The ‘GQuuuuuuX’ Endgame Is About the Messiest Relationship in All of ‘Gundam’

What is Mobile Suit Gundam about? Sometimes, it’s about cool robots. Sometimes, it’s about the horrors of war. Sometimes, it’s about the balance of power, and the exploitation of have-nots by the haves, a cycle of class conflict that is inextricably interwoven through the cycle of military conflict. But really, a lot of the time–especially in the series’ foundational Universal Century setting–Gundam is a story about the two most divorced people to have ever not been married.

And now Gundam GQuuuuuuXin its own remixing of that timeline, is seemingly going to close out being about Char Aznable and Amuro Ray too.

I’ve written before that Gquuuuuux‘s narrative has been haunted from the very beginning by the 1979 anime’s main characters. Char has been the most present of those specters, both in how the series has repeatedly flashed back to his exploits in the One Year War, to the man himself lurking in the background waiting for pieces of his plan to fall into place. Now, in Gquuuuuux‘s penultimate episode, Char begins making his moves in the open, casting off his “disguise” as Shirouzu as he makes clear to everyone around him his aims: to stop the Rose of Sharon and its mysterious alternate Lalah from inadvertently destroying reality as this “remix” of the Universal Century has come to know it.

Char and our heroes alike, however, find themselves at odds. Machu can only see the struggles of the Lalah she encountered on Earth in this trapped alternate version of her, and so Char’s desire to save the world by destroying her sees Machu race to stop him. It further turns out that Shuji, making his grand return to the story after mysteriously vanishing a few weeks ago, is by her side against Char: purportedly first as an extension of the dormant Lalah’s psionic will, but then, in a climactic heel turn, through a revelation that he too is from the same reality as Lalah… pulled into this aberrant timeline in an attempt to erase it.

How Shuji intends to do that, and why, is left unclear, save for Gquuuuuux‘s most audacious twist in the episode’s final moments: emerging beyond the Rose of Sharon’s psionic gateway to another world comes a Gundam. The Gundam. Not the re-imagined Mobile Suit we’ve seen in the show’s prior re-imagining of the One Year War; there is no lanky, skeletal, almost Evangelion-esque frame here. This is the RX-78-2, as seen in the classic Mobile Suit Gundam—and, presumably, inside it is some version of Amuro Ray.

That bit remains uncertain, to be fair. Perhaps the reality Shuji is from is one where he is the pilot of the first Gundam, perhaps, just as Char said of Lalah, he is using his vast powers as a Newtype to somehow possess Amuro and fling him at his new foes like an attack dog. Perhaps it’s someone else in there entirely, or no one, and it’s the Gundam itself being puppeteered by Shuji.

For what it’s worth, Gquuuuuux‘s invocation of “Beyond the Time” in this episode, the rock-ballad anthem that acts as the ending theme of Char’s Counterattackalmost feels like it has to be Amuro in some form or another, rather than a fake out. We already know Lalah has seen visions of other worlds that play out the fateful encounter between herself, Char, and Amuro that ended with her sacrifice in the original series over and over in infinite combinations. Surely now then, it is time to see that battle play out again, but this time with the fate of a universe at stake. Because after all what is the story of the Universal Century if not that of Char Aznable and Amuro Ray?

The evolution of Char and Amuro from wartime rivals to uncertain allies, to once-again foes yearning to understand their confounding connection to each other, is one that plays out across Gundam as a series for the best part of its first decade. Bonded by Lalah and the emergence of them both as Newtypes—capable of this heightened connection and understanding, but forever only on the brink of actually understanding each other and their visions for the world they fight for—the cycle of Gundamin the Universal Century at least, is largely defined by the relationship between these two men.

We haven’t seen a Gquuuuuux version of Amuro throughout the series so far—his role in the alternate version of past events is left pointedly out of the picture. Perhaps that’s the true aberration Shuji speaks of in the creation of this world is, in some ways, that there could be some version of Char’s story without him, one that lacks this fundamental figure that defines so much of it in the original Gundam. If Gquuuuuux is going to make reframing and remixing the original Gundam its defining trait, there’s probably no other way it could’ve ended than Char and Amuro, in some form or another, making their deal the whole universe’s problem.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.