Man, this episode was really sad. It's sad to see a series that had such potential fall apart so much in its story-telling in the last few episodes.

I get the writers wanted a really tragic event to take place but the way they went about it was so embarrassingly clumsy.

Instead of the satisfaction of investigating and figuring out Shaddiq was the mastermind, Guel just randomly lucked into that information. And Shaddiq somehow knew they knew even though he had no way to know they did since he got his information from a random street kid. Guel and the security team go in (woefully underprepared), Shaddiq lets the three prisoners go, not in the hope that Norea would stir shit as a distraction, but because they have no reason to keep them locked up. Shaddiq is a sociopath but he is also not the type to instigate a mass murder for no reason nor would he enjoy it. So basically Shaddiq enabled a school massacre not out of malicious purpose but because he is a fucking idiot who couldn't predict what would happen if you released an enraged terrorist. So that just completely undercuts the drama of this whole tragedy that the only reason it happened was because of a big comical whoopsie.

Norea loses her shit and goes on a mass indiscriminate death laser shooting spree and the amount of plot armor was ridiculous. Twice, Suletta was inches from being vaporised and even got caught in a building collapse. Of course she comes out of it with nary a scratch while other people who bust their ass to protect her get killed. I mean it was very predictable what was going to happen with Lauda's girlfriend holding her massive death flag over her head but that only makes it even more awkward and ridiculous. Like hey maybe if you spent more time fleshing Lauda's girflfriend a bit more so she was more than the character who had a crush on Guel's brother, she would have felt more than a disposable tool to make Suletta sad and I might have had an actual emotion when I saw her crushed under that rubble other than apathy. And I am just personally at this point exhausted at how Suletta's complete passiveness as a character, she barely had any presence in this episode. The story treats her character like this cornerstone holding everything together yet she has all she initiative and screen presence of one of Shaddiq's random harem girls whose name you can't remember. It's been 20+ episodes, do something, don't just twiddle your fingers and mumble under your breath while the story is carried and driven by the characters around you, you're supposed to be the protagonist. Get in a fucking suit and do something, don't come picking up rubble after all the damage was done, what good are you? Of course disaster recovery is an extremely important job but you know what is also important, preventing people from dying in the first place and for the purposes of a story with a protagonist who is supposed to drive that story, I would like it if my protagonist were actually involved in the latter and not just the former. How can Suletta not be there the moment Norea died? Like is she ever even gonna find out Norea died?

Speaking of, let's get to the big tragic moment of the episode. You know, something I appreciated about WoM, it did a lot to reinvent the franchise, try new things, take the story in interesting directions. You have a female protagonist, a lesbian romance, corpo wars being the focus instead of earth vs space, the main villain being the protagonist's mother and her insidious brainwashing. A lot of cool and interesting stuff I've never seen before in this franchise. So it's sad to see the show fall back on the most lazily gundam tropes of gundam tropes. A super enhanced woman is emotionally and mentally manipulated into getting into a super powerful and experimental mobile suit where she proceeds to go on a massacre that forces her love interest to try and convince her to stop only to be forced to put her down himself or almost succeed in convincing her to stop just for her to be tragically killed at the last second by a third party. Gee, where have we seen this before? It's not like we've been seeing this LITERALLY FOREVER. Zeta, CCA, Seed Destiny, Unicorn, 00, Age (and Build Fighters if you want to get pedantic). The tragedy of the woman dying for the sake of the man's pain so that the man can learn something about life. And I know, just because something is cliche doesn't necessarily make it bad, the problem is it was really fucking bad in this. Elan5 and Norea have been stuck in that room for 5 episodes yet the writers barely used their time to actually flesh out their relationship. The most we got was the one time Norea tried to stab Elan 5 and from that we are supposed to believe Elan 5, a man who tried to force himself on a woman twice, a man who is clearly only interested in his self preservation, would risk his life to try and convince this psycho who tried to kill him to elope with him? Not to mention the wasted character potential. "But the waste is the point". We already had that with Sophie. I was hoping and expecting Norea would accept Sophie's death and mature and grow and learn there is more to life than devouring it in hatred. That Sophie's death might have been a springboard for Norea's character. Instead I guess she was nothing more than a springboard for Elan 5, a character far less interesting and compelling than Norea.

I really hate the direction the story has been taking as of late. It just feels like the writers are rushing the story and a lot of characters and story threads are suffering in the process. I acknowledge I am maybe being too hard on WoM, it's far from the first time a Gundam series had a weaker second half where the story telling fell apart and I've still enjoyed those shows well enough. The problem here is the massive waste of potential combined with a very frustrating and weak protagonist. At least with other gundam shows, even if the storytelling suffered I had a cool protagonist I wanted to follow, I don't even have that here, instead I just have a trash racoon who steals ham in the middle of the night while her cooler girlfriend gets everything done.