As Macross March marches on, we come to the final major series in the Macross Franchies, Macross Δ – or, to use one’s adult words, Macross Delta. And we approach it with one question: how do things go eight years after Frontier?
That’s both in and out of character. Macross Delta premiered in 2016, and it takes place in 2067, in both cases being 8 years post-Frontier. It’s a smaller out-of-character interval than we’d previously seen between these full-length TV entries, and a dramatically smaller one in terms of the setting. So, how do we start out?
Well, the show quickly tells us that a new threat to humanity has emerged: Var Syndrome. Seemingly related to Fold Bacteria like V-Type from frontier, it causes its victims to become violently psychotic. Outbreaks can be suppressed by application of potent music and thus the first line of defense against Var is the Tactical Sound Unit Walkure, a Var-suppressing idol group that’s part of a combined response team known as Delta Flight. Okay, so presumably it’s something like what we see in the ending of Frontier?
Something that Delta also makes abundantly clear fairly early on is that the expanding humanity has encountered other species than the Zentradi and the Vajra. This is something that was first really introduced in one of the OVAs I’ve been leaving off, but it makes sense – back in Super Dimension Fortress, the Zentradi had some understanding that Miclone species and heirs to the Protoculture existed, and they’d clearly encountered the like before. There was even a quoted taboo or old wisdom against meddling with the same, which Britai ignored, so it’s not unreasonable that other human-like societies, descended from or created by the Protoculture, would be out there. Suffice to say, they step to the forefront in Delta, with some having fairly formidable empires of their own.
That out of the way, we’re prepared to meet our main characters. One is Hayate Immelmann, a young drifter who doesn’t seem to have any sort of passion, but who can pull off dance moves in a forklift robot for his last day on his latest job, so at least he’s got that going for him. He encounters Freyja Wion, who has stowed away from her home world both (as she is excitably eager to explain) to escape an arranged marriage and to get to the planet of Ragna in order to audition for a place on Walkure, which she loves. Only problem is, it’s not Ragna where she’s ended up.
Luck is on Freyja’s side, though, as it turns out Walkure is on-planet. When a Var outbreak occurs at the local Zentradi garrison (extra dangerous seeing as that means it’s of Zentradi with easy access to giant war machines of death), the group springs into action. This takes the form of… dramatically transforming in an obvious magical girl fashion and gaining the power to, presumably via music, conjure all manner of projections and illusions that look really awesome and can also interact with the physical world.
What.
Literally.
Okay, so we’re doing this Macross 7 style right from the start, eh? I guess you could assume, right at the start, that this is stagecraft rather than witchcraft – after all, Sheryl was able to use prepped holograms to change her clothes multiple times a song back in Frontier, you could presumably load these girls up with some sci-fi gadgets and make them fit the theme, something that the show ultimately does go with. Still, with the clear affectation of the Magical Girl genre, it’s pretty much a fig leaf over the naked sorcery of it all.
Further cementing that this is much more closely tied to 7 than Frontier was, we even have a legacy character: Mirage Farina Jenius, a granddaughter of Max and Milia (alumni of SDF and 7) and therefore the niece of Mylene from 7. She functions as the Manager/Commander of Walkure, and has about her grandmother’s (nonexistent) sense of humor.
More pressingly, the Var outbreak is coupled with an attack from a hostile space power. During the incident, both Hayate and Freyja get noticed, Hayate for having some pretty darn good moves for a civilian when he commanders an abandoned Valkyrie to help, and Freyja for having the same Bio-Fold mojo that makes Walkure members special as being there for a live “concert” drives her to sing it out loud as well.
In the aftermath, the two make their way to Ragna, where after some random encounters with the Ragnan natives (nobody tell them what happens in M.31) the two head to the grounded Macross that functions as HQ for the auditions, where Hayate is pulled away by the military types. At first it seems like Freyja’s numbers are below spec, but since they’ve seen her data before, the squad arranges a little trial by fire, simulating a Var outbreak on her train out, which she successfully sings at, showing real performance when she thinks her life is on the line. Hayate, for his part, is surprisingly easily convinced to join up with the army despite saying he hates both the military and taking orders, perhaps because the actual commander of Delta is very lazzies faire about things. Mirage, though is not pleased with him, and the two get off on the kind of rocky start where you can sort of begin to see what the love triangle in this one is going to look like.
