Well, that was a conclusion.
The battle with Lunatic goes pretty badly, and costs us a lot of the cast. The Colonel is mortally wounded, and finishes himself off to make sure he’s not dead weight dragging down Charlotte, who came to his rescue. Monica and get involved, which means they bear witness to the end. Strength is overwhelmed by the standard enemies and Dead Master, after getting a good shot off to help Empress, is riddled with holes by Lunatic, seemingly killing her. The Moonflakes begin to strike, and Empress decides that if humanity is to die, then she has nothing more to live for. She triggers her ultimate overdrive, becoming a burning blue skeleton, and shoots through both Lunatic and the Orbital Elevator. After getting the shot off, Empress disintegrates utterly.
This ends the Moonflake bombardment, but Lunatic’s core, on the moon, is untouched and estimates that rebuilding enough to finish humanity off (70% already destroyed by the Moonflakes) will take 200 years, which is no problem for a timeless being like her.
On Earth, though, things move a little faster. We cut to fifty years later. Norito is now colonel and so much the spitting image of the old colonel that you’d think they were related. Miya and Charlotte, as psuedo-Hemitheos units haven’t aged. Monica is now a rather elderly doctor, and under her care Dead Master and Strength have been recreated in child form. I guess there was enough of those two left for them to eventually be scraped back together. We meet up with these characters on the eve of battle, as Black Trike has been reworked into a space shuttle and they’re all ready to blast off and take the fight to Lunatic where it will actually hurt. In space, the new Colonel and the Hemitheos gang engage in battle against Lunatic’s outer defenses, and are joined by a newcomer, a blue streak rising from the Earth and revealed to be an at least partially reconstructed Empress. The original Black★Rock Shooter song plays triumphantly, and as the credits roll you kind of accept that this time, with the band back together and only a quarter of the way into her cycle, Lunatic isn’t getting away.
So, what’s the takeaway from Dawn Fall and its ending?
Well, I think the ending was fairly fitting. I actually liked that they went with a more mixed ending where a lot of the characters we spent time with died in order to achieve what was at first only a minor and temporary victory; it fits with the bleak tone of the show. All the same, I do like that we went on to see how humanity used its time more effectively than Lunatic and the survivors resurged to take the fight off to her. The return of Empress was a little… odd, but the Hemitheos units are super nanotech cyborgs, I can believe that her ashes in the Iron Sea had been gathering together for decades to restore her whole. And I’m fine not seeing Lunatic actually have her core blow up – her main avatar got taken down with the Elevator and playing us out with the start of the triumphant battle is more than good enough.
And they used the actual song at the exact right moment. Brownie points there.
As for the show as a whole… it’s a hugely mixed bag. It’s sloppy, amateurish, and edgy for the sake of being edgy… but it kind of picks itself up and puts itself back together in a way that was shockingly acceptable. Half of the show is so bad it’s good and the other half is fine, so on the whole it’s a quite watchable experience if you’re looking for something that’s kind of fun but also that you’ll kind of have fun at the expense of.
Which is a pretty weird mood to be in, I’ll admit. Are there a lot of good reasons to watch Dawn Fall? No… but there are enough that I can recommend it – even if with a laundry list of caveats, exceptions, and specific circumstances – and so I kind of have to give it a C- here at the end. I honestly was not expecting to offer it anything that high when I first got into the groove, so I’ll go ahead and say that the recovery at least was fairly impressive.