Short Synopsis: The Ptolemy is tracked down and the innovators again continue their attack, while Setsuna is away and injured.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 7,5/10 (Good)
Haha! Finally the thing that I’ve been anticipating the most in this series happened: the coup d’etat. Now the fun is really going to start. Let’s see whether that was something that the innovators took into account. My guess is that they too never saw it coming, otherwise they wouldn’t be unleashing an attack at the last possible minute. This coup is definitely going to take care of the one-sidedness of the politics so far in the second season so far (with A-Laws being the equivalent of an evil empire and all).

I’m also glad that in this episode, Saji and Louise finally knew their place: simply as side characters. The battle in this episode put them against each other again, but instead of completely claiming all of the focus their scenes were short and to the point. That’s definitely making their appearance a whole lot more bearable.

The big focus of this episode instead was on Setsuna and Marina, who got to spend some quality time together. Let’s hope that this is going to inspire her to actually DO something relevant to the plot (in fact, it’s going to be interesting to see how Kataron is going to evolve after the coup).

And it has also finally happened: Celestial Beings aren’t the only ones with a Trans-am anymore, and I can already see the system being mass produced before the end of the series, degrading Lockon and Allelujah’s mobile suits to your average custom suits. Tieria’s special powers also have been pretty much useless throughout the series, so the only advantage that the celestial beings have right now is 00-Riser’s mysterious communication powers. Unlike the first season, there’s really not much room anymore for the creators to give any upgrades to the Gundams, so right now it’s going to be a matter of seeing how long they can survive.

Unlike certain other Sunrise series, this show has already shown that this is a series where people die when they’re killed, so the corpses should start falling pretty soon. After all, Gundam 00 has been a show with many references to past Gundam series (and at the same time it managed to keep its own identity, unlike Gundam Seed which if I understood correctly simply completely copied the UC timeline), so I doubt that the creators aren’t going to ignore Tomino’s “nickname”.

Short Synopsis: Rina arranges a new job for Tooya.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 7,5/10 (Good)
I’m starting to like this series more and more. The writing is very subtle, and likes to skip scenes of dialogue, to instead just show the expressions on the characters’ faces. And especially with Rina: it’s really hard to try and understand what she’s thinking. Why is she so specifically hitting on the boyfriend of one of her good friends? The girl is a very good actress, so it’s hard to tell where she was simply putting up an act or genuine, and the writers of this series are really good at switching the impression the viewers are supposed to get of her multiple times within one episode.

First, she invites Tooya to a job: be Rina’s assistant manager. When he arrives for his first day, Rina turns out to have fired her old manager, so that Tooya has to become her main manager. Then, after seeing Tooya and Yuki flirting with each other while she was rehearsing, she smacks Tooya (twice) and a day later he’s fired. Then it turns out that it wasn’t Rina who fired him, but her brother. Yuki was also supposed to have a day off at Saturday, which she planned to spend together with Tooya, but this was cancelled due to a sudden job that came up. I’m not sure whether Rina was behind that one too, but the possibility is definitely there.

I’m surprised at how badly this series is received. Weren’t shows with cute girls and eroge adaptations supposed to be popular? In any case, I like this series, and how it intentionally waits with playing all of its trumps in the first round. There’s a lot going on in this series, but most of it is still pretty much hidden, and instead the creators go for a slow but solid and natural progression of events.

It’s a shame that the animation quality went down this episode, but that was to be expected. Now I just hope that the creators have enough budget to return back to the same quality of the first episode (a la Birdy the Mighty), but I do fear that the biggest part of the animation budget was blown on the first two episodes like you see with most short series like this one.