Hello Friendlies! This week, we look back on Episode 6 - Party Night! Listen to the podcast here.
Below is a copy of the transcript of this episode, created by the smooth and savvy Noirangetrois, and punctuated throughout with additional commentary by me in bold and in brackets (Edit: Like this!), plus a few corrections and additions where applicable. As always, if you have something to add, just get in touch! Hit 'Pineapple' on this website in the top bar, or contact me at lemontrash.tumblr.com :)
Episode 6
Hey there, and welcome back to Radio Meteor, the podcast where I watch an episode of 90s anime Gundam Wing and ramble about it, because people keep talking about what happens at the end of the series, but I honestly only ever watched it all the way through whilst probably drunk in the early 2000s. So this is my attempt to try and regain some memory of it all.
This week, it’s Party Night. I’m Odamaki and welcome to orbit!
[musical interlude]
Hi guys. Here we are, back in the wardrobe, in orbit, episode 6, “Party Night.” Or, as they say in Japanese, “Paati Naito” (パーティー·ナイト). Sometimes it really is just that simple. Last time we found out that Relena is really Relena Peacecraft, and today it’s Party Night. First watch through, I thought this was her birthday party, but then I remembered, we’ve already done that. So this is just an unspecified party. If anyone has picked up on why they’re having this shindig, let me know. Either way, it looks like a fairly swish affair.
I’m making a slight change to the format this week. Up till now I’ve talked about language points, and then character points, and then world observations. This episode, it just seems to make more sense to go through and discuss things as and when they appear in the show, and just give my general commentary on it. Mainly it just feels like the parts of this show I can comment on don’t really fall into any particular category as easily this time round. I guess that’s fairly typical of an episode at this stage of the narrative. It’s building up to things, but at the same time it’s still relatively fragmented. Because of that, I’m also not going to give an overview of the episode.
The episode opens with Relena returning to her school. We get an aerial view of the actual building and get an idea of the size and scale of it again. I mentioned last episode how the colony architecture doesn’t have any of this old world heritage. Well, this place has it in buckets. It’s very European. It’s very old fashioned. It looks kind of like a French/German/Swiss sort of massive chateau, and I would like to see McMansions judge Relena’s school. It’s swank, but it’s also got so many nubbing roofs. And it looks like there’s a carp pond in the back as well. You know you’re wealthy if your school has a carp pond. Go ahead and ask me about the history of carp ponds, I dare you.
She gets inside and she’s greeted by Mrs. Darlian. I’ve talked about her on Tumblr before, but what a neglected character. Drink her in, because this is basically all you’re going to see of her. I distinctly remember watching this the first time round, and I just did not identify her as Relena’s mother in any capacity whatsoever. She’s dressed in mourning, but she’s also dressed kind of like a Victorian maid. I pretty much just assumed first time I saw her that she was Relena’s maid or something, and I’m wondering if that is deliberate, because in Japanese, Relena enters the room and she says “Tadaima. Kaerimashita.” (ただ今. 帰りました.)“Tadaima” is just this stock phrase that you say when you re-enter your home, and “kaerimashita” means “I have come back.” So she doesn’t actually say the word ‘mother’ or anything of that nature, despite the fact that it’s put into the English subtitles, so that’s different.
They have a bit of a conversation in which Relena apologizes for not being able to save her father. This, again, is a crucial part of her character, that she does take responsibility for things that really, she has no business assuming responsibility for. She can’t assume the responsibility for what’s happened. We get these nonverbal glimpses of what her life with Mr. and Mrs. Darlian was like. There’s a cute photo of them on her desk. In it, she’s sitting in Mr. Darlian’s lap. It’s this little cute Daddy/daughter moment, and Mrs. Darlian is stood in the background a little rigidly. Just looking at it, you kind of wonder whether or not she has a closer relationship with Mrs. Darlian in the capacity of her mother as much as she did with her father. I feel like there’s a bigger disparity there.
It also makes you wonder a bit about Mr. and Mrs. Darlian’s relationship as well. They appear to be married but was it more of a case that they got married because of circumstance and because of need to keep this child, who they had some kind of duty to, safe. Did it develop and then they decided to just stick with it, even though the initial feelings have died? It’s very vague. I feel like there’s a lot you could really plumb into there, if you had a mind to. There’s also this question of, who was Mrs. Darlian before she was Mrs. Darlian? Is she also a member of the Sanc Civil Service? Did she have some role there as well?
