We live in a new age of legacy sequels these days, the not-quite-a-reboot movement of smashing together a new generation of potential heroes with the old vanguard we know and love. Everyone’s doing it, from Star Wars, to Marvel, to Jurassic Park, to Ghostbusters, to Cobra Kai and countless other TV and movie franchises. But few have managed to match the kind of depth of exploration laid out when Gundam did it four decades ago this past weekend with the launch of Zeta Gundam.
Zeta Gundam launched in a very different context than that of its predecessor six years prior. The first Gundam found itself coming to the end of its run with a truncated episode count, cut short by waning ratings—only to find that a combination of its dedicated audience, model kit sales, and a miraculous successful theatrical run as a series of compilation movies transformed its fate from doomed experiment to the birth of new anime genre, and an enduring franchise in its own right. With a sophomore series, there was a potential for Sunrise and Gundam creator Yoshiyuki Tomino to play things safe. Build on what had made Gundam work and click with the audience, return to its now-enduring characters but also keeping a similar scenario and wartime conflict going.
But from the immediate moment Zeta Gundam premiered in 1985, it was clear it was going to be anything but safe. Set eight years after the events of the first Gundam series, Zeta follows not Amuro Ray, but Kamille Bidan, a young rebellious colonist who, almost as soon as we meet him, finds himself brushing up against the authoritarian ruling powers attempting to exert dominance over the space colonies. It’s not the remnants of Zeon from the original show in this antagonistic position, however: it’s the Earth Federation itself, the “heroes” of the original Gundam, spearheaded by an elite faction within the military known as the Titans.
Zeta flips the script like this in so many ways—the mysterious Quattro Bajeena, a lieutenant in a resistance group called AEUG that we meet in the first episode’s opening parallel to the first scenes of the original Gundam, is not a new figure, but the new persona of Gundam‘s Char Aznable, now finding himself aligned with forces and figures he once fought against in the One Year War. Kamille, unlike Amuro, is far from a hesitant fighter forced by the circumstance of war into mechanized conflict, but a young man actively looking to push back against Earth’s increasingly fascist overreach into the colonies. It’s a fitting parallel that we meet both young men stealing themselves a Gundam: Amuro practically falls into the original Gundam out of the necessity to survive as Zeon invades his home, Kamille steals his to try and kill a Titans officer who made fun of his name sounding feminine, snapping at their casual disregard for the colonies they once fought to defend.
Zeta Gundam constantly complicates our view of Gundam‘s world in the “Universal Century” timeline that would eventually become home to a host of other series and OVAs in the Gundam franchise. Although the open conflict of the original series’ devastating war—which we were constantly reminded in the opening narration of every episode of having killed half of all humanity in just its opening months—had been exchanged for the cold war of the Titans’ searching for lingering Zeon remnants, and the AEUG’s own resistance to the Federation’s totalitarian grip, the once-clear diving lines of the first show are constantly in flux in Zeta. People defect from one side to the other, alliances are made with the unlikeliest of allies, old figures of that first war are constantly asked to reconsider what they actually fought it for in the first place. If the original Gundam was interested in the traumatic ways war could change people, Zeta‘s traumas are enveloped in a critique of power, of the ways systems of rule can perpetuate those traumas, and be readily swept up in the throes of corruption in doing so.
Perhaps there’s no better way Zeta examines this than how it handles Amuro himself. Although not a primary character in the series, Amuro casts a large shadow over Zeta before he comes to the forefront of a significant arc about a third of the way through the show. Having been put under house arrest by the Federation since the end of the original Gundam—both due to the nature of his nascent psionic abilities as a “Newtype,” humanity’s emergent evolutionary next-step as it expands out into living in space, and to stop such a powerful symbolic figure speaking out against it—Amuro is not the mighty and celebrated veteran his image is made out to be by those aware of his legacy. He’s been rendered almost hollow by his experience in both the war itself and his treatment by the Federation, any will to resist blunted by the seeming hopelessness of the Federation’s direction. It takes seeing what Char has become as Quattro, and the emergence of a new generation of would-be soldiers like Kamille and his allies, to shake him out of disillusionment.
And its boldest move may just be how the series wraps itself up. By the end of Zeta, things are extremely bad: a good chunk of the main cast does not make it out by the conclusion of the final battle, and Kamille himself is rendered comatose, his own Newtype powers overwhelming him in one last duel with the latest usurper of the Titans’ military might. The state of the solar system is arguably in a worse place than it was when the series began, the threat of the Titans as an entity destroyed, but with proverbial deals with the devil that leave the way for a Zeon resurgence the franchise goes on to tackle throughout the next series a year later in ZZ Gundam. Zeta ultimately helps begin a cycle of conflict that reverberates throughout the rest of the shows set beyond it in the Universal Century, but not in a way that renders what it had to say and spent time exploring in the run-up to that cycle’s beginning pointless. If anything, those critiques of power and the convictions it characters have are emboldened by their pyrrhic victory, their belief in their ideals the one glimmer of hope in an otherwise bleak scenario.
It’s a fascinating boldness that the contemporary return to legacy sequels has often largely lacked in the here and now. There are flashes—there’s absolutely a parallel you can draw between Zeta‘s presentation of Amuro Ray and The Last Jedi‘s vision of Luke Skywalker—but more often than not these returns to the past have leaned much more on the nostalgia factor than they have the evolutionary aspect of building something new and deeper out of that introspection, the cycle less of a commentary and more of an excuse to tell the same story, often with the same faces, over and over. As Gundam itself launches into its own kind of nostalgic next step in Gundam GQuuuuuuX, a new entry that plays with the original 1979 anime to build its own alternative vision of it, it’s clear that the spirit of Zeta Gundam is alive and well in its own franchise, at least.
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