Gundam GQuuuuuuX Ep 8 Review: Days of Present Past

After a heart-throbbing episode, we were granted the rest of -The Beginning- movie section of the One Year War, as well as an update on Nyaan’s current situation with Zeon. For the OYW section, Khara has conveniently weaved it into the current storyline – where we shifted our focus to the Rose of Sharon, as well as demonstrating the prowess of the most powerful duo in history – Char and Challia.

In episode 2, it was only briefly mentioned that during the Federation’s effort to drop Solomon on the Moon Base of Granada – where Kycilia Zabi was stationed, the Zeon Force led by Char attempted to stop that. And during the operation, a mysterious phenomenon known as Zeknova occured, vanquishing a large chunk of Solomon, causing it to miss Granada, which led to the Federation’s surrender. However, Char – along with his Gundam – disappeared without a trace.

Having the rest of the One Year War episode be the first part of ep 8 may mean more than just the Rose of Sharon setup, since in this part, we also saw another unit and character that may play another role in the story: Sayla Mass. Sayla was seen piloting the Federation’s Light Guncannon painted in the original RX-78-2 color. She went up against Char in the Red Gundam and lost the duel, was almost killed but she barely made it out of there. This is the first and only appearance of Sayla in the entire story, so we don’t actually know her current whereabouts, but if she hasn’t died, it means she is still out there doing something. I really hope she is on Earth with all the setup this episode. Otherwise, it’s great to see some Zeon action that is actually quite capable.

Back to Nyaan side, she is now under Kycilia’s wings and protection. She was given quite special treatment in exchange for one thing: becoming the pilot of the new “Gundam”. And here is where the fanbase was tested yet again. The new Gundam is called the GFreD – yes, that’s the actual name. Aside from being another metasynctactic variable name, this new Gundam looks quite…familiar, especially the color. I mean who am I kidding? It’s basically the Evangelion Unit-1 with cat ears and the GQuuuuuuX’s body. It’s kinda insane how Tsurumaki and Yamashita actually went with this idea. Either they really want to inject the Evangelion into this series, or they thought it would be an amazing shitpost (that will have real impact on the series). Either way, there are more Evangelion-ness in this episode than that. So it was revealed that Nyaan is the third pilot of the GFreD, and that previous pilot have all died. Well, guess that makes Nyaan the “Third Child” then, eh? *ba-dum tss*. And Kycilia showing a motherly side also caught us off-guard, just like how Misato took in Shinji back then. Although Kycilia would be a much better mom than drunkard Misato.

Afterwards, we’re introduced to Xavier’s friend – Miguel. Well, he started like a pretty “nice guy” who accidentally spilled all of the details about GFreD’s previous pilot – like he wanted to warn Nyaan or scare her. He was kinda nonchalant about speaking about very morbid thing, but I guess we all chalked it up to a young Zeon officer talking smack about things. It wasn’t until later that he was revealed to be a spy sent by Gihren’s faction to sabotage Kycilia’s side regarding the GFreD. We got to see Nyaan’s incredible survival instinct here where she immediately picked up on Miguel’s motive that even Xavier didn’t know about. Furthermore, We’re so used to people being assassinated with guns and dying in a mobile suit that we kinda forgot that there are other more deceitful ways to do that as well. But the things we didn’t expect the most is how Nyaan deal with it.

Nyaan and the GFreD gave us a glimpse of what they are capable of. The GFreD started up on its own, resonating with Nyaan’s psycommu ability and protected Nyaan. In the past, we thought that Haro might be the key to unlock the Psycommu, but now we can clearly see that Nyaan truly has an innate ability of a Newtype. Maybe she will be able to bring about another Zeknova for Kycilia then. Although I’m not sure why Kycilia would want to bring about another event like that. Maybe after seeing its power at Granada, she wanted to have control over its power.

The detachable ear on the GFreD is a pretty interesting gimmick, although mounting a remote psycommu weapon on the ears is something only Ikuto can think of. I can’t believe we’re officially getting a cat-ear Gundam in the color of the Eva Unit-1. There’s a lot we can discuss about the GFreD, but more stuff will definitely be revealed soon – seeing that we only have around 4 episodes left this cour.

The epilogue of this episode is also quite…interesting. We got multiple setup for the next arc’s character. We saw a suspiciously familiar young man with blonde hair and blue eyes named Shirouzu – the “Fourth Son”, or the “Fourth Rose” on Earth. Now I’m not sure if this is the real Char Aznable OR Quattro, we’ll see in the future.

Machu is on her way to Earth with the GQuuuuuuX. Yes! For some reason she was able to bust out of the Sodon, stole a Gundam, and ran all the way to Earth. I reckon this is another of Challia’s plan since it seems he anticipated everything from the start – even the attack on Kycilia. He’s always arrive at the right time at the right place. We’ll see if he will succeed on his quest to find Char again.

We’re finally getting to the meat of the series – with some serious stuff going on – both politically and actual conflict wise. Machu and Nyaan have now switched lives – one is now a runaway refugee, while other became an honored guest with a warm bed and every commodities she could ever wanted. How the perspective has changed. Let’s see how Machu navigate this new life of hers with noone she knows by her side, and how Nyaan will fare when the people around her cherish her but only if she fulfill a purpose. Underneath all the parallels and memes, GQuuuuuuX might be much deeper than we thought.

=Aaron=

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