Gundam 00 S2 Episode 2: Twin Drives

This episode builds up from episode 1 as setsuna gathers the remaining personnel for celestial being, namely Lynes and Sumeragi. There sure is a lot of hints and questions of future plots from the OP and ED so I will just note down my thoughts together with a brief summary. I have many pictures which I wish to caption but due to time constraint, I could only insert all of them as a gallery and hyperlink them to my ‘review/summary’. Hope you guys enjoy the screenies as much as I do.

3 months ago

Celestial Being tested out their new technology : Twin drive which was given together with Trans-am. However, all possible combinations of the other 3 gundams failed to align with the original 0 gundam GN-Drive. We come to know later that in simulations, 0 Gundam GN-Drive managed to align to the highest ratio together with Exia’s furnace. My guess is that exia’s GN-Drive is either a carbon copy of the original 0 gundam’s GN-Drive or derived from it. And oh, check out 003 in the gallery, pretty interesting news in the top right hand corner. I Lol-ed at the ‘read manual’ warnings.

New OP

The OP starts off with a brief flashback of the 5 gundams in the first season and then shows Saji walking alone instead of being together with lousie as it was in the OP for the first season. Lousie seems sad together with colonel Sergei Smirnov’s son. I wonder why. Peries isn’t too happy colonel Sergei Smirnov ain’t on good terms with colonel’s son either. Allelujah remains caged but the three gundams are coming for him next episode! Kataron, anti-government organisation is lead by Shirin Bakhtiar and klaus. Patrick is still not to be seen in the OP nor this episode but we do see a lot of Kati Mannequin directing attacks on Celestial Being in the OP. Neena will pilot a new throne? Who knows. We see setsuna reaching out for Princess Marina in the OP but fails to grab her. However, we see a group photo shot of Kataron and Princess marina so there may be hope for the princess. There may be hints of lousie and Ali pitched against Lockon and allelujah but can’t say for sure but what’s for sure is the last boss for setsuna is once again : Masked Graham in unknown GN-Driven machine. Ribbons has many clones of his innovators as well which reminds me of that couple pilot from zegapain.

When old meets new

On both sides, new recruits and veterans are roped in for preparation for the eventual clash. Lyle Dylandy, younger brother of Neil Dylandy was reluctant and doubtful until Setsuna gave him information of future operations of Federation on Kataron. Kati Mannequin meets 1LT Peries and her new boyfriend, 2LT Andrei. Tough luck for the guy here, the female outranks the male! Graham checks them out while savouring coffee, musing to himself on the speed at which they were activated by the commander katagiri.

Work to be done

Ian Vashti and tiera works on the new technology of Twin Drive which we learn will square the output of the particles instead of just doubling it. I see that both the subbers and the script writers have been taking their physics classes seriously as the terms used such as ‘coupling, ground state of high state’ etc. are proper scientific terms. Mileina Vashti and Lasse Aeon brought Saji his meal and left a Red Haro for him to play around with. Saji remains naive and dumb, wanting to be released. Lasse informs him that A-Laws wants him dead and that they don’t really give a damn whether they were wrong or right. The resulting conversation came up with the conclusion that Celestial Being feels obliged to right their errors of forcing the world to change when it wasn’t time yet. Saji gets owned in all his rebuttals and decided to ask about setsuna’s welfare. Like he cares.

Relevations

Setsuna unceremoniously revealed Sumeragi Lee’s identity to Billy in order to separate her from him. What a freaking security leak. Not only did he pissed off the nephew of the commander of A-Laws, I’m sure Billy would want Sumeragi very dead soon enough after 99 hrs of emo. Lynes managed to verify the information that setsuna passes him and contacts someone in kataron using the codename Gene-1.Ian and tiera finds out practically (check out the top right hand corner folders’ names =D )that their theory of exia+00 doesn’t activate and could not stabilise the drives. Saji plays pinball on the UMPC HMPC(Hologramic Mobile Personal Computer) through red haro and discovers that setsuna was not responsible for the attacks in spain on Louise family. Looks like neena will have a stalker with a thirst for blood soon enough.

