I tried my best not to spoil Zeta Gundam, so no character deaths will be listed here. This review is specifically about the final episode.

When Yoshiyuki Tomino created Mobile Suit Gundam, I wouldn't say that how he changed anime wasn't as dramatic as people claim. For a long time in the 1970s, creators had been steadily depicting more and more out there and less child friendly things, that had ironically enraptured children as well as young adults and teenagers. To roll back the clock just a few years before Gundam's debut, you could see this mindset in things like Muteki Koujin Zambot 3, an anime series very much about the "real" war stories and the "real" war, terms that people would later use to talk about Gundam. At around the same time you have Ken Ishikawa writing Getter Robo which slowly transformed to be more mature than its toy commercial beginnings, or Go Nagai pushing the boundaries in many of his works.

What the creation of Mobile Suit Gundam did was fully speak the words many creators had wanted to hear at the time, and it wasn't just because the main characters had interpersonal drama, or seeing large amounts of destruction portrayed as a bad thing, and it wasn't seeing these giant machines, ostensibly made to sell toys, be destroyed. What Tomino did was in a sense make our characters the machines, so the machines could act as characters. When you see a Zaku gets destroyed in 0079, you don't just see it explode, you see the pilot inside viscously die and cry out one last time. Not only has the machine in effect "died", but so has the one piloting it, and you are forced to see this happen. This element, in addition to the others listed above (and generally a less episodic structure) is what made Gundam a bigger deal than something like Zambot 3.

This is all important for what I'm about to discuss as death is very important in Zeta Gundam, anyone who has seen the anime would know this. It's not a pure "Kill 'em all Tomino" moment, but the body count is high. This all comes to an end in the final episode, when Kamille and Scirocco confront each other.

Scirocco is one of many antagonists in Zeta, but he is ultimately the one we have known the most up to this point (I don't consider Jerid as much an antagonist as I do a rival for Kamille), and we have seen the atrocities committed under his command. When Kamille calls out Scirocco for thinking of war as a game, he's absolutely correct. He did not see these pilots as people, he saw them as machines, cogs in this greater war. Despite being a newtype himself, he doesn't see the truth, or rather, he ignore the truth. These people and their giant robots have become one.

So, ultimately, when Kamille fights Scirocco in the Zeta Gundam, he wins through the strength of those whose wills he carries with him. Everyone who he has managed to find connection with in this brutal war comes to help him, and with that he declares that he feels a power moving through him, and it always gets a chuckle out of me when Scirocco says "How can that defeat a mobile suit?" He could never understand the power of the human spirit that lays inside these machines, these machines engineered for death and destruction that now carry the spirits of the deceased with them, spirits that amplify Kamille's, and the Zeta Gundam's powers into something far greater.

It in a way shows that all this death and destruction wasn't meaningless. These characters who have passed on were able to help Kamille in that final hour, Kamille who had found connection with them, while Scirocco, who had remained apathetic to many of the characters and uncaring of the casualties was left to die.

I didn't really have a whole lot to say about Zeta Gundam in general, but that conclusion, and how it uses death, which has coloured this genre for ages, left a large impression on me. I believe there are many other aspects of Zeta Gundam that are great, but I'd find it more interesting to discuss them under different context.

You will see the tears of time.