Gundam Seed
I just finished watching all of Gundam Seed. It was awesome.
The plot arc was just amazing.
It starts of course with the ZAFT attack on Hieropolis, an Orb orbital in space, where the Earth Alliance is building secret mobile suit prototypes. Of the five suits, four are stolen by ZAFT, the Aegis, Duel, Buster and Blitz. The fifth, the Strike, is piloted by the Earth forces person in charge of the project. She's about to get herself killed when Kira (who randomly ended up there after trying to find a shelter, and so get swept into the cockpit with her) takes control and uses it to protect his friends (who haven't reached shelters in time). Kira handles it very well. The Archangel, an Earth forces prototype cruiser, is also there and ends up coming inside the orbital as the nagar is bloked through sabotage. Most of the senior officers have been killed in the sabotage, and a young ensign takes over.
This battle is part of a war between Naturals (living on the Earth's surface) and the Coordinators, genetically modified humans living in space, on the Plants. Orb is a neutral country and it turns out later that these suits were made there without knowledge of the top leadeship, although some members of the leadership did authorise it. The war started after a nuclear attack on an agricultural plant called Junius 7.
ZAFT step up attacks and the battle detroys Hieropolis. The Archangel leaves, collecting Kira, the suit, his friends and a malfunctioning escape pod. They are harried all the way to an Earth Alliance facility. They leave that just as ZAFT destroy it, and the leCruset team in their stolen mobile suits, harries them all the way to the 8th fleet. Only thanks to Kira do they hold them off, and Kira and Athrun (in the Aegis), two childhood friends find themselves fighting. Kira is a Coordinator and he fights to protect his firends, yet the war is increasingly becoming see as Naturals versus Coordinators, and even those on his side start to see him as a traitor to his own people. Kira starts to have severe issues about everything hs is fighting for.
That synpsis covers everything up to last time I'written about this. A last minute attack meant that the Strike had to launch to cover the Archangel and the Archangel changed its entry corridor to match that of the Strike's, causing them to land in the heart of ZAFT controlled territory.
They landed in the middle of the Sahara desert, the domain of Waltfeld, called the "Dessert Tiger". Waltfeld decides to detroy the Archangel and nearly succeeds except for the help of local resistance fighters. Eventually, Kira in the Strike fights off Waltfeld and kills him, but not before being temporarily captured by him in earlier doings. Waltfeld is a really cool character, and I cried when Kira killed him. Kira didn't take it any better.
After fighting their way clear of Waltfeld, they reach the Indian Ocean and head out over it, but are harried by ZAFT submarine carriers and the members of the LeCruset team who transfered to Earth. Many titanic battles follow and eventually they (barely reach the neutral country of Orb (on who's orbital, Hieropolis, the whole plot started). Orb shelters them and helps them in exchange for technical data from the Strike and Kira's help in rewriting the OS on their mass production model suits.
They leave pursued again by the LeCruset team, and before they can reach the relative safety of Alaska and Joshua base's air defences, they get attacked in two last titanic battles. In the first, Kira kills Niko, the sweetest and most youngest member of the leCruset team. I really liked him. That was the problem all along, I really liked both the leCruset team and the Archangel crew. It was horrible when he dies.
At this point, Athrun flips out and vows to kill Kira, after having been ambivalent about it all this time. In the next battle, he goes for it and he and Kira have an epic battle, where he ends up killing Kira's friend, Talle, who just started piloting the second Skygrasper airplane assigned to the Archanged. Athrun then sacrifices the Aegis to take down the Strike and ejects at the last minute when his suit self destructs in an embrace with the Strike. Everyone thinks that Kira is dead. In the meantime, the Buster gets shot down by laFlagga and Diarca surrenders himself as he can't get it to move (and he has very large cannons aimed at him by the Archangel), the Archangel gets shots down (but still works) and the Duel shoots laFlagga down (who lands safely in the water). It's a pretty epic battle and everyone is pretty depressed afterwards. It was also pretty shocking, as the death count wasn't that bad up until then.
They arrive at Alaska, and the commanders there try to make the Archangel's captain a scapegoat because she let a Coordinator pilot the Strike. They were incresingly developing a policy of Total War against the Coordinators, and the idea of one helping the Naturals and showing them up didn't appeal to them. They refuse to give the Archangel any orders, in the meantime sending out forces to reinforce Panama, their last surviving space facility, against the next large assault planned by ZAFT, in Operation Spitbreak.