Mrs. Darlian starts asking if Relena knows that she is Relena Peacecraft and Relena lies, first of all. She says that her father didn’t tell her anything. And then almost immediately, Mrs. Darlian is like, okay then, we need to talk, because there’s something I need to reveal to you at this time. Relena doesn’t want to hear it. I said at the end of the last episode, she had gone back into this identity that she’d originally had as her safe space and that she was just not ready to let go of that. This tiny little segment is really quite heartbreaking, and then is quite rapidly moved away from in the narrative.
She flings her arms around this woman and says, “Zutto Okaa-sama de itte, kudasai.” (ずっとお母さまで言って下さい)In the English, that’s translated as, “You’ll always be my mother.” In the Japanese it’s slightly different. “Zutto” is “going forward and forever” or “always.” “Okaa-sama” is a more reverential way to address your mother. “Itte kudasai” is “let me call you Mother,” effectively. So it’s like, “Let me always call you mother.” So she’s really appealing to this woman to not take this away from her, to not shatter completely everything she understands and knows about the world. Because that was just too much.
She could give up her identity in terms of being privileged, she could join in this rebellion, but she’s not ready to give up her family. She’s still quite protective. That is a part of her that gets developed continuously, I think, as the series goes forward. That’s just my opinion right at this second in time. As I watch further episodes I’ll probably redact that. We’ll see.
Next we jump over to Lady Une and Treize. Lady Une is talking about going after Relena. Relena knows too much, she’s gotta be hushed up. The plot thickens in that we see Une prepping to step into the diplomatic void that she’s created. (EDIT: Maybe not explicitly, but I think the undercurrent is already there). The assassination that she’s undertaken has several outcomes in OZ’s favor. They get rid of one of their prime rivals, who is onto them and could mess up their plans. But they also create confusion in the colonies that undermines the political power there. They have a chance to go in, and as we see in later episodes, they set up this swing in the power balance to seize control.
We have Treize knocking around with his tweety-pie birds in a cage. He lets them go and it’s very symbolic. I couldn’t quite decide what metaphor that was supposed to portray. I had a few thoughts about it, which I’ll come back to further on down the line. But we see Treize giving Une orders. He offers her five mobile suits for what is effectively just an attack on a civilian school, and she’s like, “Oh, that’s quite a bit.” In response, he says, with a kind of wink and a nod, “Well you never know where you might encounter the enemy.” Which makes me think that Treize is up to some fishy shit, because they at that stage didn’t know that Heero was parked there, or if they did, then Treize knows but he hasn’t told Une. She definitely doesn’t know that.
We spin right over to Heero, who is preparing to leave the school and he is busy standing at the window being a massive misanthrope, sort of sneering at these normal kids having fun, excited for a party in their party frocks. He says, “Arあe ni wa kankenai,” (あれには関係ない which in the English is translated to, “it doesn’t concern me” or “it has nothing to do with me.” But I feel like the sentiment that it would be better translated as is just a big fat “Whatever!”
I think this is really Heero’s “tatemae.” He really pretends he doesn’t care, that he’s unfeeling, that he’s Mr. Mission and Mr. Gundam Pilot, but he has all these emotions and he has all these interests, these thoughts and again, these witticisms that are kept below the surface and keep bubbling up. The cracks were there before he even landed on Earth, and Relena is the wedge that just keeps battering away at them. Because she can see it. She can see that he’s not entirely what he thinks he is, but I don’t think she realizes that she sees this. As far as she’s concerned, she’s taking him at face value, but it’s not the face value that he expects people to pick up on or that other people do pick up on.
(EDIT: Whoops. Idiot brain strikes again - I forgot I’d previously recorded a section about tatemae that was later edited out. ‘Tatemae’ and ‘Honne’ are paired concepts relating to how you feel. ‘Tatemae’ literally means ‘standing in front of’. It’s the public persona you put out. ‘Honne’ in contrast, is your real feelings. Most cultures have an aspect of this; it’s like saying ‘Thank you, how lovely!’ when you receive a gift you neither like nor want, but Japan kind of goes beyond that. Now, on reflection, I wouldn’t say i used this term correctly in relation to what’s going on with Heero in this scene, but perhaps it’s tatemae adjacent. Let me explain.
