This is primarily a review of just the second season (or second cour) of Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury, rather than a review of the show as a whole, but I do discuss a few spoilers from both seasons. If you want to avoid those, or just don’t want to have to read the entire thing, then feel free to skip to the last paragraph right at the bottom of the review, after the last rainbow breaker.
I tend to do my best to stay away from any kind of discourse surrounding the anime that I enjoy, so I have no clue what the public consensus is on this season of Witch from Mercury, but I have the sense that it might be more divisive than last season proved to be in some corners of the internet. For a decent stretch of episodes it managed to build on what the previous season accomplished, mixing compelling character writing with great action and political intrigue in an immersive world, but as the season went on there were more and more cracks noticeable in these central pillars of the show’s appeal. If you're curious on whether this season lives up to its predecessor, or if it represents a slump in the quality of its presentation, I’ll do my best to balance the good and the bad to make it clear why I think it's actually a mix of both, and why I think it was and is still worth watching.
If you happened to have also read my review of the previous season of this anime, you may recall that I spent a chunk of that review talking about how great the character writing was. Some of that still carries over into the second season, with the main cast generally reaching the inevitable endpoint of the paths they were on when we last saw them. There’s immense payoff and emotional impact in Suletta’s journey from being a blank slate for Prospera to impose her will on, to being able to take action independently from what people expect of her or how they may react. This being accomplished by reframing rather than wholly abandoning the perseverance that defined her character in the previous season of the show. Guel Jeturk - whose name will never stop being funny to me - goes through a similar reframing, with a return to his father’s company, but with a desire to do the right thing replacing his desire to prove himself. A lot of the characters in this anime find themselves in effectively the same place they’ve always been or even always tried to escape, but in completely different circumstances after confronting the delusions that once held them as prisoners. That progression might seem to take place a bit too quickly in some cases, with Miorine getting over her slump almost instantly - at least from the audience’s perspective - but it never feels unearned or out of place. Well, never may not be the right word there, as the faster pacing of the last half of this season does result in moments where character motivations start to get a little lost or muddled, like Lauda’s arc towards the end in particular, and even Shaddiq to an extent.
Rushed pacing took away from the appeal of the show and made the last few episodes a bit of a mixed bag. For one thing, my enjoyment of action scenes a lot of the time is tied directly to how much I care about the characters involved in those scenes, what they have to lose and what it is they fight for. When you have Lauda and Guel in this pointless feud in the final stretch, it’s difficult to even bother paying attention to what’s going on, likewise with Shaddiq somehow blaming and attacking Guel for certain developments that take place on Earth. It felt like the show was missing a few scenes to bridge the gap in the characters’ logic between what occurred and how they reacted to it. I understand that what ultimately matters the most is not whether a character is strictly rational, but whether that character is believable and consistent. My constant criteria for what I consider good character writing is "does this make sense for this character in this situation, with the information available to them?" In the first season of the show, the answer was always a resounding yes, but here we ended up with different points where - for the sake of advancing the plot or artificially progressing the character - that wasn’t always the case, and again it just made the action that much weaker for me as a result. For what it’s worth though, the pure visual spectacle of it is as great as ever, if not even better, with brand new Mobile Suits and Gundam units coming into play in well choreographed and animated battles.
One last note on the character writing, the first half of this season is really Witch From Mercury at its best on that front, with a number of supporting characters getting to shine. Chuchu routinely coming in as the voice of sanity to hold Suletta and Earth House at large together was a wonderful thing to see, and honestly the highlight of at least a couple of episodes. Sophie and Norea were also welcome additions to the main cast for a period of time and got substantially more development than I expected they would from the roles they had in the attack on Plant Quetta. For the few out of place character motivations or choices we get an abundance of emotionally engaging and interesting characters and scenes from the start right through to the end, and it’s important not to lose sight of that. Everyone here has flaws and fears that make them feel human, and that make their high points or happiest moments resonate so strongly, even Elan has a positive, heartwarming moment in choosing to carry the spirit and will of another character with him, reconnecting with the value of human life in general, and his own life. I can’t emphasise enough that just because there’s a few missteps doesn’t mean that this season completely shat the bed on this aspect of its character writing
Moving on from the characters to address the setting of the story itself, we have another instance of the show suffering because it tried to do too much too fast to reach its endpoint. I loved how both the prologue and the first season only gave the audience the essentials in terms of worldbuilding so as to make the anime immersive but not overwhelming, but this season shows the limits of that approach in the long-term. As things stand, I actually no longer think there will be another season, so for the time being the Assembly League almost coming out of nowhere and disturbing the internal politics of the Benerit group, which itself had just begun to reap the effects of having intervened against the Vanadis institute, created an interlocking chain without an easily discernible start or endpoint when it comes to the different factions in this world. I just ended up not sure who was even on what side anymore at some point, and what their roles were in relation to each other. When you start to cram in so much stuff, explaining or introducing things a bit more beforehand is quite helpful, and probably would’ve helped make the experience of watching this weekly more seamless. With all of that said, I think the role of the Assembly League works quite well thematically even if I’m not quite certain of its position in the narrative, and that leads on into a brief glance at what makes this anime so great even when other aspects of its writing start to falter a little.
If the core focus of the original Mobile Suit Gundam series was the dehumanising nature of war, then Witch From Mercury shifts that focus onto the role of corporate interests in deepening and perpetuating wars. Through the system of war partitioning, the different arms of the Benerit Group - as well as presumably other competing corporations - are able to fund the conflicts that have left the people of Earth under constant threat of violence and exploitation. This occuring while those same people have no say or influence whatsoever over the corporations that profit from selling weapons and technology to their proxies on Earth. The Assembly League, while ostensibly some kind of overarching government, is merely an extension of this system for mediating corporate rivalries, as it only finally makes its move against the Benerit group not as a neutral arbiter but as a tool to further the interests of one corporation over another. If this does turn out to be the end of the show as a whole, then it does leave something to be desired in terms of fully expressing or demonstrating its ideas on both corporate greed and the symbiotic relationship between corporations and governments, but the final episode does end on what could be an ideal path forward in the upliftment of the Earth. The “Earthian” quest for freedom didn’t get as much of a spotlight as it perhaps could have either, but different ideas of freedom remained as the core motivating factor for the decisions undertaken by the different members of the main cast. It’s not a coincidence that the physical form of Quiet Zero that we do get to see in the show resembles a coffin, drawing attention to the irony of Prospera’s methods when you consider that her explicit desire is to use it as an instrument for freedom.
Lastly, it would feel kinda weird to talk about this show without talking about Suletta and Miorine together, but if you happen to not care much for what I have to say on their relationship, or you want to avoid spoilers on the possible status of that relationship, you can keep reading without clicking on the text that’s in the spoiler tag below:
With all that said, this season of Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury had a few rough moments, and perhaps tried to do more than it realistically could with its allotment of episodes, but even when the cracks started to show thanks to patchy pacing, it still held on to the themes and engaging characters that were a big part of what kept me watching the previous season anyway. If this is indeed the end of the show, then it may not have gone far enough in expanding on certain threads and ideas, but it delivered enough to be both a worthy successor and a satisfying end for anyone who was a fan of the prior season. For that reason it gets a score of 79 out of 100, a bit of a step down from the first season, but still more than worthwhile both on its own terms and as a continuation of the story.
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