As the two new members get settled into their places (Hayate getting some initially hostile training from Miraje, Freyja practicing and having it learned of her that she seems to only show her power in times of crisis), we also learn more about those hostiles from before: they’re the aerial knights of the Kingdom of Windmere, which also happens to be where Freyja is from. Windmereans are another Protoculture offshoot, distinct by having heightened physical abilities, shortened lifespans (they seem to expect around 30 years, perhaps a little more), and a Lucky Charms Marshmallow or two called a “Rune” in their hair.
They show up and attack Freyja’s debut concert, declaring war on the Earth-origin UN government for about the most sensible and realistic reasons we’ve seen – they feel like they were taken advantage of at first contact and abused through their treaty with the Earthlings, fought for their independence, and now want to boot the Earthling government out of the local region of the galaxy (referred to as the Brisingr Globular Cluster) since they don’t exactly trust a hostile colonial power that abused and possibly used weapons of mass destruction on them in the past.
The outbreak of war makes things more difficult for everyone. For Hayate, he didn’t want to fight and kill, just to fly, so staying in Delta is a bit of a choice when the Ragnan authorities insist they have to hold off the Windmere forces. For Freyja, while the other Walkure girls and Delta members stand up for her, forces both official and in matters of public opinion consider that she might be a spy sent to infiltrate Walkure for nefarious ends. And what’s everyone’s problem is that the Windmereans have their own magical singer, the young prince of Windmere who can, through his song, control Var-afflicted individuals, triggering them and organizing them to do his bidding rather than blindly lashing out.
To be fair, they do build on what Frontier left us in terms of why singing magic works across time and space, relating it to biological Fold reactions – essentially the same stuff that the setting uses for FTL communication, except of living origin (again, Frontier laid the groundwork with the Fold Bacteria). Hayate is noticeably affected by songs that kick into Fold-resonance mode, but he also wears a pendant that looks just like Sheryl’s earrings from Frontier and is thus also almost certainly made of Fold Quartz, which has been established to be able to pick up signals. They also do make the optics of the later concerts seem a little less outwardly sorcerous, though the full Sailor Moon style transformations into the girls’ idol outfits still play up the mild lean onto the Magical Girl genre.
As Windmere expands its grasp, we get some good interplay fighting back against their use of Var as mind control, and we muddy the waters some with forces outside Windmere claiming that it was Windmere that used the weapons of mass destruction, not Earth. Both sides seem to have at least some members who fully believe their faction’s official story.
In the meantime, it’s worth mentioning that both Hayate and Freyja have… harsher mentors. For Freyja, the most demanding senior Walkure member is the mysterious Mikumo, who is the current lead vocalist and who likes to talk about cryptic things while going off on her own both in infiltrations and just in general. For Hayate, both he and Mirage are subordinate to the “Grim Reaper”, a gruff and demanding pilot named Messer who really plays up the hate despite our outlook softening over time to where he really wants his fellows to live.
We get an infiltration (because that’s what you have pilots and a highly recognizable idol group do – infiltration on foot) where the gang discovers that Windmere is using a reaction between their native apples and certain sourced water to trigger Var in people with presumably latent infections, basically engaging fully in biochemical warfare. They also appear to have a specific interest in Protoculture ruins, which resonate with both Walkure’s singing and the Windmere Song of the Wind that they use to establish their Var-based mind control.
After that, Windmere resumes its offense. After getting some really nice character building where it turns out that Messer is grappling with his own Var case and carries a torch for the original lead singer from among Walkure, who saved him, he gets killed in an aerial duel with one of the Windmere knights. Thereafter, war is brought to Ragna with the addition to the Windmere forces of a giant unstoppable salvaged Protoculture battleship. UN forces above our friendly sorts try to blow up Ragna’s Protoculture ruins to stop Windmere from establishing a mind control field over the cluster as a whole, but bombing them just causes them to phase and reestablish themselves, allowing the conquering Windmere forces to dock their battleship with the ruins and proclaim dominion while the local Macross and city-ship (still barely spaceworthy) escape.
The battle does put one of the knights on life support and cost the old Windmere king his life, but the prince (who is also the “Wind Singer”) and the somewhat threatening cunning advisor seem ready to run the show. Meanwhile, the exiles get their act together and find some new backers to bankroll operation: retake the Cluster, putting them back in the fight against Windmere.
