The time for the great battle against Shin’s brother’s Shepherd form has come. The episode “feels” short, consisting essentially of two extremely powerful scenes rather than a lot of little ones, albeit with a little support. Let’s take a look.
First of all, we have the battle. The remains of Spearhead go on, with Shin in particular angling to 1v1 his brother while the others try to pick at the borders of a colossal swarm of incoming. Despite being brutally outnumbered, they do their best, taking on the first wave only for an even larger swarm of reinforcements to appear on radar. Certainly, the Legion is living up to its name. Meanwhile, Shin duels the giant mecha form of his brother, but finds he can’t do real damage to it; the armor over at least most of the body is too much for his juggernaut’s gun to handle. Brother keeps it a 1v1 fight, obsessed as he is with ‘saving’ Shin from humanity, but the situation still doesn’t look good.
When things seem hopeless though, the sky erupts in flames and Shuga gets the sudden and unpresaged call from Lena, who goes so far as to synchronize her left eye (risking blindness or worse) to control the final firing position for the mortars raining hell down on the Legion backup.
I’ll be honest, when the concept of the Republic mortars was first introduced, I was not expecting them to be this effective and devastating.
Lena’s reckless action is called out, pointing out that she’s putting her neck on the line several times over, but that’s one thing that doesn’t seem to matter to her compared to doing whatever she can (and then some) to save their lives. The Republic doesn’t play by any sort of honorable rules, so neither will Lena.
The chaff cleared up, it’s all on the battle of the brothers. Shin manages to strike some sort of vent or radiator, promising a way to do real damage, but not only does his brother’s machine protect the weak point fairly well, it sprouts liquid metal arms worthy of the T-1000 to try to grab Shin, even putting him out of commission for a time. Lena, plan in mind, fires on the scene. Shin’s brother throws himself in the way of the shells, but these ones aren’t explosives that actually threaten Shin via proximity. The duds, though, are still heavy and fast moving and slam into the Shepherd frame largely disabling it enough for Shin to recover from being knocked senseless, have his machine pick itself up, and go in for the kill. He finishes his brother off at long last… but in doing so comes to remember the good times he had and why he loved his family, rather than just the one dark moment on which they last parted, bringing him to break down into tears.
We then get the aftermath. As the audience, we get to see just how Lena managed to pull the support fire off when she’d been previously denied any support for Spearhead’s mission. She went back to her scientist friend, despite the woman’s wrathful anger, and asks for her assistance breaking into the fire control system, with the incentive that she deduced what the audience likely did last week: that the boy that the scientist knew was, in fact, none other than Shin, and that our scientist lady is in fact wracked with guilt over how she betrayed and abandoned him before, and would be willing to go the extra mile for him in particular. The slice of emotional blackmail is extremely well done, exactly as bitter as it should be given the notes they parted on and what Lena’s actions may mean for either of them.
Also in the aftermath, Spearhead prepares to move on, spirits actually high, as they continue into now-vacant Legion territory. Lena realizes, though, that they’re moving beyond the range not just of Republic intel, but Republic communications as well, including the Para-Raid. She dashes out of the office, running through the city (presumably in the direction to the front, to keep them in range of her Para-Raid for even seconds longer) as they describe the scenes they’re encountering, a field of red flowers, probably the spider lilies that symbolize death, and the approach towards a large ruin that fascinates them. Finally, the signal cuts out: Spearhead is beyond Lena’s reach, and she once more breaks down, her friends having left her all the same.
And again, the show is kind of in a “Where do we go from here?” state. Not because, as last week, there was a narrow situation, but rather because its very open. Will Lena face punishment, mild or severe, for calling in the artillery? Will she be able to contact Spearhead again while they’re still out in the distance and if so, how? What is Spearhead going to find? And what’s the Legion’s next move, now that one of their major Shepherds has been taken out? We’re told that killing a Shepherd throws them into disarray, which should allow Spearhead to penetrate deeper into Legion turf than would otherwise be plausible… but the Legion is also learning and growing, so I doubt they’ve given us their worst. What they find, how they get back in contact (because, while this could be a satisfying ending, we know for meta reasons that it’s not the end), and how the Republic reacts to both Lena and the Legion will shape much of the final episodes of this season and especially the direction the second cour takes.