ZAFT, meanwhile, are becoming more hardline under the leadership of Athrun's father. They decide to launch Spitbreak at Alaska, intending to take the head off the military. However, the Earth Alliance forces see it coming, and build a large array called a Cyclops Array undeneath which they plan to detonate when ZAFT have taken the installation.
In the meantime, Kira wakes up in Lacus Cline's house on the plants. Somehow (and this is the flimsiest plot excuse of the whole series), a reverent living on the island where the epic battle was fought finds him and brings him to Lacus Cline (who is a pop star idol on the Plants up in Earth Orbit). Lacus has been a very fluffy, annoying girly character, and this is the first time you get to sense that something isn't quite right with that. Lacus then uses her father's security clearance and gets Kira onto a new prototype, the Freedom, and he then steals it to go back to Earth. At this point, Lacus is declared a traitor by the Plants, although they are careful to say that she's being led astray by evil people, thanks to her fluffy girly pop star image.
When the battle in Alaska starts, laFlagga notices that something isn't right, finds out about the Cyclops array and then alerts the Archangel. The Archangel decides to leave the battle area, understanding that the end result is the detonation of the array and their destruction. Meanwhile, Kira returns in the Freedom and tries to put an end to the fighting, saving some Zaft forces in the process, among them Eesac from the leCruset team, his sworn enemy in the Duel.
Unfortunately, about 80% of the ZAFT forces get annihilated when the array goes critical, and the Earth Alliance uses the destruction to blame ZAFT for genocide and rally support around the hardline anti-Coordinator Earth faction.
The Archangel realises that if they return to the Earth Alliance, they'll be court martialled or dissappeared in order to prevent any details leaking out about who really destroyed the Alaskan base. Kira, meanwhile, decides that he isn't going to fight for the Earth Alliance any more, an neither will he fight for ZAFT. This is the first time that Kira has actually figured out who he's fighting for and is comfortable about doing it, as he had all kinds of issues being a Coordinator fighting for the Earth forces. His mood catches that of the Archangel and they defect to Orb.
In the meantime, the hardline faction on Earth decides that Orb's neutrality and its acceptance of Coordinators in its borders is unacceptable and makes demands, sending a large fleet under the hardliner faction Blue Cosmos, whose aim is to get rid of all the Coordinators. While the leader of the Plants, Athrun's father, send him out in the Justice to recover the Freedom. Before he leaves, Athrun meets with Cline, who is on the run and has supporters in the military covering her. She stages an impressive exit when government troops track Athrun to Lacus and leaves Athrun feeling very confused about who he's fighting for now.
Orb decides to fight the Earth Alliance fleet and the Archangel lends a hand. The Earth Alliance have a trio of advanced mobile suits piloted by three people who we don't get to know anything about, beyond the fact that they're drugged up so they can operate the suits as Coordinators would and that they're considered expendable and are controlled by the drug addiction by Blue Cosmos. This trio assaults Orb, which makes an excellent showing for itself against the main Earth forces except against the trio and the Archangel helps them kick arse. But the trio soon have Orb on the backfoot and are about to defeat Kira when Athrun shows up and decisively intervenes, sending them away.
Before the attack, Diarca is released. He takes no part in the initial fight, but he's haunted by Meer (who was Talle's girlfriend), and her grief, attempts to kill him and then attempts to save him when someone else tries to kill him, shakes his certainty in the world. Haunted by her grief and feeling helpless when there's fighting all around, he heads out in the Buster and start to fight alongside the Archangel and against the Earth forces. Meanwhile, Orb repaired the Strike (the Archangel had send them the location of the epic battle) and laFlagga gets to pilot this in his first battle.
The whole group decide to come together when Kira and Athrun make peace and Kira tells Athrun that he's now fighting against the war and the escalation being waged by the two sides. Meanwhile, in Panama, a desperate ZAFT stage a careful and brilliant assault on Panama taking out the spaceport there and denying the Earth Alliance access to space. ZAFT forces take no prisoners and execute all Naturals they find, pulling Athrun further away from ZAFT as he can't agree with their conduct.
The second assault on Orb sees the Orb forces pull back to Orb's space facility. In a last ditch defence, the Archangel is launched into space and the remaining troops of Orb are loaded onto a ship and also send into space, where it docks with the Kusanagi. The leader of Orb destroys the spaceport to prevent it falling into Earth Alliance hands.
