DeeBot

Yeah, that sort of easter egg is pretty common in these situations. Makes sense that he was involved in the CGI, could easily sneak his name in there when they needed a label to slap on Machida.

You can tell it's BS by the fact that it reads like someone's fan fiction idea of how the movie would play out. Real spoilers would be more original.

You know, it's taken me a while to try and resolve Sheryl's initial attitude with her later softening--heck, even with her initial impression of Frontier as her starliner drops out of fold. For a long time, I figured it was just discontinuity. I still think it doesn't entirely gel, but it's started to make more sense to me. Under Grace's tutelage, Sheryl took everything about her job extremely seriously. Work was all she had; on the job, that was the only thing on her mind. When she was acting like a jerk, she was usually actually right. (She's a professional! What's she doing performing with a bunch of probably incompetent amateurs from a school? After all, she had no idea if they were really any good. And she said no fans backstage! She doesn't want anyone getting in the way of the crew doing their jobs. And her fans really would probably mostly be paying attention to her; that what they'd paid to see, after all. She may have just been gloating just a wee bit there, though. And when Alto was running off to be the hero, she belittled him because he should have left things to the professionals, like Gilliam, instead of just getting in the way.) Ultimately, I think her attitude can be attributed to having an extremely driven work ethic, coupled with being managed by Grace to strive towards being that ultimate idol. There was nothing else for her--not school, not friends, not love (massive parallels here with the early Misa). Her professional exterior was as mechanical as anything else Grace built. We get a hint, though, that her softer side was always there. In episode 3, when trapped in the shelter, she protests at Alto's accusation that she's an exhibitionist, just because her professional persona dresses like a slurm. She adamantly insists that how she appears on stage has nothing to do with who she is off it. I think that statement extends beyond just the way she chooses to dress. On a slightly meandering note, I still enjoy that bit at the end, where Sheryl doesn't seem to realize that Alto and Ranka (like everyone else on Frontier) aren't implanted; in episode 5, she seems surprised that she has to explain how Grace can record scenes with her eyes. (It's the only way you can make sense of her demand that they not upload nude pictures of her up on to the net; strikingly, that seems to imply that such pictures don't already exist, which seems a bit odd, given her strictly professional approach to her career.)

I wonder if the people who think they just make stuff up as they go along actually know how involved the animation process is. This isn't live action; you don't just throw people on to a set and film the latest daily episode of your soap opera. (Heck, even live action isn't that simple.) Everything has to be planned months, if not years, in advance. I'm only more convinced of this when I see call-outs in the early episodes to things that only get revealed at the end. While there's some room to make on-the-fly changes in the tiniest of areas, most of the story has to be pieced out so voices can be recorded and the work farmed out to various studios to work on in parallel.

Good to see none of us are ever going to get old.

I've started rewatching the series from the beginning, now that I know how it ends (watched up to episode 5 so far). It's interesting how many little details you pick up with hindsight, like Ranka wailing about why Ozma was dying since she didn't blab about a secret (as it turns out, about her calling the Vajra) in episode 3--a promise she made to Brera, not Ozma, and was a point of confusion back at the original airing. Also, some of Alto's more braindead moves of impulsiveness make more sense in the light that he really did join up with SMS originally for Ranka's sake. And there's this moment where Alto's fiddling vainly with his hair, right before he head off to cheer for Ranka in the Miss Macross contest in episode 4--it's almost immediately overshadowed by him getting pissed off over the prank Bobby pulled with the cosmetics. Anyway, I was reflecting on the last few minutes of the last episode again, and it struck me that what was going with the interplay between the girls was Ranka being acknowledged as Sheryl's equal. In the rest of the series, Sheryl and Ranka have had a mentor-mentee relationship, with Sheryl clearly being the one Ranka looks up to. This faded a bit with Ranka's Cinderella-like rise and seeming usurpation of Sheryl's position, but ultimately this was a false start--Ranka couldn't sustain it, as she failed to cope with her heartbreak over Alto. At the very end, what I think we get is an acknowledgment from both girls that the mentor-mentee relationship is over--they are now truly equals. Ranka declares, rather hesitantly, that she'll fight Sheryl in love and song. Sheryl accepts, returning with Ranka's own kira gesture. Ranka seems a bit overwhelmed by that--and I think it's because she realizes Sheryl, the idol she used to look up to so much, now considers her a peer, not just an up-and-comer. There's recognition there from both sides, after all they've been through together, that from here on, they'll be true (if friendly) rivals. Since in many respects, Sheryl ends as high as she started (with a personal lesson or two learned along the way), this is mostly about acknowledging Ranka's rise. In that light, I think it's only appropriate that the love triangle ended unresolved, because it's only now that the two are really competing on an equal footing, with equal strength and confidence. Personally, I don't think there's a harem in the cards--I think everyone in the triangle wants a choice made, eventually--but it will be resolved in the fullness of time, not because the Vajra threat was neutralized a few minutes earlier and demanding viewers want an answer right now. Anyway, time to be getting back to my rewatching schedule. Can't wait to see what hindsight illuminates next.