The Gathering of the Beings

Setsuna practically drags Sumeragi back to CB while she went on and on how she is weak and just wants to run away from correcting their wrongs. Setsuna remains GAR and drags her to meet the new meister, lockon stratos.

Shocking developments.

Unknowing to Setsuna nor sumeragi, the new lockon’s loyalty may lie elsewhere, namely Kataron. Kataron leaders including klaus and Shirin were discussing the current Federation plans of expansion to occupy resisting countries which apparently includes Kingdom of Azadistan from the look on Shirin’s face. Unsurprisingly, the next scene shows Princess Marina being arrested by stormtroopers federation troops. The focus shifts to Ms Wang and her slavemen in her mega-mansion, Hong long who is displeased with Ms Wang and unconvinced of her explanation for revealing Celestial Being’s location to Ribbons. Neena appears(did she REALLY have to do that?) just in time to inform Celestial Being that A-Laws have found out their location. Considering how they came across the information, it is really ironic.

Pre-emptive strike

Ribbons thought speak with one of his female version of tiera and transmit the newly acquired info to one of A-Laws battleships. The commander of the ship immediately orders a strikeforce out to engage Celestial Being but did not include Louis as part of the force. Celestial Being responds by sending out Seravee Gundam. In their mini-craft, Sumeragi kicks into action the moment the A-Laws formation was observed. With the MAGIC TOUCH™ of her index finger, she transfer a strategy plan within seconds, I am so awed =O With a new plan, Ptolemaios II unloads their payload of missiles which took out most of the GN-XIII. It also appears that the new lockon stratos has a sharp mind as well as he expresses comprehension of Sumeragi’s magic plan. Seravee charges and compresses GN-particles with bigheadgundam taking out crippled GN-XIII. Unfortunately, two Aheads and 1 GN-XIII survived and 1 Ahead engages seravee while the rest aimed for the ship.

00 launches!

Setsuna decides to do some space acrobatics while leaving the mini spacecraft in the hands of lockon stratos who doesn’t seem too confident about his piloting skills. With one final 360 degrees manuvuer, setsuna lands perfectly in the cockpit and activates trans-am in an attempt to force boot it with limited success. With Ian and tiera having tried their best using scientific approaches, Setsuna manages to boot it up just with a ‘0, Exia and me’ warcry. Of course Bandai had to came up with an explanation and the reason there’s time lag in booting up, just like booting up windows mobile 6 takes forever as compared to say iphone. Without further ado, 00 took all of them out with his imba movement speed, attack speed and damage. He has invulernability called the windmill-blows-it-all-away. He deals critical of 2.2 with every hit and even with smoke causing him unable to cast spells fire beam weapons, it was easily taken care of with normal melee attacks despite facing a superior range hero. Incidentally, I thought the script writers might have been inspired by Intel’s Core 2 Duo just looking at this screenie. Ribbon doesn’t look too happy and even one of his innovators gloat about his lack of knowledge about the twin GN-Drive technology. Careful there innovator, he could easily put you out and replace you in a second. Guess having more than one GN-Drive as we saw in the last episode of Gundam 00 Season 1 is different from the Twin Drive technology on 00 Gundam.

The ED

Lyle is shown holding a gun while being caress by an unknown woman. Anyone reckon a wild guess? Yea yea, pieres and Allelujah but my money is on pieres and andrei. By the way, did anyone notice how FAMILIAR that symbol on Ahead looked? Look again. Saji with the wedding ring wants to stop Lousie holding the gun. Bad move bad move. Tiera and the innovators. What’s the link? New Lockon meets new crew, Fledt goes all glassy over him, I bet ya if Lockon betrays Celestial Being, he will definitely be using her.

Next Episode : The Strategy to rescue Allelujah

Billy is almost at 99 hrs of emo and will morph into a black undead 9/9 creature with trample haste and indestrutible. Princess Marina remains caged. Neena is activated. Pieres interviews Allelujah. Louis meets Andrei, no please no. And pointing guns at each other is the cool thing next episode.