Tatemae is typically used for the sake of politeness and cohesion. It’s all about fitting in. You say ‘yes, yes’ because social convention dictates that this is the polite and correct thing to do, and inside (honne) you feel ‘no, no’. The art of it, is that most Japanese people are adept at reading when a ‘yes’ is for real, or is just tatemae. I have to say, the British are also not bad at this, but for some folks, this is a really exasperating aspect of life in Japan that takes a lot of getting used to. At any rate, Heero’s not saying ‘whatever’ because he’s being polite. After all, he’s talking to himself. But I still don’t feel like it’s a genuine expression of his emotions. In that respect it’s ‘tatemae’ to his role, rather than to society. It’s basically also… very teenage. How often have you heard that old chestnut? ‘Ugh, whatever, I don’t even want to go to the party anyway- it’s stupid.’)
That is clear when Relena goes to confront him at the school. At this point she has got even less time for his drama than she has had at any other point. She surprises him, and then she’s very fast to jump on that weak point. She’s like “Oh, so even you can be surprised,” and she mocks him for it. I feel for Heero a little bit, like, boy, he gets played like a fiddle by Relena in this scene. She goes in and this time she uses her charm and she is polite to him, but she uses it as a weapon.
She tells him that they’re on the same side. She basically tells him to stop being emo and to come down and at least enjoy the party when he has time. It’s an interesting philosophy that she pulls out of the bag here, that yes, we’re going to war, but if we have an opportunity to be human, we should take it. I think that’s the crux of the matter in that scene there, of what Relena’s message is. His message is that he can’t afford to do that.
(EDIT: or put it another way, she’s pointing out that she sees right through his ‘ugh, whatever’ attitude and reasoning that there’s no real obligation on him not to do a little of what he wants. After all, they have no idea Une is going to attack in five minutes.)
So that’s the first half of the episode. Queue big giant head moment.
[musical interlude]
Meanwhile, we are still calling around the houses of what all the other pilots are up to. Aside from the main plot of Heero and Relena and their emotion, they refuse to let you forget that these characters exist and they’re doing stuff. They could very easily have ignored these guys. They’re not really doing a huge amount at this stage. But it keeps giving you these flashes episode after episode of, these guys exist, they’re doing this stuff, remember they’re here. At the same time it’s, well, I’ve talked a lot in the first episode about how this isn’t a traditional ensemble anime. There’s still not this push to go round and collect them all up, and we’re all going to work together and that’s the goal, and the separation is an issue that has to be overcome.
It’s kind of a question of, why do they keep doing this? (NOIR SAYS: I think it builds up their characters a little for when they are central to the plot) Why not just forget these guys are there and focus on the main thread of the action and then bring it later, because they’re not really foreshadowing a huge amount either. I wonder if it is to do with the fact that this whole anime was commissioned to sell five new toys, effectively, and there had to be five new Gundam designs. I guess that could be the reason why this is so as it is. There’s just this commercial push to organize it that way.
Anyway, we get a nod to Wufei. He’s still alive. Meanwhile, Trowa is still being a little bitch. Just from the point of view of his employer, this kid turned up, got the job (just about), then he vanishes for several days, then he walks back up and is late for work and then he just gives a load of sass. If this was any employment situation other than the circus, where Trowa has exhibited a few very useful and niche skills, you get the feeling he would be kicked out on his rear pretty quickly.
We get this scene with Trowa being the target for Catherine’s knife throwing act. She refers to him as “oningyo-san” (EDIT: Idiot bilingual klaxon!! This means ‘doll’) jokingly, and then it fades to black. Then she realizes, actually, she’s unwittingly put her finger right on the button of the situation and suddenly the emo intensifies and she realizes, he’s a mess. He is a proper, deep down in the doldrums mess. It throws her enough that she accidentally nicks him with the knife. But equally, Catherine’s super perky. I really like Catherine, and she’s a lot less naggy and a lot less older sister-y than I remember her being or that I seem to recall her being characterized as in fandom.