I have a headache from catching up on this thread and reading nothing but pages of shipping discussion. Ick. I'm as fond of on-screen romances as the next guy (well, maybe more than the next guy), but it's almost like in these last few pages, nothing else happened in the episode. Anyway, I'm hoping everyone's decided to just let it rest now. My own stance on the whole matter is pretty much the same as Gubaba's. I guess one problem with this being the final episode, is that there's no logical place to end the discussion.

The problem I see with this is that a movie always has to be capable of being a standalone product as well. When you make a movie, you go into it with the expectation that yes, your loyal fans who sat through 25 episodes are almost certain to want to watch it, but you also have an audience that might have heard about this Macross Frontier thing, but doesn't want to sit down to watch 8-10 hours of episodes for context first. You don't have to rehash the whole story, but you can't make something that only followers of the TV series would be interested in, either. The SDFM continuation worked because it was a continuation. You were already following along with the TV series, you just got more of it. A movie, especially one that goes to theaters rather than directly to video, doesn't have that luxury. So I don't think it can take the same approach, where things almost seemed to wind down for 10 episodes, things slowly resolving themselves, before picking up again in the final episode. Nobody (well, nobody sane) is going to make a movie where the only thing that happens is that loose ends from the TV series are wrapped up. I do agree that a post-war, colonization scenario is plausible, though (although only one of many possible plots). It might be a lot like those Macross 7 episodes where they discovered and explored Protoculture ruins. There are still a lot of mysteries left on the Vajra planet, now that the Frontier fleet is no longer on a journey, but has actually arrived somewhere.

I think the ultimate message is that AI was given a bad rap. AI/technology is neither good nor bad, it's all about how you use it. You had both the evil Ghost V-9s from Galaxy, and Luca's more heroic Ghosts, fighting on opposite sides. You had evil and good humans on opposite sides, too. From episode 1, we get the impression that humanity froze AI development in its tracks after the Sharon Apple incident. I think Luca's moment in the sun is a recognition that this was ultimately an overreaction, blaming the tool instead of the user. The Judah system isn't good or bad, it's neither.

Ah, it may have been written out on screen, but how do we know that Baby Sheryl is really Sheryl? I refuse to believe that Sheryl Nome is Mao Nome's granddaughter without an entire episode devoted to the subject, flashing back to Sheryl's entire family history, from the day her parents conceive her, to the day she's picked up by Grace on Galaxy. You know, it's an entirely legitimate point. There's enough wiggle room to still say Sheryl isn't Mao's granddaughter. But it's so ludicrous, you instinctively want to apply Occam's Razor and reject that position as making no sense. At some point, people just need to accept that a cigar is just a cigar, and stop treating everything with disbelief. It's a story, not a documentary. Everything you see and hear was put in there for a reason.