Before they can reengage, though, Windmere decides to expand their war goal to taking over the whole galaxy, and the advisor (who seems to be manipulating matters) and his weird contact seem to have a plan to do it by amplifying the Protoculture ruins effect.
As we start to fight back, the horrible truth about the WMD deployed on Windmere comes to light. It turns out that none other than Hayate’s absentee father who he never really knew, a UN pilot, stole the bomb and used it to wipe out the UN garrison on Windmere on behalf of the Windmere rebels, ending the war but with massive collateral damage to Windmere itself.
Before really processing that, we go on a mission to deal with one of the Protoculture structures. Technically, to investigate it, but when Walkure (especially Mikumo) and the Wind Singer have themselves a music duel, it ends up destroyed, freeing the planet in question. During the battle over the ruins, Hayata and Freyja resonate again, this time so hard that Hayate is knocked out cold when he’s done being pushed far past normal human limits. We then spend an episode of downtime getting late-game exposition about how music may be a weapon of the Protoculture, how Var is indeed the result of stray Fold Bacteria left behind by the Vajra when they departed the Milky Way, and how Mikumo might be a secret ultimate weapon of some sort. It’s a lot to take in, most of which makes at least some sense.
It turns out Mikumo is in fact an artificial human, which is something that her friends… are extremely accepting of and take in stride, as she herself does. Honestly, while it’s a clear plot token, it’s nice to see that it’s not treated as a source of horror either for her or for those around her. She’s real, she’s a person, the difference is that now they can kind of tease each other about the fact she’s technically three years old despite her physical and mental development fitting in with the teen to twentysomething members of Walkure.
Once the gang is back in condition to be in action, they plot a commando mission to Windmere itself, infiltrating with a small crew that… mostly gets captured. Mikumo is snagged by the sinister advisor while team Love Triangle (Mirage, Hayate, and Freyja) are brought in and put through a sham trial. They escape their execution with a timely distraction and remote-controlled planes, and Walkure tries to put on a show to shatter the Windmere Protoculture Ruins and end the threat of the Song of Wind.
However, the advisor reveals to Mikumo that she’s a clone or recreation of a being from Windmere legend, a legacy of the Protoculture known as the Star Singer. He seems ready to use her as his new puppet to control the galaxy, since he knows the secret password to hack her brain. Meanwhile, the Walkure concert seems to be a disaster as one member gets shot by a sniper and placed in critical condition while Freyja starts to develop the white marks that show up when Windmere folk begin to burn out, suggesting that she’s not long for this world. Thus, we have two episodes left to turn things around and save the cosmos from the domination of the Star Singer and the jerk holding her reins.
I don’t want to overly compare Delta to other entries, but there are points on which it seems to invite comparison, recalling past entries more than those entries recalled each other, and this one I can’t really let slide. In Macross Frontier we had the “Sheryl is dying” arc, where we learn that one leg of our love triangle has an incurable disease and, later on, that her limited time is related to why she could do something awesome, even with a moment that tells us that she’s foregoing life-extending treatment in order to make the most of her final days with her power. It’s a strong emotional mark, but it’s also given a fair amount of hang time. From the point where Grace taunts her with the fact that she’s dying, through her confirming it with doctors, and then Sheryl coming to terms with her fate and trying to live as best she can with the days she has left. Sure, the reaper’s scythe is miracle-removed in the climax, but by the time that happens we’d really had a chance to process what being under that death sentence, that would fall not just some day but soon, meant for Sheryl and how she could handle that.
When Delta first shows us that Freyja, aside from the short lives of the Windmere people in general, is clearly being killed by singing with Walkure, the show has just two episodes left and a lot of irons in the fire, so it’s clear we’re not going to be able to process it the same way. Delta, here, is hiding overly much in a great predecessor’s shadow, which runs the risk of making it less apparent that what it produces is still good, since it doesn’t quite stand as tall.