Together the Archangel and Kusanagi head out for abandoned orbitals at Earth's L4 point. There they are met by the Eternal, a prototype ZAFT ship stolen by Lacus Cline and her faction. The ship is captained by Waltfeld, who somehow survived death at Kira's hands :) (although is wife, who co-piloted his mobile armour didn't survive :( ).
ZAFT forces follow them to the L4 point, but not before the Dominion, the first of the Archangel class built by Earth forces, follows the Archangel. Equipped with the trio and under the command of the leader of Blue Cosmos, the captain is the person who was second in command of the Archangel but was removed at Alaska as being too valuable to kill off when they sacrificed the Archangel as bait. An epic duel takes place between the Archangel and the Dominion and between laFlagga and leCruset (who heads the ZAFT forces sent to retrieve the Eternal). In the duel between laFlagga and leCruset, we learn that leCruset is a clone of laFlagga's arrogant dead father (who funded a lot of the early genetic experimentation that involved the Coordinators) in a bid for imortality, and we learn that leCruset has been leaking details to Blue Cosmos to enable the two sides to kill each other with greater effectiveness as, by and large, he's given up on the human species altogether and feels his heritage has given him that right to make that judgement about the human race. The Archangel holds off the Dominion (barely) while the Eternal makes last minute adjustments to itself.
There's a second assault where both the ZAFT forces and the Dominion try to attack the three ships simultaneously. However, the Eternal has finished its preperations and joins the fight. The Archangel and the Dominion duel again while the Kusanagi and the Eternal smash throug the ZAFT forces, all of them escaping.
In the meantime, leCruset leaks information about the n-jammer canceller, a deviced that cuts through n-jammers, devices ZAFT used to make sure no nuclear weapons could be used on them again (the war started when Blue Cosmos nuked an agricultural Plant called Junius 7). This allows the Earth Alliance to use nukes again, and they use them to bust through the outer ZAFT defences and head in to destroy the Plants.
The Kusanagi, Eternal and Archangel mobilise to prevent the nukes reaching the Plants and succeed. But then ZAFT reveals the Genesis weapon, a giant Gamma ray laser, and takes out half the Earth fleet.
The Earth fleet get desperate and attack the ZAFT forces. Now the three ships decide to split themselves up. The Archangel goes after the nuclear bomber carriers, guarded by the Dominion, while the Kusanagi and the Eternal go after the Genesis mirror. The Genesis mirror is used a second time, destroying the Earth Alliance Lunar base and a load of reinforcements incoming. Meanwhile, Eesac leads a ZAFT strike team also trying to take out the carriers and ends up fighting alongside the Buster, Archangel and the Freedom, who together do a number on the trio of suits piloted by the drugged up people under the direction of Blue Cosmos.
A third shot is scheduled, for the Atlantic Alliance capital of Washington, and is likely to take out half of the Earth's surface if it hits. leCruset pilots a third, more advanced mobile suit called the Providence and ends up nearly taking out most of the Archangel's complement of mobile suits and Eesac. leCruset kills lifeboats from the Dominion (which was totaled by the Archangel) and Kira flips out. Kira and leCruset have an epic duel and Kira kills leCruset while detroying himself in the process. The Providence floats into the way of the Gamma ray laser as it fires and thanks to Athrun's help, the whole thing blows up before anyone else gets killed. Meanwhile, Athrun's father goes a bit nuts when some people object to him targetting Washington and he is killed by an aide that he tried to shoot for insubordination.
The battle ends by and large with lots of dead people, but with the three ship's primary objective is achieved (no annihilation of the Earth or the Plants). laFlagga gets killed deflecting a shot from the Dominion onto the Archangel after the Dominion lauched lifeboats (so the Archangel didn't shoot it). The Dominion only fired because the captain got annoyed at the Blue Cosmos leader's fanaticism and orders abandon ship. The Blue Cosmos leader repeatedly shoots her (in a wounding and not to kill way) and manually targets the Archangel, leading to the shot that kills laFlagga. There's a trio of prototype pilots, who pilot Orb's mass produced suits, and they die too. The lifeboats off the Dominion die (so we lose Fley, one of the characters right at the beginning) and the captain in command of the Dominion. So it's pretty sad and there are lots of people I cared about in the series just getting killed off :(.