The Frontier movie will be a longer rehash of Flashback 2012: It'll open with Alto and Sheryl's wedding, several years after the events of Macross Frontier. Then for the remainder of the movie, a somewhat disappointed Ranka and her pet Vajra, Ai-kun (and maybe Brera) will go on a quest to find the truth about the Vajra planet. Hilarity ensues.

You mean like Ranka?

*snicker* You must be new to this shipping thing. Once it's resolved, the shipping wars only get worse. Official Couple (tvtropes.org) One True Pairing (tvtropes.org) Well, a clip movie might fit the bill here, then. I agree that it's too new to do a remake already, but there's two ways I read the movie news: Either they want to do another story in the Frontier time frame (which is what I'm sure we're all hoping for), or they're doing a theatrical version of the TV series in order to get even more exposure (and increase the return on investment for all that expensive CGI, of course ). I'd say it's about 60-40 at this point.

I predict the Frontier movie will resolve the relationship... between Luca and Nanase.

I was actually sorta impressed how many things people were speculating on turned out to be true in the final episode. That said, the Frontier speculation got to the point where you were throwing the kitchen sink at the wall and seeing if it stuck, so I'm not all that impressed by the correct guesses. On the whole, I think this thread is kinda silly if you also don't include the 95% of things you got wrong with the 5% of things you actually got right.

Great episode. I'm not surprised that there was a significant fraction of negative reactions this time--you'll never make everyone happy, and some people seemed to set themselves up for disappointment, with demands that everything be resolved at a deliberate pace, in loving detail. Final episodes are, well, final, after all. No more room to take a "wait and see" approach. I think it's a bit inaccurate to describe this episode as "rushed." Extremely fast-paced, yes, and on the first viewing, I don't think it always worked (it's been bothering me less on subsequent viewings, I must admit), but rushed implies that they had to go at this frenetic pace because they were running out of time. On the contrary, I think the crazy pace of the finale was planned for some time now. They wanted to go out with a big bang, a single episode to cap off everything in one furious explosion of action. Pushing things along at breakneck speed isn't exactly something unique to the final episode, and animation isn't like live action--you don't get to episode 25 and suddenly realize, hey, I need to film a final episode with everything in it. You need to have started the process months in advance, and the level of control animation provides allows you to pull off something where every frame counts. It's one of the unique things about the medium. That said, I don't know if I personally like it (I wasn't too fond of it in earlier episodes, either), or if it entirely works, but it's still very awesome, and repeat viewings really do help resolve the overall action in my mind. I hope future Macrosses try to slow things down in the future, though. Also, I don't know if the Blu-ray version will try to extend some sequences out, since extra scenes are sorta traditional for something like this. I expect so, although that might compromise the intended pacing. Probably have two versions, similar to the first episode's multiple versions. I'm sorta branching off into series discussion now, but I think you need to look at the finale in the context of the series as a whole to really be satisfied with it. Macross Frontier is really a much less epic story than the original Macross was. We're dealing with a single colonization fleet and a tightly-interconnected group of characters, with the threat localized (until the very end), while the original Macross told a story about a massive clash of civilizations, involving the fate of all of humanity. In that sense, Frontier is much more like Macross 7 than it first seemed. It's not so much a new SDF Macross, as a new Macross 7, and if you expected one I can understand how you might be upset that you got the other. The GG sub actually has multiple subtitle tracks, and (get this), a 2.0 and 5.1 audio track. There's your extra 300 MB or so right there. (This is, incidentally, one of the big advantages of the MKV format. Understandable how people who just want to watch the episode don't want to deal with that complexity, though.) I originally thought the video stream was just larger to accommodate the extra action, but multichannel audio tracks do tend to take up a lot of space, and the video stream wouldn't need to be twice as big to accommodate the action in this episode. I think the song medley was to emphasize the point that there were two different, individual voices, the thing that made the Vajra finally understand human individuality. When the songs clash, it's to demonstrate that sometimes humans are in conflict, but when they work together, it's showing individuals can work together, too. Only a hive mind can sing in perfect unison, like the Vajra do. Actually, I took the whole final scene with Bilrer to reflect his disappointment that things hadn't turned out the way he had hoped after all. Anticlimactic for him, maybe, but actually sorta sweet for the fans. He misses Minmay, and thought he'd found a way to finally meet her, but in the end, there was no way for him to do that without resorting to Grace-like evil... Incidentally, I don't know if Grace really saw herself as evil. She assumed everyone else would want what she wanted ("ultimate human evolution": fusion with the Vajra, becoming a galaxy-spanning superbeing, something the Protoculture had never achieved), and couldn't understand why anyone wouldn't want that. Maybe she finally understood that at the end, although I took her final expression to be more of hangover from being disconnected from the galaxy-spanning consciousness of the Vajra. To have known, felt all that... and then lost it. I agree the VF-27s were piloted, buuuuuuuuut... How often do we actually see, in the flesh, not via a video feed, the actual crew of any Galaxy spacecraft? No cannon fodder bridge crews or pilots or anything. I think that's suspicious enough alone. Large portions of the Galaxy populace may spend most of their time uploaded into cyberspace, or at least their military. It might be an interesting topic to explore in the movie, if it continues the story, rather than repeats it. GitS, Macross-style? I read even more into it than that. I think Luca admired Sharon Apple (seeing as how he loves his machines ), even though she ended up being highly unstable. He gave his Ghosts the same abilities, and when he unleashed them, it was like giving Sharon and AI in general a chance to prove herself all over again, without Myung's dysfunctional emotions mucking her up. What I think really emphasizes this point is how one of his Ghosts, despite being in autonomous mode, sacrifices itself to save him by intercepting a shot, without him apparently even noticing. This was ultimately a vindication for his belief that AI wasn't inherently evil, that it could be loyal and selfless, too. The reputation of AI will probably be rehabilitated in any future Macross series; kinda an odd spin on one of the messages of Macross Plus. I also found this to be the saddest part of the entire final episode. Poor guys. I concur. I don't really see the "harem" ending so many others seem to. The whole "song/love war" thing seems to be more like, "Hey, we don't have to figure this out in 25 episodes. We have full lives ahead of us now." Since Sheryl isn't dying anymore, and the series has a happy ending for the fleet, why not leave things open-ended? It'll resolve itself in the course of time, and neither Sheryl nor Ranka has to feel rejected. Everyone has time to explore their true feelings. If the Frontier movie continues the story, I could really go for this sort of thing. Maybe something light-hearted, Dynamite 7-style, now that the central conflict has been won.

