A real-world issue holds back the new ‘Gundam’ show right at its end—one that can’t let the rest of the series move on in the way it wants to.
The final episode of Gundam GQuuuuuuX asks its characters, new generations and remixes of familiar faces alike, to imagine new possibilities and futures for themselves free from the established ideas and histories of the Gundam shows that came before them. But while doing so, one nostalgic allowance exposes that GQuuuuuuX itself was unable to let go of that past in a singularly damning way.
The 12th and final episode of Gundam GQuuuuuuX is largely built on the revelation that its entire setting, a re-imagined vision of Gundam‘s Universal Century setting, has been made by a version of the Newtype Lalah Sune from a reality where she was saved from death in battle against the Gundam by the sacrifice of her version of Char Aznable, sending her into a despair that shattered reality, as she mentally searched for, and created, timelines that tried to imagine a possibility where Char survived.
Already itself an alternate imagining of similar events in the original 1979 anime, where Lalah perishes at the Gundam and its pilot Amuro Ray’s hands, this information is relayed to the audience and GQuuuuuuX‘s young protagonist Machu alike by a psionic flashback in the form of a modern yet retro recreation of scenes from the 41st episode of the original show, “A Cosmic Glow.” As the recreation of Char, Amuro, and Lalah’s battle plays out, familiar voices fill in their roles: Char and Lalah are once again voiced by their original actors from Mobile Suit Gundam, Shuichi Ikeda and Keiko Han, respectively, but Amuro is left oddly silent. (In a fun twist for the English-language dub, Keith Silverstein and Lipica Shah, who voiced Char and Lalah in the adaptation of Gundam: The Origin, briefly reprise their roles for this sequence.)
That is, until later on in the climax of the episode, where Tōru Furuya—who has played Amuro across anime, films, games, and more for 46 years—reprised his role once more. It’s for a singular line of dialogue, acting as the spiritual voice of the titular Gundam GQuuuuuuX to express its desire to not see Lalah suffer any further.