I don't know if you read that plot summary, but if you did, you can kind of see that the plot scope was pretty epic. I liked the way that the series was about war and the evils of war and the benefits of peace, but it wasn't done in a fluffy way at all. In fact, I'm quite surprised by how brutal the end scenes in the final battle were (especially the living humans bloating up and bursting before they die when they're hit by the gamma ray laser is so utterly out of any proportion with the rest of the level of gore in the series, so it left a vivid impression, and my feeling is that it was deliberate).
The way the plot set up this exploration of war is to have the leCruset team members and the crew of the Archangel being (on the whole) honorable people who are fighting to protect their homes against invasion, violence and death. However, their ideals are slowly being betrayed by their own sides, as each side adopts total war and total annihilation of the enemy as policies and the hardliners take over, until they can no longer understand why they're fighting or what the point of killing each other really is. Which makes every death when it happens really tragic and sad, as the leCruset team tries to bring the Archangel in. By exploring the motivations of the characters, it explores the issues of war and fighting.
The science fiction setup does make it conceiveable (if not entirely believable) that the two sides might go to all out war to destroy each other because of the genetic manipulation difference and does make a good point about war fought only to kill the enemy and not for any other end in and of itself, as well as handling issues of friction in society about the whole idea of genetic manipulation.
I can't help myself comparing the escalation of the two sides with World War 2, as I can see similar escalation on the part of the Nazis and the Japanses (who both adopted total war) against the Allies. But even the German armed forces refused that doctine and German armed forces treated their POWs well, with the Luftwaffe going so far as to visit concentration camps where the SS stuck downed pilots, and the army treating the Warsaw uprising fighters as enemy combatants because the Allies demanded this be so. So I think there's something in the human spirit that tries to naturally avoids total war, even as people keep reinventing it. I wonder if any Allied people really wanted an eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth and to respond in kind? Watching this anime brings home what would have happened, and I'm so glad it didn't go that way. I remember there was a politician who suggested that Britain nuke Argentina in the Falklands War, so there are always people who push for that kind of war. But I'm happy in all those conflicts, it never goes so far.
Anyway, if you haven't guessed it, I can't tell you enough how utterly awesome watching this anime has been and how much it's touched me and made me think. So if you can and you get the chance, do please watch it.
The plot arc was just amazing.
It starts of course with the ZAFT attack on Hieropolis, an Orb orbital in space, where the Earth Alliance is building secret mobile suit prototypes. Of the five suits, four are stolen by ZAFT, the Aegis, Duel, Buster and Blitz. The fifth, the Strike, is piloted by the Earth forces person in charge of the project. She's about to get herself killed when Kira (who randomly ended up there after trying to find a shelter, and so get swept into the cockpit with her) takes control and uses it to protect his friends (who haven't reached shelters in time). Kira handles it very well. The Archangel, an Earth forces prototype cruiser, is also there and ends up coming inside the orbital as the nagar is bloked through sabotage. Most of the senior officers have been killed in the sabotage, and a young ensign takes over.
This battle is part of a war between Naturals (living on the Earth's surface) and the Coordinators, genetically modified humans living in space, on the Plants. Orb is a neutral country and it turns out later that these suits were made there without knowledge of the top leadeship, although some members of the leadership did authorise it. The war started after a nuclear attack on an agricultural plant called Junius 7.
ZAFT step up attacks and the battle detroys Hieropolis. The Archangel leaves, collecting Kira, the suit, his friends and a malfunctioning escape pod. They are harried all the way to an Earth Alliance facility. They leave that just as ZAFT destroy it, and the leCruset team in their stolen mobile suits, harries them all the way to the 8th fleet. Only thanks to Kira do they hold them off, and Kira and Athrun (in the Aegis), two childhood friends find themselves fighting. Kira is a Coordinator and he fights to protect his firends, yet the war is increasingly becoming see as Naturals versus Coordinators, and even those on his side start to see him as a traitor to his own people. Kira starts to have severe issues about everything hs is fighting for.
That synpsis covers everything up to last time I'written about this. A last minute attack meant that the Strike had to launch to cover the Archangel and the Archangel changed its entry corridor to match that of the Strike's, causing them to land in the heart of ZAFT controlled territory.
