Anime

The confrontation between Machu and Nyaan ended up being kind of a nothinburger, and Machu easily succeeded in awakening Lalah. So what did that do? As we discovered later in the episode, something. Maybe the third impact again. We can never have enough of those, I suppose.

Enter Char.

The final confrontation with Kycilia happening on a theatre stage was a forceful, but still pretty good visual symbolism. As they have their talk, the play is crashed by the MCs of the show, who take the wheel in the usual search of Mr. Walking Plot Device, who sheepdogged them back into Lalah's presence. Kycilia gets unceremoniously dispatched as not relevant anymore to the plot, and both Chekov's guns go off, not at who'd you'd expect.

Char getting subconsciously magically dressed into his uniform by Lalah was utterly hilarious and blatantly a "hey guys its me, the guy from the merch" moment.

And while the battle outside rages on, we discover - Mr. Walking Plot Device is... from the UC, and might be, if I interpreted the scene correctly, Amuro Ray - here to destroy the G-Spam timeline.

Queue the late 80s Album Oriented Rock / Synthpop blend, it's Beyond the Time time, and time to bring back the RX-78-2 to the fight for the cool of it. Gonna buy the merch yet?

My cynical commentary aside

Any thoughts on the episode? I liked most of it, beyond the quick dressup scene I mocked and the finale. Lalah as a world ending threat (or is she? that's actually a question that remains unanswered and is interpreted differently by characters!) was probably an inevitable plot development, in a society that knows only the apocalypse and status quo (I'm talking to you liberals), and Char vs Machu vs Nyaan could have been a decent final battle for it.

However, the ending was just awful imo. If that is Amuro in the graffiti man's soul, or inside that Gundam, then any conflicts from the G-Spam universe become completely meaningless.

It all becomes background noise to Amuro vs Char, because Tomino wrote so in 1979 and 1988.