I remember seeing this a while ago. The speech bubbles are in Korean, incidentally, if anyone's trying to translate them.

Silly person. It's a pre-emptive strike so the Zentradi invasion doesn't interrupt the broadcast of episode 25. Once that's done, then we can get on with fighting Space War I.

That was exactly my point. In Japan, they say they're doing whaling for research and they're actually doing it for food. In Frontier, they're doing it for research, and the joke is that maybe they're really doing it for food. The joke is in the reversal. As for how much the Japanese actually like their whale meat: "Defiant Japan to Promote Eating Whale Meat" (1993) "Whaling: A Japanese Obsession With American Roots" (2007) Apparently, it's more something the older generation grew accustomed to, but isn't very popular with younger folks.

Caught something today... Remember that scene at the beginning with Alto towing a string of Vajra corpses behind him? Well, I just picked up that the whole thing was sorta an oblique commentary on Japanese whaling practices. If you're not familiar with this, Japan has a practice of having "research" fleets that go around harvesting "specimens" (in very large numbers) of various kinds of whales (mainly minke, I think). Of course, they end up with a lot of extra meat... (Incidentally, it apparently tastes disgusting; they need special government programs just to get people to eat it, raising the question about the whole point in the first place. But that's getting political.) Anyway, what's Alto doing? As the bridge crew comments, harvesting a bunch of Vajra, perhaps for research. And the joke is that they're actually doing it for food. Kinda hard to catch if you're not familiar with Japan's whaling controversy. I wonder if this has any broader meaning, though. Vajra as the new space whales? Kawamori just making an obscure environmental statement?

