Last week, I said that Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX‘s remixing of the original Gundam continuity was letting several of the original series’ biggest characters haunt the narrative, from the absent Amuro Ray, to the slightly less absent Char Aznable, and then the one figure who’s really been skirting around the edges of GQuuuuuuX‘s periphery in earnest, the mysterious Lalah Sune. This week, Lalah stopped skirting… and then some.
To the surprise of no one after last week’s setup, episode nine of GQuuuuuuX, “The Rose of Sharon,” is indeed for the most part about Lalah Sune making her way into the series’ narrative, as Machu manages to escape confinement with the GQuuuuuuX and head to Earth, where she finds Lalah forced to work at a lavish brothel. But while this Lalah is indeed a Newtype—regaling staff and Machu alike of the visions she sees in her dreams—she is not the Rose of Sharon that Machu was seeking in her hopes to be reunited with Shuji.
Instead, this Lalah is almost haunted by what has come to pass, her Newtypism not really granting her a vision of the future, but what was, as GQuuuuuuX offers yet another spin on a classic scene from the 1979 anime. Floating in the cosmic glow that represents the connection forged between Newtypes, Lalah flatly explains that the future she sees is her own: the future of another Lalah, a young woman who meets a young Zeon officer in red who whisks her to the stars… a Lalah who falls in love with that man, and also his rival, as she dies in battle saving the former from the latter. What the Lalah of GQuuuuuuX sees beyond time, as she says to Machu, is the original story of Mobile Suit Gundam.
The implication then that GQuuuuuuX‘s remixed timeline of the Universal Century co-exists alongside Gundam‘s original one, in some capacity, already raises a bunch of fascinating questions, but things only get more interesting in the episode’s climactic moments, when we and Machu alike discover that the Lalah was right when she told them that she is not the rose neither she, nor Shuji, nor everyone else has been looking for after it went missing…
Because another Lalah Sune is. The Lalah Sune, if you will. Hidden for years at the bottom of the ocean until Machu and the GQuuuuuuX find it, Lalah’s mobile armor the Elmeth, locked in time from the moment of her death in the 1979 anime, has some how become an almighty object of vast psionic power, a Newtype beacon that has transitioned across this divergent timeline, calling out to the generation of Newtypes that forged it in the first place in characters like Char and Lalah, but also the generation that has grown beyond them in this new timeline, like Machu, Nyaan, and Shuji.
Of course, Gundam is no stranger to the alternate reality trend that has become du jour in contemporary pop culture. It’s been on it for decades at this point, when Mobile Fighter G Gundam created the first alternate Gundam universe to exist on TV outside of the stories that had been told in the Universal Century setting. Ever since we’ve had a bunch of other alternate realities to provide the setting to new Gundam series, we’ve had realities that, like GQuuuuuuX, has mirrored and riffed on the Universal Century stories to create their own echoes of its ideas. Hell, Turn A Gundam presented a vision where its setting was a far-flung future after a “Dark History” that eradicated humanity back to a technological reset—one that touched upon every corner of Gundam continuity up to that point in some way, a comment on the cyclical nature of historical trends, while also symbolically honoring the entire metatext of the franchise up to that point, regardless of continuity.
Suffice to say, the coexistence of a GQuuuuuuX timeline, with all its changes, and that potential of the original timeline alongside it, is not exactly unfamiliar territory that Gundam is wading into as it explores all this. With GQuuuuuuX having just a few more episodes to lay out what exactly it wants to say in all this remixing and meta-commentary, time will tell if all these self-referential reveals will result in the series creating something additive to that vast canon—or if its wild evocations are simply designed to spin the heads of diehard fans.
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