junior

So why was Bobby acting as Ranka's escort at the movie screening, and not Ozma? I find that to be an odd omission. It should have been her brother sitting next to her... And Ozma only had one brief scene during the episode. I hope Alto didn't have to turn down an invitation from Ranka to be her date... I also noticed the similarity in the shape and size of the crystal with Sheryl's earring. But Sheryl is wearing hers throughout the episode. So unless the one Alto had survived the destruction of the Vajra mothership and someone picked it up... (not likely, but we don't know what exactly they are so there is a very very very very very small chance...) Any mention of why Sheryl was wearing Ex-Gear when we first see her in the episode? Nice scene between Sheryl and Alto when Sheryl kissed him. Though I suspect that if Mikhail had seen it he would have muttered another "Baka!" Though I couldn't understand a word of the dialogue, for some reason I got the impression that Brera was in trouble for acting to save Ranka. I've a sneaking suspicion that Ranka isn't part of Brera's official mission onboard Frontier, but is instead something that he's stumbled across on his own - probably as part of the background that people here are guessing about. And since then, keeping an eye on her has become his "hobby", so to speak. Possible flaw in the "Grace is Brera's boss" argument, though a minor one. The individual that Leon meets with (who is presumeably Brera's boss) uses a cellphone to pass information to Leon... but Grace hasn't been seen with one to date. Instead, she appears to use an implant that works as her cellphone. That's not a major objection (it wouldn't be hard to get a cellphone), but it is an interesting thing to note imo.

Hmm... Maybe he just made references to the movie then. Guess I'll have to rewatch the episode sometime soon.

No, Clan Clan has let it be known far and wide throughout the Zentraedi community that she's reserving that right for herself, and anyone or anything else who tries will suffer!!!

They apparently got broadcasts of the Kaifun/Minmei movie as well. Remember Exedol singing Shou Pai Lon when he meets with the leadership of the SDF-1?

If true, then only marginally so. Alto blew off one of Brera's engines, and then was able to drag him over to where Mikhail could get a clear shot. If the VF-27 had been stronger in battroid, then it would have been Brera that was doing the dragging.

It didn't do him any good. Alto scored on Brera with his gunpod during the fighter chase. Brera then flips to battroid mode and slips behind Alto (18:51), but Alto is apparently almost instantly able to get Brera back in front of him because a few seconds later Brera is running from Alto's drunken missile swarm. The missiles then generate the fireballs that Alto is able to use to pop out and surprise Brera and Alto is able to grapple Brera and drag him in front of Mikhail. The primary information on the VF-27 comes from episode 7 and 9. Based on what I've seen so far, I suspect that the VF-25 is more responsive, whereas the VF-27 is more agile. It's somewhat hard to explain, but in episode 7 we see Alto dodge in great smooth sweeps and weaves that seemingly rely on recognizing the incoming fire patterns and avoiding them, whereas the VF-27 performs a series of sharp angles that allow it to move in an unusual fashion when it makes its run at the Vajra ship. So Brera can turn sharper than Alto can, but Alto is able to get his fighter to respond faster to changes in the situation (such as Brera changing course). Or at least that's my theory. Been watching too much Code Geass?

Someone pointed out elsewhere (not here on Macrossworld, though someone may have mentioned it here without my noticing) that SMS basically provides a believable method to do both the high school anime story that Kawamori has stated Frontier is meant to be and also do the usual transformable mecha war story that Macross TV series are expected to be. The real world military doesn't tend to allow much flexibility about what its members do. SMS allows Alto, Mikhail, and Luca to both attend school and work for a military employer that might (key word there) believably work to arrange its schedule around the trio's classes. Sure, in some situations the three of them have to leave class in a hurry or otherwise skip school (note the comment about Alto and the others missing class during the conversation between Ranka and Nanase in episode 9). But they can presumeably make arrangements to avoid having to pull too much patrol duty during their normal class time, just as you might adjust your work schedule with your own employer. You wouldn't expect the NUNS military to allow that.

iirc, even Clan Clan was only seen right after the launch when she taunted Mikhail. I'm guessing that Ozma is overall squadron leader. He's the one that retrieves Alto in episode 2 so that Alto can tell everyone about Gilliam's death. His conversation with the med-lady/Monster pilot in episode 6 also suggests to me that he's over her in the command structure. And since she's not directly a part of his VF-25 flight, that would mean that he's probably over the entire SMS mecha complement on the Quarter.