Sure enough, the penultimate episode doesn’t really address that – Freyja keeps her condition hidden. Instead, we mostly spend time with Hayate learning the truth of his dad (he was an agent, and tried to take the bomb away from civilized areas when ordered to drop it on the Windmere capital), ending as the Windmere team uses Mikumo to mind control a UN fleet into blowing itself up, before heading to Ragna where the final amplifier awaits that could turn all the Protoculture-descended species into a hive mind under the control of the Windmere. Again, also done in Frontier, but this one is more on par.
This is… exactly what our advisor villain does. However, as the connection begins to form, Freyja is able to summon enough will of her own to reach others with her song, allowing the Windmere king to do the same and direct everyone against his treacherous advisor who stole his “become Vajra” plot from Grace.
The titanic hologram of a mind-controlled singer covering the evil base is also on loan. If you’re going to take, take from the best I guess.
This doesn’t seem like enough, but on the verge of fading away and being dragged into the abyss, Hayate manages to proclaim his love for Freyja, which also reaches her. But she has hang-ups about the fact she’s dying, forcing Mirage to confess and then call her out before we can get the triumphant rally. Mikumo is brought around, the villain is destroyed, and the galaxy appears to be at peace once more. We even have the love triangle resolved this time… though in a turn that slightly redeems what I just griped about, Freyja isn’t given a magic out of having burned up so much of her self singing for Walkure, and she and Hayate look forward to a happy but brief future in a rather bittersweet finish.
Thus ends Macross Delta.
So, to start out, Delta doesn’t reach quite the heights of Frontier, and was at first hard to watch right on Frontier’s heels. But, the more I got into it, the more I was willing to see it both as its own thing despite where it borrowed, and as something good in its own right.
To an extent, I feel like Macross Delta is “Macross 7 done right”. It’s not trying to be a Saturday Morning Cartoon the way 7 was. It has a more light and fun vibe (I think we actually lose more characters that mattered in Delta than SDF or Frontier, but the atmosphere isn’t the same kind of heavy) and while it doesn’t go “super robot” the way 7 kind of did, it makes the singers much more explicit magic than either Delta or SDF. There’s a little more of a fig leaf here since we don’t also have Spiritia, but the power of music is once again a very literal and even potentially physical thing. Because of that it seems fantastical and high-flying.
But it does this in a package that doesn’t feel like it’s disrespecting your intelligence. It addresses and grapples with, more than any other TV Macross series, the horrors of war and the realities of strife and human hatred, because for the first time we have two recognizable human groups fighting over realistically banal grudges. Even at the end, when they team up to take down the main villain, the king of Windmere still believes there will have to be a reckoning with the UN government, presumably not a friendly one, it’s just not as important as stopping the galaxy from being smelted into a single being. Even earlier, Windmere has a very legitimate casus belli, but feels less justified when they bust out the biological warfare, mind control, and so much racial supremacy rhetoric it’s not even funny.
I think this balance is Delta’s biggest strength. It busts out the full goof, where idol singer stagecraft and sci-fi gadgets can make a concert look like a magical girl battle… but then it also brings out those grounded, real moments, like the causes and fate of war and Freyja’s impending demise not getting a pretty fix, so you don’t feel like you’re being talked down to.
I think the biggest place Delta lacks is in the supporting cast. Macross shows have typically had pretty large casts, and while side characters don’t always get named in my reviews, when I think about Frontier I keep coming up with more characters who were rounded and had arcs and personalities that evolved over the show and weren’t reliant on basic tropes. In Delta, the main love triangle is pretty well developed and we actually get some work with the Windmere knights of all people… but the starting four members of Walkure are a bit lacking: two of them (the quite hacker and the busty friendly girl) start and end with their simple tropes. Mikumo has a lot of plot, but that’s about what she is and not who she is. Admittedly, she’s only starting to discover the latter as of the end, and that’s the point of her, but she’s not the most compelling or best studied character. The last one, original lead singer Kaname, is worthwhile but for how important Walkure is I’d kind of want all the members to be on at least her level. The military friends are… they’re there, and they’re watchable, but they don’t leave a huge impression.
I think it’s a case where… things were just stretched too thin. We have Walkure, Delta Squad, and the Windmere knights who are all sizable groups. Something had to give.
Still, one may notice that this is, ultimately, a minor gripe. Macross Delta gets an A from me. The first half skews lower, but it sticks the landing in a huge way, giving us this very carefully balanced experience. I still think Frontier is a cut above, but Delta’s a pretty solid follow-up act.