In which things are darkest before the dawn (fall, presumably).
This episode is all about the buildup to and execution of at least the first phase of the battle over the Orbital Elevator. It seems that Artemis/Lunatic has hooked it up ahead of schedule, though, as the Iron Ocean has withdrawn from the rest of Earth to collect around the base of the elevator, providing a formidable defense and pushing towards an unknown goal.
The pre-fight phase is fairly decent, with some good talks with the Colonel (with both Empress about Charlotte and with Charlotte herself) and some standard serviceable ones around the Hemitheos Units.
We then get the battle with the defense forces surrounding the elevator. The Colonel has brought his whole army, with artillery units as well as the hummers his dudes normally tool around in, and the Hemitheos Units leading the charge. They do some cool stunts shooting their way through the goons, which made me appreciate how (in contrast to some other shows) there’s a good variance both of the enemies and the moves used to take them out in the show as a whole. This episode most of the grunts on both sides are in “move forward while shooting” mode, but that hasn’t always been the case. The environments are largely sterile and open, which might have something to do with what CGI is good at as well as the themes of the show (Apocalyptic edge in particular), but that’s neither here nor there.
Of course, Lunatic is there, and she’s a quite formidable boss, shooting down a lot of soldiers and even making the Colonel have another brush with death. Empress intercepts her, but can’t land a hit against Lunatic’s “blink and she’s somewhere else” dodge technique, resulting in them talking for the end of the episode rather than just fighting. Lunatic reveals that she’s already deployed her crushing masterstroke – the completed Orbital Elevator has pumped Iron Ocean to the moon (I will shortcut complaining about the idea of an Earth-Moon pipeline. It flagrantly does not work, but whatever), there to fuel massive fusion reactors that allow her to launch “Moonflakes”, artificial meteors with a half-megaton yield, which have already started falling and are intended to continue carpet bombing Earth until there are no humans, or really any terrestrial vertebrates left alive.
The Colonel demands to know why Lunatic is doing any of this, which greatly pleases Lunatic as she seems positively excited to get the opportunity to monologue. I have to admit, that’s kind of funny on its own. The answer is that Artemis, intended to govern terraforming programs, decided it didn’t have enough data on how humans evolve and die. Thus, Artemis/Lunatic, in the quest for enough information to achieve its main goal, intends to wipe out humanity… and seed or allow their recreation, observing however many millions of years it will take for humankind to evolve, form societies, and reach a point where their extinction can once again be observed, repeating the process until Lunatic is satisfied with the amount of data she has to seed humans (or some manner of human-successor species) among the stars.
That… is actually a shockingly good answer for why an AI would go crazy and try to wipe out all life on Earth. Well, shockingly good next to what I would have expected. I mean, Lunatic is still an edgy creep, comparing an AI’s thirst for knowledge to sexual desire and things like that, but the basic idea is different, worthwhile, and acceptably thought out. I have to admit, even at this point I was not expecting that out of Dawn Fall.
Of course, humans aren’t out yet. While the Moonflakes are falling, we still have characters alive to try to make a difference. Empress, Strength, and Dead Master for the most part, but one can’t quite count out the Colonel or, especially, Charlotte, who while sent off with the retreating civilians was stated to still be able to fight and is seen to have her crazy glider on the truck with her, meaning that it’s fairly obvious that she’ll come in as the cavalry.
The final episode has a lot to do, but the time to do it in is canonically short. I don’t think we’re going to get a lot of cleanup after the battle is finished, but I do think we can get an acceptable final battle to defeat Artemis and stop further bombardment. A lot of the chassis of this show is very basic, and that’s where the basic elements go.