Also note which team responded to Clan Clan's distress call. It wasn't her fellow Pixie team members, but instead Alto and Mikhail. And Alto has time for a full-on dogfight with Brera without the Pixies ever showing up. The writers may not have intended it, but there's probably an argument there that Clan Clan intentionally arranged things so that her patrol zone would let her keep an eye on Mikhail.

No - the problem is, why exactly am I rooting for CB? They say that they want world peace, but we know absolutely nothing about them nor do we know how they plan to bring this world peace about. How is their plan to bring about world peace going to actually cause people to stop fighting? They've got some masterplan, but we don't know anything about how this plan is supposed to work except that it involves them attacking a bunch of different locations. In fact, we only know one thing about the plan because Sumeragi mentions in one episode that an incredibly large number of people are going to die in the process of accomplishing the plan. So why exactly should I care what Setsuna, Sumeragi, and the others are trying to accomplish? If anything, there seems to be a pretty strong indication that I should want them to be stopped as soon as possible BEFORE they have a chance to cause all of the deaths that Sumeragi has predicted. And then Eifmann goes and throws a spanner in the works when he realizes that the goal of the plan isn't what it has been announced to be, and is murdered before he can reveal the actual goal (i.e. killed in a fashion very reminiscent of the oft-mocked death scene of South Burning in Gundam 0083). So in short, as of the end of season one we know only one thing about CB's master plan - a whole lot of people are going to die for reasons that we don't understand at this time. The single biggest flaw of the series is that it seems to be based around offering vague hints that a huge revelation is just around the corner and will turn up any episode now while not actually offering any such thing and in fact only continuing to drop more and more vague hints that never seem to actually pan out. This idea has been repeatedly pointed out during the series to be rather impractical due to the simple constraint that you can only have four Gundams in so many places at the same time. Sumeragi's a master strategist and hence would have to know this. So she must have something else in mind. And as I mentioned above, Eifmann realized right before he was killed that the stated goal of CB wasn't what CB was actually striving for (something about the connection between the old Jupiter colony and CB's GN Drives tipped him off, though in typical Gundam 00 fashion we have no idea why the connection was important in understanding CB). The series also demonstrated that the goal that you state for CB is more or less impossible for another reason as well. During the desert arc the superpowers set up a trap for CB, and would have captured or destroyed all four Gundams if it hadn't been for the intervention of the Thrones (who weren't really members of CB). In that arc, the series demonstrated that the superpowers were capable of taking down the Gundams with the proper preparation before the introduction of the GN-X. There have been series that completely ignored this plot. Wing and G, both of which aired in the US, went with something completely different. Wing went with the "guerilla special forces mecha pilots" route, while the goofy G had the Gundam tournaments. SEED went back to the old UC formula, but that was due to an intention to follow the general outline of the MSG plotline (at least until the Alaska arc).

Yeah. Several years ago it switched over to the GML Mk. 2 as we called it (iirc, it was due to spam problems on the original list, but I don't remember). The guy who maintained the list actually disappeared from the list a couple of years ago, and it continued on auto-pilot until just a few months ago. It suddenly stopped one day, and no one could contact the old list maintainer. We managed to dredge up the names of some of the people who had posted recently and got a new list of sorts going (though it's pretty quiet at the moment - other than an occasional post about new model releases, the only thing discussed since Gundam 00 went into hiatus is the off-topic Macross Frontier), but all of the lurkers are gone as is anyone who hadn't posted in a while.

If you knew them then you'd know that the first statement doesn't apply. They discuss new model releases, and the various side story things that have come out (to a certain extent). They enjoy for varying reasons just about every series from MS to Turn A to G. The major exception so far has been SEED Destiny, and now possibly 00. But the latter is still ongoing. In most Gundam series, even if you're not entirely sure about the side that the protagonists are fighting for (i.e. Atlantic Federation in SEED), you can at least root for the protaganists' desire to survive or stay alive or persevere or whatever. Dumping the protaganists in a situation in which they have to fight or die (followed by the discovery that one of them just happens to be an amazing mobile suit pilot - though it doesn't always work that way) at leasts let you root for the protaganists in the hope that they make it out alive. 00 doesn't do that. Instead There's some good "blow stuff up" episodes (though not nearly as pretty as the ones in Macross Frontier). But the plot is a huge mess in pretty much every sense of the word. And that's why I question how high it is in the survey.

Considering that Clan Clan generated a gigantic fireball by hitting an asteroid, of all things, I'm hardly going to complain if the animators decided to make the ship have a pretty explosion.

So when a series ends up being set in the year 2200, are we going to be nicknaming the Zentraedi characters "Bugs Bunny"?

