.
Anyways, Cagalli is about to eat it against Destiny when the plot device arrives --- down comes Strike Freedom and Kira, towing Lacus in Infinite Justice. The odd part is that it takes Kira about 30 seconds to get there... I'm guessing there's some sort of time overlap with previous scenes.
Shinn of course is none too pleased to see a resurgent Freedom, and the *real* battle begins. Shinn is starting to lose his touch. First, he fails to kill both Kira and Athrun in Gundam battles, and he doesn't fare too well in this battle. He doesn't lose, but he does manage to get disarmed of his weapon. Archangel and Minerva engage, to no real result.
The battle between Destiny and Freedom ends in a stalemate as Destiny is running low on power and is forced to retreat. Again, why does ZAFT bother with non-nuclear reactors on their signature Gundams. They don't seem to mind breaking the nuke stalemate when it suits them.
The rest of the episode somewhat follows some of the patterns from SEED:
Lacus and Athrun (with Meyrin watching) have a philosophical discussion on motivation.
Mwu (Neo) saves Archangel (he continues to have a lot of memories of Archangel... I wonder if they'll ever explain that, or just gloss over it)
Kira is in a fierce battle (in this case, with a recharged Destiny and Legend).
Athrun launches in Justice to help Kira in the battle for Orb.
In any case, this is an excellent episode, and we have some more interesting continuation to follow in the next episode.
Posted by Drylnn at August 18, 2005 04:10 AM