I'm surprised you come back to the forums without having finished the current episodes. It's a walking deathtrap of spoiler mines. Especially with the final episode coming up... Anyway, yeah, this was a pretty sweet recap episode. It's almost immediately followed by a lot of WTF moments, though.

I doubt Leon's doing it for the same reason Grace is. He probably doesn't know all the details about the real potential of the Vajra. I think his ambition more lies along destroying the Vajra, settling the fleet, and becoming a big hero, thereby catapulting his political career to a galaxy-wide scale, burning of the Reichstag-style. It really doesn't matter what his motivation is, though, because whatever he wants, he's not going to get even close. Bilrer's motivation is still a bit mysterious. He says it's about transportation... but he's not exactly the most forthcoming guy. We definitely know what Grace is up to, though her motivation isn't as simple as mere galactic domination. It's the way she wants to dominate the galaxy. She doesn't just want to forge a single empire (as Leon probably wants), but she wants to merge all the sentient species of the galaxy into a single mind. It'd almost be admirable if it weren't also completely murderous. Galaxy may have slightly different goals than Grace (they probably don't want Grace as the central goddess in the system any more than anybody else does); I'm sure we'll find out in the final episode if there's any conflict between them. I agree that Grace and Leon don't exactly have the most original ambitions (although it's notable that nobody's succeeded yet), but I don't think a story needs original motivations to be interesting. Quite the opposite, in fact; novelty for the sake of novelty is poor storytelling. The villainous factions have familiar objectives we can identify with. It's all about the execution, though. And it's not like we want either of them to win, right? Riiight? Personally, if the final episode is going to have any unexpected revelations (and I'm sure it will), I'd rather they be focused on the good guys, and maybe Bilrer (whose alignment I'm still unsure about). Macross Frontier doesn't have to close with a grand message to still be a good show. I wonder if there's going to be a "Yakk Deculture!" version of the final, though. I wouldn't be surprised if they ended up with some footage that they don't have time for in the broadcast edition. Or maybe there'll be bonus episodes or something on the BD. Anyone know what's airing the week after Frontier? I'm wondering if it's definitely not Frontier-related.

Really? Because I hear it all the time. Anyway, I just realized... the final episode (which is #25), of the series commemorating the 25th anniversary of Macross, is being broadcast on September 25, at 25:25. That's just insane. Maybe there's a 26th episode, but they're not counting it to make the numerology work.

You have an interesting definition of "simplest."

You know, that line about Ranshe and Mao's blood fighting... doesn't it seem like Grace/Galaxy really has it out for the Zentradi? I can't help but feel there's some sort of reason for it. Bilrer's suspicious of her. The Kaitos looks more like a Zentradi design than the Dulfim, and is apparently sacrificed (if the attack on the Galaxy fleet was as exaggerated as it seems). The whole 33rd incident goes without saying. No (macronized?) Zentradi allowed in the entire Galaxy fleet. The Zentradi recreational island was sacrificed/had the DE on it. Frontier has a liberal policy towards Zentradi, and becomes targeted by Galaxy. Considering the short shrift they keep getting, I can't help but think it's intentional. Maybe it's just plain racism? Galaxy's full of human supremacists? (Would explain Grace's world view.) Or is there something about the Zentradi that makes them a threat/incompatible with their grand plan? Another thing: The Dulfim was put into quarantine as soon as it arrived at the Frontier fleet. Perhaps it was never released... would explain why nobody ever saw what went on there, except perhaps for Leon's men... who were in on the conspiracy. (By the way, I like the idea that Bilrer really wants to meet Minmay. I don't think it's a good idea for the show to go there, but it'd be fun if Bilrer was doing all this because he's a typical Zentradi fanboy.)