We get another nice little language point here. He reminds her of “kemono,” (獣•けもの) which in the English is translated as “beast.” I’ve talked about beasts before, but that was “kaibutsu,”(怪物•かいぶつ) and this is “kemono.” “Kemono” is “beast” as in lions, tigers and bears, oh my! It’s about animals or brute animals and she compares him to something like a wild animal. Not terribly sophisticated, but perhaps if we go for the most flattering version of it, inspiring, I don’t know. I don’t really know what to make of that sentence. He’s kind of basic, is maybe what she’s saying there. But not in a like, “Ya basic,” kind of way.
She also says, “If you smiled more, you’d be cute,” which cracks me up just based on how modern discourse goes about catcalling and everything. The fact that we have a female character telling a boy, “Oh, you know what, you’d be so much cuter if you smiled.” Just kind of blows my mind slightly. She also says “Moto ga ii,” (本がいい? 元がいい?) which I’m kind of question mark over. The English subtitles translate that as, “you’re quite good looking, you know.” But “moto,” I can’t find exactly which character (kanji) that is. I have it in the back of my head that it’s “karada” (体) as in “body,” as in “you have a good form,” which I guess you can translate as you’re good looking, but it can also mean, maybe you’re in good condition. I don’t know, this one I’m a bit baffled on. If I figure it out, I’ll come back to it. This one would have been helpful if I could have seen the actual Japanese subtitles, but I’ve still not figured out a way to get those working.(EDIT: So evidently it’s not 体 karada; which leaves me with moto as in 元 or 本. Given where it is in the sentence, I’m inclined towards 元 which is basically ‘stuff’. A component or an ingredient. ‘Your stuff is good’. So maybe this IS a slangy way of talking about someone’s looks. *laughing* sounds a little predatory. TL;DR I’m still not too sure on this one.)
Anyway, that’s two done. We check in with Wufei and we check in with Trowa, and then it jumps back to Heero, who is staring at Relena like he does not know what to make of her. At this stage she declares an alliance, that she is on his side and that she’s fighting the same good fight that he’s fighting, despite the fact they haven’t discussed exactly what he’s doing one to one. (NOIR SAYS: I’m guessing J never told him he spoke to her) (EDIT: Definitely doesn’t happen in this episode at any rate!) She’s spoken to Dr. J, he’s given her his version of events, but she hasn’t gotten from Heero exactly what he understands about the situation, which I think that even now is starting to change from Dr. J’s view of things. And she makes this statement, this resolution that she’s committed to this fight. She’s keeping some things in her pocket. She’s keeping her Darlian identity, she’s keeping her family, which is fair enough, but she’s also putting her cards on the table a little bit, and it does surprise him.
Next scene, Une is arriving, and she is very much set up as the undeniable bad guy here. Zechs is a bit questionable, he’s got some sympathy given to him in the narrative, so has Noin. Very much so Noin. Treize, he just kind of flaffs about making metaphors. We’re not really sure about him yet. But Lady Une is an antagonist you can sink your teeth into. She’s very clearly the baddie. Even her soldiers think that she’s cuckoo, but you know, we can’t have sympathy for this guy who questions her orders anyway because he’s a worm who caves to his job, and then he’s dead.
Also, are you telling me that Wing Zero was sunbathing next to the school all this time, and nobody noticed? I call baloney. There would have been a groundskeeper or something who would have stumbled upon that. And I can’t also help but think that Une has terrible plans. She has this idea that she needs to get rid of Relena. Fair enough. Putting my baddie hat on, I can see how that makes sense. You need to shut this kid up. But this is not the most subtle approach. She literally flies into a boarding school with an aircraft carrier and five mobile suits to attack a civilian party that is totally unarmed as far as she is aware, and her sole reason for doing this is that people will think that the colonies are attacking. Why would the colonies attack a school? Out of all of the possible targets on Earth, how is that on the most believable? And then she’s actually probably very damn lucky that Heero actually does crop up, because then they can be like, “Oh yeah, a Gundam was there, we had to attack.”
