I may have railed a lot against Jasley as a villain, but in exchange for putting up with him, I got to behold one of the most visceral IBO battles yet, so good in part because there’s no foreplay and no dawdling. All our Tekkadan boys are stone-faced and businesslike in their hugely satisfying, meticulous taking-down of Jasley’s larger fleet. We start in the middle, when things are already going badly for ol’ Jazzers, but he still holds out hope Iok will come to bail him out (he won’t).
Hush gets to do some stuff in a new suit, and I kinda liked while he held his own, he wasn’t out there dominating or anything. He also got to crack a smile. When he and Shino return to the ship to refuel, reload, I also appreciated the scenes of out-of-breath pilots taking a breather and grabbing a quick bite and drink while they can.
Also fun is the fact that from the very start of the episode, the Jasley we’re shown seems…different. He may have the bigger fleet, but they’re all unreliable mercs, and he somehow looks smaller and more vulnerable on his paisley-lined bridge, swapping his pimp duds for the same spacesuit as everyone else.
As things go worse and worse for him and his defensive line begins to crumble, he keeps yelling mostly to himself about how none of this makes any sense: he’s a good earner, he deserves the top spot he’s trying to take from McMurdo. He’s simply unprepared for the intense level of resolve the foes he so easily made are carrying with them. He’s literally kicked a hornet’s nest.
He sends out human debris pilots, in hopes they’ll be a match for Tekkadan. Zack asks if it’s really okay with Chad and Dante to be fighting…their ‘own kind’. Chad get one of the better lines in an episode full of them: “Our standings and backgrounds don’t matter. Everyone with a weapon is equal. We just crush them.”
All hope of the cavalry arriving is lost when Jasley contacts McMurdo to try to work something out, to get him to call off his Tekkadan dogs. But McMurdo turns out to be a lot less old and out of touch than we might’ve thought last week when Jasley was able to undermine him so easily.
No, Iok isn’t coming; McMurdo had a talk with Rustal, who is keeping Iok in check and ignoring Teiwaz affairs in exchange for Teiwaz forgetting about the Iok’s attack on Turbines. And since Tekkadan isn’t part of Teiwaz anymore, the only person Jasley has to sort out his problems is…Jasley. It’s a great little phone call…so devastating.
Does he jump in his souped-up mobile suit and take the fight to Tekkadan? No; when Tekkadan is close enough to start taking potshots at his flagship, he calls Orga to surrender. I guess Orga could work out a pretty sweet deal with Jasley, but it’s clear Orga just wants to watch him beg, and isn’t even that entertained by it.
With that, he sends in Mika, who asks Orga what to do, standing over Jasley’s bridge with his weapon drawn. Orga says crush ’em; Mika crushes them, and that’s that. With Jasley gone, and Naze, Amida, Lafter, and all the others he killed avenged, Orga breathes a deep sigh of relief.
Everyone agrees that while the departed probably aren’t too happy with what they did (and what they had to give up to do it), they still did the right thing. Now Tekkadan can truly move forward towards kingship of Mars. And they don’t need Teiwaz anymore.
Instead, they’ll be joining the Gjallarhorn revolution that announces its existence not long after Tekkadan finishes things with Jasley. McGillis has rightly pinned the blame for the SAU-Arbaru conflict with Rustal, and now that Teiwaz and Rustal seem to have an understanding, it’s possible Tekkadan might fight against Teiwaz in the future. And now that Tek’s cut ties with Admoss as well, Kudelia finds herself on the outside looking in.
But for now, they have a powerful ally who shares their ideals, and will fight beside him as he roots out the rot of corruption that has plagued Gjallarhorn too long. Orga and McGillis’ original deal still stands. In hindsight, Jasley never really had a chance to disrupt it.
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Jasley turns out to be quite the coward, though not as bad as Iok. However, when Iok doesn’t show up, he tries to hide behind daddy’s “skirts” and McMurdo isn’t having it. I just loved that whole conversation between the two of them, as if he didn’t think Barriston was going to find out.
And that scene…that final scene…Mika taking out Jasley…it was the first time I’ve seen in a long time a killing scene that tied and matched Char’s bazooka kill shot from the 0079 series. I literally jumped off my chair and shouted in excitement. It was so, so good. Especially with Mika and Orga mirroring each other and Orga giving Mika the kill order. Oh…It was so satisfying…
I’m actually interested in what happened at that 7 Stars meeting and why Rustal and Iok weren’t there, and how McGillis KNEW they wouldn’t be there. Also what is Gaelio going to do now? He’s been doing nothing for episodes, so it’s about time we see him do something. However, he’s fighting Mika in the next episode, so I don’t see that going very well for him. Also, we finally get McGillis backstory next week, so that should be good.
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Interested in seeing what Kudelia’s role is now that she is sort of left behind.
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Two possibilities. She could go escape her responsibilities with her company and join Tekkadan and do what little help she could. Of course that way she would be close to the ‘one’ she has deep feelings with. The other one would be, use her standing and connections and get involved in the politicking the would result in the Gjallarhorn announcement and inadvertently use those to help Tekkadan.
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The battle was slightly underwhelming , but that might be the whole point. IBO is not really known for glorifying its battle scenes, but this lacks the frantic excitement of, say, the battles against the Dawn Horizon pirates earlier this season. And that actually ties in nicely with the fact that some characters (Kudelia, Zackj, etc.) question whether all the he things they had to do was worth this battle. Even Orga is shown not fully satisfied and Mika (in his ever-perceptive self) outright says that Naze will surely scold them if he were alive. There was certainly nothing to be excited about it with all the things they lost.
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I think it’s really nice to see both sides. Their actions feel empty, but it was also the right thing to do. It may not fit the Teiwaz model of an organization, but it was the right thing for Tekkadan. As for Zack, he reminds me of last season Merribit a bit. He’s basically the outsider non-com looking in. He’s observing but he doesn’t really know the truth because he’s not out there. I also love Chad’s answer to him in regards to Human Debris. It would be like a soldier taking it easy on an enemy soldier because they both came from poor backgrounds or because they were both women. In the battlefield, things like that melt away, and if you think like Zack you wouldn’t last very long. I understand his thoughts, but there is more to it than that as well. Things that the actual fighters understand better than he does.
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Jasley’s demise was rather oversimplified. They could have shown a slight scene of him on the bridge as it it collapsed and imploded, showing his horrific last milliseconds before he gets sucked into space. But I guess the episode accomplished its point, Jasley’s number was up after all the shenanigans he had done to many people.
Just like in many iterations of the (Gundam) franchise, the New Order-esque announcement by Gjallarhorn (Fareed’s faction) never fails to send a chill into my spine. When such things happen it would only mean an escalations of world shattering events to come, and unlike in previous series, the protagonists (Tekkadan) have taken sides with a group that could have nefarious hidden agendas. But I guess that is just a classical case of choosing the lesser evil.
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