They landed in the middle of the Sahara desert, the domain of Waltfeld, called the "Dessert Tiger". Waltfeld decides to detroy the Archangel and nearly succeeds except for the help of local resistance fighters. Eventually, Kira in the Strike fights off Waltfeld and kills him, but not before being temporarily captured by him in earlier doings. Waltfeld is a really cool character, and I cried when Kira killed him. Kira didn't take it any better.
After fighting their way clear of Waltfeld, they reach the Indian Ocean and head out over it, but are harried by ZAFT submarine carriers and the members of the LeCruset team who transfered to Earth. Many titanic battles follow and eventually they (barely reach the neutral country of Orb (on who's orbital, Hieropolis, the whole plot started). Orb shelters them and helps them in exchange for technical data from the Strike and Kira's help in rewriting the OS on their mass production model suits.
They leave pursued again by the LeCruset team, and before they can reach the relative safety of Alaska and Joshua base's air defences, they get attacked in two last titanic battles. In the first, Kira kills Niko, the sweetest and most youngest member of the leCruset team. I really liked him. That was the problem all along, I really liked both the leCruset team and the Archangel crew. It was horrible when he dies.
At this point, Athrun flips out and vows to kill Kira, after having been ambivalent about it all this time. In the next battle, he goes for it and he and Kira have an epic battle, where he ends up killing Kira's friend, Talle, who just started piloting the second Skygrasper airplane assigned to the Archanged. Athrun then sacrifices the Aegis to take down the Strike and ejects at the last minute when his suit self destructs in an embrace with the Strike. Everyone thinks that Kira is dead. In the meantime, the Buster gets shot down by laFlagga and Diarca surrenders himself as he can't get it to move (and he has very large cannons aimed at him by the Archangel), the Archangel gets shots down (but still works) and the Duel shoots laFlagga down (who lands safely in the water). It's a pretty epic battle and everyone is pretty depressed afterwards. It was also pretty shocking, as the death count wasn't that bad up until then.
They arrive at Alaska, and the commanders there try to make the Archangel's captain a scapegoat because she let a Coordinator pilot the Strike. They were incresingly developing a policy of Total War against the Coordinators, and the idea of one helping the Naturals and showing them up didn't appeal to them. They refuse to give the Archangel any orders, in the meantime sending out forces to reinforce Panama, their last surviving space facility, against the next large assault planned by ZAFT, in Operation Spitbreak.
ZAFT, meanwhile, are becoming more hardline under the leadership of Athrun's father. They decide to launch Spitbreak at Alaska, intending to take the head off the military. However, the Earth Alliance forces see it coming, and build a large array called a Cyclops Array undeneath which they plan to detonate when ZAFT have taken the installation.
In the meantime, Kira wakes up in Lacus Cline's house on the plants. Somehow (and this is the flimsiest plot excuse of the whole series), a reverent living on the island where the epic battle was fought finds him and brings him to Lacus Cline (who is a pop star idol on the Plants up in Earth Orbit). Lacus has been a very fluffy, annoying girly character, and this is the first time you get to sense that something isn't quite right with that. Lacus then uses her father's security clearance and gets Kira onto a new prototype, the Freedom, and he then steals it to go back to Earth. At this point, Lacus is declared a traitor by the Plants, although they are careful to say that she's being led astray by evil people, thanks to her fluffy girly pop star image.
When the battle in Alaska starts, laFlagga notices that something isn't right, finds out about the Cyclops array and then alerts the Archangel. The Archangel decides to leave the battle area, understanding that the end result is the detonation of the array and their destruction. Meanwhile, Kira returns in the Freedom and tries to put an end to the fighting, saving some Zaft forces in the process, among them Eesac from the leCruset team, his sworn enemy in the Duel.
Unfortunately, about 80% of the ZAFT forces get annihilated when the array goes critical, and the Earth Alliance uses the destruction to blame ZAFT for genocide and rally support around the hardline anti-Coordinator Earth faction.
The Archangel realises that if they return to the Earth Alliance, they'll be court martialled or dissappeared in order to prevent any details leaking out about who really destroyed the Alaskan base. Kira, meanwhile, decides that he isn't going to fight for the Earth Alliance any more, an neither will he fight for ZAFT. This is the first time that Kira has actually figured out who he's fighting for and is comfortable about doing it, as he had all kinds of issues being a Coordinator fighting for the Earth forces. His mood catches that of the Archangel and they defect to Orb.
