If you haven’t watched 86 yet, do yourself a favor and give it a look. The first cour of the show was a well-paced, emotional, dramatic dive into the seemingly no-win scenario of a group of undesirables intended to die in battle against an army of rogue AIs and their commander, a principled young woman battling to hold on to her own humanity and help them against the wishes of the system she’s a part of. It was A+ work that balanced human kindness and cruelty, as well as light and darkness in general, to form an effective experience.
The one odd bit is that, despite the fact that we knew another cour was coming, it seemed to end on a definite final note. So, how does the show continue?
We start, quite logically, by catching up with Lena – the character you’d know from last time wasn’t dead or worse. She’s handler for a new Spearhead squad (her main contact going by the callsign of Cyclops) who seem to have a deep respect for her command. It’s a different relationship than the initial spite of handler to squad that we see elsewhere, but also different than the earnest friendship she built with Shin’s group, with Cyclops referring to Lena as her “Queen”, oddly without a hint of irony.
This fits Lena’s new demeanor. We get a sequence very much like the opening sequence with Lena in the first cour, showing her going to work in the military office, with a lot of shots or notes replicated like the drunken soldiers being derisive of her in the lounge or a brief meeting with her scientist friend. However, the emotions are different now. Lena isn’t the shy little mouse she was at the start of the show; she’s retained both the hardness and determination that she gained in the final episodes, ignoring the jeers of her technical comrades with her head held high and dealing with her new commanding officer (having been demoted to Captain and reassigned away from her uncle) in a way that shows that as technically respectful as her words may be, she’s got a superior position and a ruthless dedication to getting her job done, using whatever she can get her hands on to fight the legion with the knowledge that there’s only so much more that political bullshit can do to her. She also seems to have gathered a group of like-minded junior officers, now being at the head of a clique rather than facing the crushing, faceless weight of San Magnolia alone.
It’s also worth noting that there are some excellent visual tells for setting the stage differently than was done before. The first time around, most of the country looked happy and beautified. Now, with winter oncoming to give us a more gray and grim lighting, that’s clearly what most citizens see, but the camera follows what I assume to be Lena’s gaze, noting the chips in the infrastructure and cracks in the statues, the small details that give the impression of San Magnolia as its dystopian self through the imagery of damage and decay, rather than the bright facade that the state presents.
There’s a palpable sense throughout this sequence that Lena, sharp-eyed and with a dyed red streak in her hair, is now something dangerous – to the Legion, surely, given how she touts her battle records in order to reinforce the fact she’ll be suffering no retribution for appropriating extra resources to the war effort, but also possibly to the political machinery that sent her friends to die and destroyed her innocence.
After that, we catch up with Shin, We follow the seemingly dying dream he was having at the end of his last scene only to have him wake up (with a few initial shots carefully edited to not show anything below the scar on his neck) in a hospital under quarantine. Apparently, he and his friends were rescued at the last minute by forces of the Federation of Giad, a successor state to the Empire that created the Legion, and one that seems to be actually relatively free and equal at that. It’s not all sunshine and roses, with some authority figures recommending the kids be killed just for safety, but the current president seems like a more or less decent sort who arranges their citizenship and adopts them into his home. This is also something of the worst-case scenario for San Magnolia that Lena’s uncle was worried about in the previous episodes, with the story of the surviving 86 getting out and creating, already, a groundswell of support against a country that, before Shin’s arrival, the Giad citizenry didn’t even know still existed.
At the President’s house we also meet their new little sister by adoption, the presumable last heir to the former imperial family and quite the adorable little brat. She’s full of herself, but in that cute kid sort of way that you really just have to allow, and Shin and the others are offered a life of peace with this weird sort of family.
Of course, there’s still some real darkness here – various forces within Giad are deeply interested in the military technology captured with Shin’s squad (particularly the Para-Raid, a complete unknown as it was invented after the Legion arose) as well as in the possibility of securing the squad’s service, given that the kids themselves at the very least aren’t opposed to returning to the battlefield.