Jumping in before anyone else can, just to say... Strike's head was indeed the first part of it vaporized, yet a head appears in the debris field created by said MS' destruction.Dark Duel wrote:I find especially interesting the presence of the Strike's head in the wreckage, as it's something else that should not be there: The head was the first part to be visibly, on-screen, totally vaporized by the Dominion's positron blast.
A minor detail, but it still annoys me.
No, this does not mean we can retcon out Mu's death using a complicated series of retcons involving the "real" Strike with him in it not being the one in front of Archangel (it was) as Mu substituted an empty third Strike to take the blast.
As absolutely hilarious as that kind of contrivance would be, it's not the case. Mu = dead at Jachin Due. End of story, I'm afraid. Frankly, any explanation for Neo being Mu would have been better than "he surivived an antimatter beam to the face because he's that awesome", even one involving Neo being a secretly-made clone with accelerated ageing and artificially-implanted memories, or something.
Much as I enjoyed Seed, and it still holds a fairly high position on my favourite animated Gundam stories list, Destiny simply isn't as good. I still enjoyed it, in many ways, more or less the entire first quarter of the series up to Minerva escaping Orb (episode 12, I think?) was fantastic. Unfortunately, the decline begins almost in the next episode, when a not-at-all-ambiguous ZAFT special ops team try to kill Lacus, "for some reason", and a rebuilt Freedom appears to wipe the floor with them. Cool, but an unfortunate sign of the shape of things to come.
The series did still have some impressive moments, mark you. The slightly silly Lohengrin Gate was enjoyable, Destroy and its rampage across Europe was quite fun, and the Impulse vs. Freedom fight was wonderfully choreographed. Unfortunately, for various behind-the-scenes reasons, the series never really lived up to its full potential. It seems Destiny existed to continue the momentum Seed built up in the Japanese Gundam fandom, but the result was rushed, almost forced, and sadly doesn't work as well as it could have.
A shame, but there we go. If the film ever comes to fruition, we'll see what that does for the Cosmic Era, but until then it'll just be more and more diluted by endless side-stories using the risk of contradicting a future work as an excuse for a total lack of creativity, sadly.