In the meantime, the hardline faction on Earth decides that Orb's neutrality and its acceptance of Coordinators in its borders is unacceptable and makes demands, sending a large fleet under the hardliner faction Blue Cosmos, whose aim is to get rid of all the Coordinators. While the leader of the Plants, Athrun's father, send him out in the Justice to recover the Freedom. Before he leaves, Athrun meets with Cline, who is on the run and has supporters in the military covering her. She stages an impressive exit when government troops track Athrun to Lacus and leaves Athrun feeling very confused about who he's fighting for now.
Orb decides to fight the Earth Alliance fleet and the Archangel lends a hand. The Earth Alliance have a trio of advanced mobile suits piloted by three people who we don't get to know anything about, beyond the fact that they're drugged up so they can operate the suits as Coordinators would and that they're considered expendable and are controlled by the drug addiction by Blue Cosmos. This trio assaults Orb, which makes an excellent showing for itself against the main Earth forces except against the trio and the Archangel helps them kick arse. But the trio soon have Orb on the backfoot and are about to defeat Kira when Athrun shows up and decisively intervenes, sending them away.
Before the attack, Diarca is released. He takes no part in the initial fight, but he's haunted by Meer (who was Talle's girlfriend), and her grief, attempts to kill him and then attempts to save him when someone else tries to kill him, shakes his certainty in the world. Haunted by her grief and feeling helpless when there's fighting all around, he heads out in the Buster and start to fight alongside the Archangel and against the Earth forces. Meanwhile, Orb repaired the Strike (the Archangel had send them the location of the epic battle) and laFlagga gets to pilot this in his first battle.
The whole group decide to come together when Kira and Athrun make peace and Kira tells Athrun that he's now fighting against the war and the escalation being waged by the two sides. Meanwhile, in Panama, a desperate ZAFT stage a careful and brilliant assault on Panama taking out the spaceport there and denying the Earth Alliance access to space. ZAFT forces take no prisoners and execute all Naturals they find, pulling Athrun further away from ZAFT as he can't agree with their conduct.
The second assault on Orb sees the Orb forces pull back to Orb's space facility. In a last ditch defence, the Archangel is launched into space and the remaining troops of Orb are loaded onto a ship and also send into space, where it docks with the Kusanagi. The leader of Orb destroys the spaceport to prevent it falling into Earth Alliance hands.
Together the Archangel and Kusanagi head out for abandoned orbitals at Earth's L4 point. There they are met by the Eternal, a prototype ZAFT ship stolen by Lacus Cline and her faction. The ship is captained by Waltfeld, who somehow survived death at Kira's hands :) (although is wife, who co-piloted his mobile armour didn't survive :( ).
ZAFT forces follow them to the L4 point, but not before the Dominion, the first of the Archangel class built by Earth forces, follows the Archangel. Equipped with the trio and under the command of the leader of Blue Cosmos, the captain is the person who was second in command of the Archangel but was removed at Alaska as being too valuable to kill off when they sacrificed the Archangel as bait. An epic duel takes place between the Archangel and the Dominion and between laFlagga and leCruset (who heads the ZAFT forces sent to retrieve the Eternal). In the duel between laFlagga and leCruset, we learn that leCruset is a clone of laFlagga's arrogant dead father (who funded a lot of the early genetic experimentation that involved the Coordinators) in a bid for imortality, and we learn that leCruset has been leaking details to Blue Cosmos to enable the two sides to kill each other with greater effectiveness as, by and large, he's given up on the human species altogether and feels his heritage has given him that right to make that judgement about the human race. The Archangel holds off the Dominion (barely) while the Eternal makes last minute adjustments to itself.
There's a second assault where both the ZAFT forces and the Dominion try to attack the three ships simultaneously. However, the Eternal has finished its preperations and joins the fight. The Archangel and the Dominion duel again while the Kusanagi and the Eternal smash throug the ZAFT forces, all of them escaping.
In the meantime, leCruset leaks information about the n-jammer canceller, a deviced that cuts through n-jammers, devices ZAFT used to make sure no nuclear weapons could be used on them again (the war started when Blue Cosmos nuked an agricultural Plant called Junius 7). This allows the Earth Alliance to use nukes again, and they use them to bust through the outer ZAFT defences and head in to destroy the Plants.
The Kusanagi, Eternal and Archangel mobilise to prevent the nukes reaching the Plants and succeed. But then ZAFT reveals the Genesis weapon, a giant Gamma ray laser, and takes out half the Earth fleet.