Anyway, then the episode is like, we’ve had enough of actual plot, and we skip over to Quatre. He is chilling at his desk, a la Spiderman, in a very very empty room. Just a depressingly empty office, playing battleship and having some tea, pondering. And he’s sitting there like, “Ah, more Gundams. Hmm. Gotta catch ‘em all.” Then we leave him. Meanwhile, Howard’s getting pissed. He’s having a drinking party. You know, big mood. Duo is moonbathing? I dunno, he’s having a good chill, they’re celebrating having fixed his Gundam. But rather than rushing off to find his mission or carry on whatever it is he’s supposed to be doing, he’s having a little break.
If you have any questions about how [Howard] is actually, genuinely getting pissed and what he’s drinking, when he responds to Duo saying, “The moon looks so much better from Earth.” He says, in English, “Oh you bet, it’s a beauty.” In Japanese, he says “tsukimizake to iun da.” (月見酒と言うんだ•つきみざけというんだ) “Tsukimi” (月見•つきみ) is “moon viewing,” it’s this traditional autumnal activity, usually in the late October full moon. You go out and look at it because it’s big and it’s beautiful. And the “zake”(酒•さけ) is booze. So “tsukimizake” is booze that you drink while looking at the moon. It’s typically “sake,” Japanese rice wine, or “shochu,” which is like a rougher version of sake. So he says “tsukimizake to iun da,” “That’s why they call it ‘moon-viewing booze’,” and you know, classic Mike Howard. Love it.
Duo makes this comment in the scene about how the moon, which I think reflects back quite nicely on that scene in the previous episode where Mr. Darlian tells Relena to look at the Earth and how beautiful it is. So Duo’s talking about how beautiful the moon is, and he says, from L2, from the colonies, it looks like a graveyard, they are just too close for it. There’s again this theme, this sort of lost appreciation for the heavens. There’s this lost perspective of how beautiful the natural world is and humanity can be. And he’s also lying there, thinking about Heero, and this is probably the scene that launched a thousand fics. It’s cute. I also really think that Duo likes people who can punk him. It rustles his jimmies in a good way when somebody manages to yank his chain and get one over him and make him laugh.
Then the episode decides that’s too chill and we go straight back to the action. We’ve got Heero still fighting Lady Une’s mobile suits. It demonstrates how good Heero is as a pilot as well. He knows very much the capabilities of his enemy, and when the mobile suit soldiers try to pull up, he gets quite angry. He shouts at them, “You’re too heavy!” And then he blows them up. But he’s a little bit like Wufei in that he’s annoyed that his enemy is so poorly prepared or bad at doing what they’re supposed to be doing, at being a worthwhile enemy in some respects.
Relena quickly moves to protect some of her peers and then tells them that they need to run. These girls are really quick to bail. They don’t question her, they’re out of there. And we get another instance of Heero targeting somebody. He zooms in on Relena with his targeting system. He’s not actually targeting to fire, but he turns to almost attack, and then he protects. This is similar to what he does with Duo when he’s teasing Duo, but this time it’s not a game and he’s genuinely performing an action to preserve her, and then he genuinely questions himself as to why he does it.
This is the game changer. He had not planned to do this. It completely changes how he operates following on from this. And he’s super pissed off about it. Just as he did before when she yelled “Dame!” and then he didn’t allow himself to smoosh onto the rocks on the beach, he asks himself again and again, “Why am I doing this? Why can’t I kill her? Why am I hesitating?” She’s really really gotten under skin. And I think he’s suddenly realized on a deeper level than he intended to that she could represent a third option to all of the options he’s got, in the same way that in later episodes, Catherine does that for Trowa.
It gets into the crunch, and then, deus ex machina, Treize calls Une and calls her off. And it’s a bit puzzling at first but then we get into his office and we learn that Noin has actually telephoned to beg for clemency for Relena on Zechs’ behalf. Zechs wouldn’t do it himself. Ass. But she has taken it upon herself to do this. And it’s questionable at this stage as to how much contact she has ever had with Treize. He’s her superior, her superior’s superior in fact, but she goes out of her way to do this, even though there’s this wider attack to blame this attack on the colonies and further undermine their status within the Earth Sphere Alliance.
(EDIT: lbro009 pointed out that in Ep 0, Noin serves with the specials led by Treize so she has met him if you want to take that version of events into account. This is also true in Frozen Teardrop, where she serves with Zechs and Treize in the specials.)