I'm on a mailing list full of Gundam fans (or was... it crashed a few of months ago, and the list admin apparently walked away a couple of years ago so most of the lurkers got lost when we set the new one up), and one of the guys there posted (paraphrase), "Why exactly am I rooting for the protagonists?" This is a Macross forum and not a Gundam forum, so I don't want to start discussions over what is or isn't problematic about Gundam 00. But imo there are a number of issues with the series, pretty much all related to the plot, that keep it from being one of the better mecha series out there. The series has its moments, and I like some of the characters (Soma and Sergei, and Graham up until the stupidity in the series finale). But overall it's flat, imo.

I think this is the most important part of it. Contrast it with the earlier scene with the Vajra, and Alto was insisting that he didn't need Mikhail's help and could finish the Vajra off on his own. In contrast, when Alto grabs Brera he specifically drags Brera over to where Mikhail will have a good vantage point to get the sniper shot in. In the first scene, he's disdainful of Mikhail's help, whereas in the second scene he intentionally seeks it out. And I don't know why anyone would discount Alto's skills in the fight. He blew Brera's leg off, which was no small feat given that even Clan Clan only got a single good shot in (that unfortunately got stopped by the asteroid). The series has made it clear from the start that Alto's piloting skills are excellent. His only real problem at the moment is that he's still not fully used to combat, so he tends to get distracted by the things going on around him. As he gets more used to the confusion of combat, then even that problem should go away.

Yeah, but the Gundam 00 series itself had a lot of issues, imo. As spectacular as the last couple of episodes were, the rest of the series wasn't very good and the plot had a lot of problems.

I'm sure it was just a way of being nice. She offered her condolences when she did it. She had no way of knowing that it would affect him like it did. And even if she is associated with Brera (and I've stated that I don't think that the voice sounds like her), she would have had no way of knowing that Mikhail would be going up against Brera very shortly afterwards. If she did have any ill intent, then it was probably merely to get Mikhail to leave her alone. Remember that Mikhail was hitting on her at the time...

I'm left to wonder how Gundam 00 could possibly beat out Macross Frontier (by one ranking position).

Gunpod = Rounds kill yellow Vajra, bounce off of Red Vajra Missiles = Blow Vajra up if they hit Clan Clan's Shoulder Cannon = Cracks the armor on a Red Vajra Mikhails Sniper Rifle = Blows chunks off of the Red Vajra Knife = Penetrates Red Vajra armor Even Alto can't do anything against the Red Vajra with his gunpod. Granted, the Red Vajra actually seems to try to avoid his fire, whereas it flies directly into oncoming fire from VF-171s. So it's possible that the VF-25 has a larger caliber weapon that actually slightly inconveniences the Red Vajra. But other than that, the gunpods have been completely useless against the Red Vajra since the start of the series. So... kill yellow Vajra with gunpods, use missiles against Red Vajra and hope that they don't get jammed (like in the first episode). And set them up to be sniped by Mikhail.

Yeah, but while she does do multiple voices sometimes even in the same show, you generally expect that each character will only have one voice assigned to it. It was mentioned that it might be an intentional attempt to 'fool' us by changing Grace's voice slightly when she communicated with Brera. But if you're going to go to that amount of trouble, then it seems a bit silly to give the whole thing away by doing it right after showing Grace spying on the meeting in which the Frontier leadership discusses the Vajra nests. Speaking of the meeting... Why wasn't Bilrer there? If he's the owner of SMS (as I believe is the case), shouldn't he have been there along with the Quarter's captain?

VF-27 I Can Has Leg /innocent whistle

Regarding episode 12 -

I still think the voice of Brera's boss sounds a bit too deep to be Grace. But I admit that seems to be a minority opinion around here... Maybe. Though presumeably she's going to have to let Alto know about that eventually if she intends to keep getting closer to him. It just seems odd to me that she'd hide that information from Alto, of all people. That is, assuming that the translation was 100% accurate.

Leon knows something about Ranka, though. And he had a reason to cover up the VF-27 that we're not aware of. So I'm pretty confident that he does know more than we do. He's also probably plotting with Mr. Bilrer, and it's possible that Leon only knows the bare minimum (i.e. just a little more than we do) and Bilrer is the one with all of the real information. But then why deny it? That's the puzzling thing. Alto already knows that she had a screwed up childhood. So if she really did manage to get through growing up on Galaxy without going to school, then why deny it? If it was a slip of the tongue, then there has to be something about when she was growing up that she'd rather not have Alto know. And that begs the question, "Why?"