The Earth fleet get desperate and attack the ZAFT forces. Now the three ships decide to split themselves up. The Archangel goes after the nuclear bomber carriers, guarded by the Dominion, while the Kusanagi and the Eternal go after the Genesis mirror. The Genesis mirror is used a second time, destroying the Earth Alliance Lunar base and a load of reinforcements incoming. Meanwhile, Eesac leads a ZAFT strike team also trying to take out the carriers and ends up fighting alongside the Buster, Archangel and the Freedom, who together do a number on the trio of suits piloted by the drugged up people under the direction of Blue Cosmos.
A third shot is scheduled, for the Atlantic Alliance capital of Washington, and is likely to take out half of the Earth's surface if it hits. leCruset pilots a third, more advanced mobile suit called the Providence and ends up nearly taking out most of the Archangel's complement of mobile suits and Eesac. leCruset kills lifeboats from the Dominion (which was totaled by the Archangel) and Kira flips out. Kira and leCruset have an epic duel and Kira kills leCruset while detroying himself in the process. The Providence floats into the way of the Gamma ray laser as it fires and thanks to Athrun's help, the whole thing blows up before anyone else gets killed. Meanwhile, Athrun's father goes a bit nuts when some people object to him targetting Washington and he is killed by an aide that he tried to shoot for insubordination.
The battle ends by and large with lots of dead people, but with the three ship's primary objective is achieved (no annihilation of the Earth or the Plants). laFlagga gets killed deflecting a shot from the Dominion onto the Archangel after the Dominion lauched lifeboats (so the Archangel didn't shoot it). The Dominion only fired because the captain got annoyed at the Blue Cosmos leader's fanaticism and orders abandon ship. The Blue Cosmos leader repeatedly shoots her (in a wounding and not to kill way) and manually targets the Archangel, leading to the shot that kills laFlagga. There's a trio of prototype pilots, who pilot Orb's mass produced suits, and they die too. The lifeboats off the Dominion die (so we lose Fley, one of the characters right at the beginning) and the captain in command of the Dominion. So it's pretty sad and there are lots of people I cared about in the series just getting killed off :(.
I don't know if you read that plot summary, but if you did, you can kind of see that the plot scope was pretty epic. I liked the way that the series was about war and the evils of war and the benefits of peace, but it wasn't done in a fluffy way at all. In fact, I'm quite surprised by how brutal the end scenes in the final battle were (especially the living humans bloating up and bursting before they die when they're hit by the gamma ray laser is so utterly out of any proportion with the rest of the level of gore in the series, so it left a vivid impression, and my feeling is that it was deliberate).
The way the plot set up this exploration of war is to have the leCruset team members and the crew of the Archangel being (on the whole) honorable people who are fighting to protect their homes against invasion, violence and death. However, their ideals are slowly being betrayed by their own sides, as each side adopts total war and total annihilation of the enemy as policies and the hardliners take over, until they can no longer understand why they're fighting or what the point of killing each other really is. Which makes every death when it happens really tragic and sad, as the leCruset team tries to bring the Archangel in. By exploring the motivations of the characters, it explores the issues of war and fighting.
The science fiction setup does make it conceiveable (if not entirely believable) that the two sides might go to all out war to destroy each other because of the genetic manipulation difference and does make a good point about war fought only to kill the enemy and not for any other end in and of itself, as well as handling issues of friction in society about the whole idea of genetic manipulation.
I can't help myself comparing the escalation of the two sides with World War 2, as I can see similar escalation on the part of the Nazis and the Japanses (who both adopted total war) against the Allies. But even the German armed forces refused that doctine and German armed forces treated their POWs well, with the Luftwaffe going so far as to visit concentration camps where the SS stuck downed pilots, and the army treating the Warsaw uprising fighters as enemy combatants because the Allies demanded this be so. So I think there's something in the human spirit that tries to naturally avoids total war, even as people keep reinventing it. I wonder if any Allied people really wanted an eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth and to respond in kind? Watching this anime brings home what would have happened, and I'm so glad it didn't go that way. I remember there was a politician who suggested that Britain nuke Argentina in the Falklands War, so there are always people who push for that kind of war. But I'm happy in all those conflicts, it never goes so far.
Anyway, if you haven't guessed it, I can't tell you enough how utterly awesome watching this anime has been and how much it's touched me and made me think. So if you can and you get the chance, do please watch it.