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Mobile Suit Gundam Double Zeta.

It gets a lot of bad press. "Worst Gundam Ever" is a common phrase when ZZ comes up in conversation. However. I'm going to go and stand out on a lonely, creaking limb and say I liked it. Say I liked it better than Zeta. Now let me tell you why...

The Characters:
The main difference between Zeta and ZZ is that a majority of the main characters are teenagers. Judau Ashta - the protaganist and pilot of Gundam Double Zeta - isn't interested in piloting or fighting at all in the beginning. When the badly damaged Argama lands at ... their colony, he and his friends are simply interested in the Gundam for its scrap value, as they have been left to fend for themselves while their parents have presumably gone off to (or died in) the war. His younger sister Leina worries about him sacrificing his education to earn money and doesn't like him hanging around with the somewhat inscrupulous Beecha and Mondo. Along with feisty girl Elle and unassuming Ino, Judau and his friends get caught up in the activities of the Argama during their attempts to rob it, and form the core of the series from beginning to end. While it's hard to warm to them all at first, you can't help but feel happy for Beecha as after doubts about the war and attempted defection, he finds his calling as a Captain rather than a Mobile Suit pilot, or get caught up in their personal battles when grief causes Mondo to have no thoughts except revenge.

The idea of the Cyber-Newtype is carried on from Zeta in the guise of Elpeo Puru. A young girl similar to Four Murasume and Rosamia Badam, Puru can go from child-like over dependance on Judau to ace pilot bent on destroying him. My main problem with the cyber-newtypes in Zeta was that firstly I felt that having Four, Rosamia and Sarah was overkill, and that they could have been combined into one memorable character. Secondly I never really felt very much for them (which also made it hard to empathise with why Kamille did) as they never got much screen time. Puru however spends a lot of time with the main characters during the middle of the series which gives her character a chance to develop much more than Four or Rosamia did.

Haman Karn is back again as the main antagonist of the series, along with the new characters Glemy Toto, Mashymyre Cello and Chara Soon. Mashymyre is the first foe Judau and friends face - initially almost a comic relief character, a chivalrous villain who refuses to play by anything other than the rules for the sake of his hopeless infatuation with Haman. Indeed, this is really the only thing which saves the untrained (and inept) Judau from death in the early episodes. Later we see a different side to Mashymyre when he is the architect of a colony drop on Dublin. Chara follows a similar (but more sympathetic) path - possesed of particularly overt sexuality she is always a source of humour, but there is also the feeling that something is not quite right in her mind - a personality split which makes it equally likely she will behave in a fun-loving or cruel manner. Glemy Toto, Judau's main nemesis, we see first as he too naively enters his first Mobile Suit battle, and watch as power gradually comes to corrupt him utterly. Sadly he never gets the kind of character development or sympathetic scenes that Jerrod Mesa got in Zeta, which makes him a weaker character as we never really learn what (if anything) drives him to make the decisions he does.

The Story:
I enjoyed Zeta Gundam, but I often found myself picking holes. The most pervasive problem I had was the short lived and duplicated storylines. For example; Someone develops feelings for an enemy. Someone is kidnapped. One episode later they escape. Wait, they've been captured again. Kamille meets Four. She's gone. Here she is again... etc. With ZZ some of the same ideas are there, but they are slowed down to a speed which actually allows for some character development. Leina is kidnapped by Glemy and is gone for 10-15 episodes, and Puru joins the Argama and stays for a good 20. Chara and Mashymyre dissappear completly to be returned towards the end only when they are relevant, they aren't kept around needlessly or killed off and replaced with yet another generic villain.

As with all Gundam series, ZZ has it's tragic moments. But it picks them carefully and neither milks them for pathos nor glosses over the characters' emotions making them seem cold. People suffer, some moreso than others and some cope with loss better than others. The ::slap:: "get over it, this is war!" attitude to emotion seems to have gone - indeed Captain Bright even says at one point, when berated for the fact that the main characters still behave like kids; "I gave up trying to make them anything else." Which seems to be as much a lesson that the writers of ZZ have learned as he has.

I can understand why people react badly to ZZ at first. The first few episodes on the Shangri-La colony have a lot of humour in them - they don't take themselves seriously and even gently parody ideas from previous Gundam series. Quite a contrast to the dark final episodes of Zeta, but Tomino has said that it was his intention to cheer the audience up, as he felt that more of the same would depress them. And that's perhaps it, the fact that Double Zeta feels more hopeful than it's predecessor, not afraid to have a little fun along with the war and the tragedy, has endeared it to me.