Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These

Episode 9

After a hiatus last week, Legend of the Galactic Heroes should know it needs to kick into high gear right away. So of course it comes roaring out of the gate with the high-octane excitement of a round-table political discussion! Now naturally, LOGH knows we're here for this content to some degree, and it presents it effectively enough to set up what will likely be the final arc of this season. That said, the actual presentation of the scene may still be a liability for for some. The sequence of the Alliance council meeting discussing the pros and cons of extending or even escalating the war was necessary in the source material, but its direction here suffers from being underplayed the same way Oberstein's machinations were in the previous episode. It might be because we don't actually know any of the political figures engaged in this conversation besides Trunicht, but the policies and points being made here come across as dry even by this show's standards.

That could be the point, of course. The underlying theme in this scene and indeed the whole episode is how the cold, calculating way in which nations choose to wage war moves into being so impersonal for the individual citizens involved. The socio-political impacts and economic instability caused by the prolonged conflict are touched upon by the participants in this debate, and if you're a buff for the historical context being brought into the plotting here, this scene will likely do a lot for you regardless of its muted presentation. This late in the series the show must be confident of its audience's interests, since even though the ideas being discussed are peak LOGH for that audience, it's still so dry, simple, and even slow that it's practically coasting on the ideas of the text itself. These points all prove to be important by the episode's end, thankfully, which does end up elevating the whole exercise.

There is another background element given spotlight in this episode, as the previously briefly-introduced Dominion of Fezzan and its Landsherr leader finally get some elaboration. Interestingly, where the presentation of the Alliance council suffered from seeming too rote, this scene has the opposite problem. Fezzan's machinations are of course integrally important to everything that happens in LOGH, and the time spend detailing them is also used to clear up exactly which moves the two major sides in the war are making, even while adding some embellishing interference from this third party. The issue is that Die Neue These apparently doesn't trust the audience to gather how effectively manipulative this faction is from their actions alone. Thus, the whole conversation between Rubinsky and his subordinate is draped in the dramatic trappings of almost cartoonish villainy. It's actually quite masterful, filmic composition in the anime, with clever cinematography and even appreciably flowery dialogue. But doing all that while just introducing Fezzan now, in this way, only serves to oversell them as over-controlling behind-the-scenes villains. It does drive up the digestible cinematic style that this version of the story is going for, especially as it hurtles towards its climax. But that's at the cost of the otherwise grounded tone that has worked so well for LOGH until now.

Everything else in the episode pertains to Yang, and the strength of the story elements we get from him thankfully helps this episode feel like more than the sum of its parts. His attempt to resign in the wake of his success at Iserlohn is tempered well by the depth of his rejection by Sithole. On some level Sithole seems to be working too hard to guilt Yang into staying in the army, but on the other hand it fits with the character's pragmatic warrior nature; he truly believes that Yang is the best chance the Alliance army and the people in it have of fighting successfully without needless sacrifice or wasted effort. This is echoed by Schönkopf, in his own glib way, bringing up that most of the soldiers see Yang as a figure to follow for survival. It's a nicely earnest goal that does well to be espoused by this particular character.

These characteristic discussions of Yang and the role of the war he's in do well, but it's the way the effects of the conflict are demonstrated at the very end that really put this episode's ideas over. A data-entry error in a traffic system causing congestion is an absolutely tiny issue resulting from strained skill-resources in wartime, but still serves as a perfect example of just how far down to the ground level those sweeping political decisions we saw at the beginning go. That macro level discussion seemed to leave us hanging with its dry generalizations, but by showing its results at the micro level, on the opposite side of the episode, it makes its implications clear even to the audience members who weren't fully engaged by that debate. It all gets wrapped up in a neat little bow with Yang's ruminations at the end, and how his treatment shows a politicized society's special treatment of ‘war heroes’, the tolls the conflict takes on them, and how participants in a war may feel about the future generations they drag into it.

In a reverse of the types of pacing issues LOGH usually has, this one actually brings itself up quite a bit in the second half of the episode. Along with a strongly-earned emotional coda showing the culmination of Jessica's political rise, this whole episode does end up being an effective return from a week off for the series.

Rating: B+

Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.