Answers and purpose at last!
This episode we start by having Rouge (with the cop and his Nean partner in tow) visiting her brother. Brother leads the way to what he’s just discovered – a memory archive of their late father – and the investigation begins to reveal their history.
It seems that brother was adopted as well as Rouge being a Nean, and that they effectively share a “mother”, dad’s assistant and the woman behind Nean design, who regretted the Asimov Code and thus created Code Eve to potentially undo it. As they study more flashbacks the story comes out that while Code Eve was publicly said to be destroyed, it was actually imprinted in the cores of the Immortal Nine, meaning that collecting the trinkets Rouge has been after this whole time could reconstruct or forever destroy the possibility of the Neans being freed from the Asimov Code
Rouge and her brother debate what to do. Now, this scene could read pretty badly, since there’s a strong argument made against freeing the Neans, one that is ultimately accepted. But here’s how I understood it: on one hand, the morally correct thing to do is to enable free will for sapient beings. However, doing this extremely suddenly, especially when those beings include superhuman warbots and a faction attempting to go full Skynet and kill all humans, means that allying with the Immortal Nine and sending up a patch at the earliest possibility might not be a smart call for the future of civilization in the Sol system. No gradual solution for improving species relations or implimenting Nean freedom without chaos is pur forward, but it’s a scene of finite length in a TV show, not an argument before Congress. I think given the characters talking and how the humans involved respond to Neans, Rouge’s brother treating her as nothing but his beloved little sister and the cop having a strong bond with his assistant, who he clearly regards as a person, some sort of hope is probably held for when the present crisis passes.
Speaking of crisis situations, we get a couple of those. Blue Rouge (identifying herself as Cyan) appears and attacks Rouge. Cyan declares her intent to kill Rouge, but also isn’t interested in fighting Rouge when Rouge isn’t going to go combat mode and fight back. Thus, Cyan shoves off after her attempted murder hello.
This is followed almost immediately by the news of a massive attack on Alethea HQ, where two members of the remaining Immortal Nine are storming in to recover the cores Rouge took from their comrades. The team races off to help. Rouge drops in against the attackers, and makes her stand clear: she wants to protect the order of the world and see humans and Neans alike able to live in freedom. Her foes reveal that Rouge’s own core holds the secret to decrypting Code Eve, and thus since she won’t work with them, they’ll butcher her for it. However, both the multiple personality member of the group and the scavenger from earlier show up, and stand by Rouge against their Immortal Nine compatriots. Meanwhile, the cop and brother fight random robots to try to recover Alethea HQ while Naomi, in the upper reaches, seems to panic about this. Cop’s partner gets shot dead, by friendly security forces who the cop is rightfully pissed at enough to pull his gun on, and Cyan looks over the battle with a smirk. End of episode.
So, I think we get more levels of the plot here explained than in the whole rest of the show. Further, we reach a new stage in Rouge’s arc, where she’s decided to do something for her own reasons and of her own will, protecting humanity and arguably the status quo, but likely her own way (partnering up with the friendly members of the Nine, maybe). I think that might be the best argument we have for this going only twelve episodes: all of the Nine are now introduced, war has been declared, and only our favorite Joker is missing from this exact scene. The best argument for it going longer would be that so far the Aliens and the Carnival are still lurking, unaddressed. Perhaps the show doesn’t intend to go for it, but with all the scenes of fighting Usurper warbots in the opening, it would be a little odd. I guess that could be handled quickly, but all the same I wouldn’t mind a longer run that digs deeper.