And then Treize sort of floats around being more metaphorical, and the birds come back. And again, I’m not sure what metaphor this is supposed to represent, but I did wonder if it was maybe that the birds were Zechs and Relena and he was on the verge of throwing them away as pieces in his game. So Zechs is Treize’s protege, as we’ve discussed. He’s been molded and created and used by Treize, but perhaps at this stage Treize was thinking, “Maybe I don’t need him anymore. Maybe he’s not important enough to have this consideration of not killing his sister.”
Or it could even be a more manipulative situation, where it’s a bait and switch, so he’s threatening Relena, and then shows his clemency in order to pull Zechs back into line or make sure that Zechs does toe the line. Because presumably, Treize has always known who Relena was and where she was. He could have taken her out of the game virtually anytime he wanted. So Treize is definitely playing a long game here, and he’s playing everybody against each other.
(EDIT: So my memory is COMPLETE GARBAGE. Noir caught that Treize says ‘So the rumours are true’, which I can confirm on a rewatch that he does in both languages. He’s no longer on the line to Noin which suggests that he’s being honest. Scrap that theory anyway…)
There was a book about a mouse called Pentecost. I don’t know if anybody remembers this one, but in it there was a seven-legged insect. It’s entire role was that it played both ends against the middle. It manipulated everybody to just serve its own purpose and then it never really explained what it was doing and it flew away. So Treize is kind of a seven-legged bug here. That’s what I’m going to refer to him as until I get further into more episodes and I understand perhaps maybe more about what he’s doing. But I to admit, I have never ever ever understood Treize as a character. Not once. Maybe this time. But until then, seven-legged bug.
[musical interlude]
The final scene, then. We have Relena and Heero in this bizarre showdown, and this is another one I struggle to get my head around. She keeps demanding for him to kill her. This is something that everyone likes to make fun of. It’s very memeable. There’s another of those episode scenes that tries to take itself very seriously but it just ends up kind of ridiculous because it’s just so over the top. Very hammy. Heero is like, “Why can’t I kill her?” and she’s like, “Just kill me!” and then he can’t and it just goes on and on.
But trying to figure out what is going through their heads here. Heero I think is a bit more simple. He just has got this situation where he actually can’t bring himself to kill her because he doesn’t see her fully as an enemy. Relena’s motivations are less transparent but I think it boils down to the fact that she just wants to know if he would do it. She doesn’t really seem to believe that he’s capable of it, of looking a civilian, someone like her right in the eye and then murdering them in cold blood. And although he’s a soldier and he does kill, that is quite a different scenario to an opponent in war. Again, we’ve got back to Wufei and how he treats Noin. He says, “I don’t kill bleeding hearts or women.” Essentially, “I don’t kill people who are not my enemy.”
Relena’s quite jaded. She knows that the world terrible, and I think this is a situation that she wants proof that it’s not actually as bad as it seems. That whatever else she’s seen in the world, the violence, the fact that her father was assassinated, that the world is horribly dangerous, that the irredeemability of the world is not yet fact. So she wanted to prove that he would threaten her but then put the gun down because he was too human to do it. And it might be, you know, Relena doesn’t seem to value her own life very much, anymore than he does. Perhaps it’s a situation where, if he doesn’t put the gun down, if he followed through on his threat, then she would not have been leaving a world worth living in anyway.
This is a defiance of a world that was being forged out of war. So this is a world that is at conflict. Deep conflict, and has been for a very long time. It’s a world that makes child soldiers, it makes children’s lives into tools, or just collateral. From there, her character goes on to be this push to prove that someone, a civilian, could make a difference, could find peace without a weapon in her hand. It’s the question she poses to Dr. J. Surely, there’s another way. These are the kind of thoughts that are conflicted in her head.
That’s pretty much it for Episode 6. Overall I’m not really sure what to make of this episode. Similar to previous episodes, it jumps around a lot, but it is building up to something, and we get now very much the baseline is established for the whole Relena/Heero conversation that’s going to be taken forward. Please let me know if you have any thoughts or comments or suggestions. You can always find me at lemontrash.tumblr.com or an the Radio Meteor website where you may have heard this. I hope you enjoy this, I hope you found it interesting. I am Odamaki and I will see you in orbit next time. Bye!
[music]