Space Battleship Yamato 2199: Episode 8 – Bread and Circuses

The reason why I called this post “Bread and Circuses” is because that’s what half of this episode was. We get into the mind of the enemy leader, Dessler, even more in this episode while watching the Yamato’s bid for survival with his many generals. It was like a game to him. The other half of this episode was the Yamato crew fighting for survival against whatever cosmic threat Dessler cooked up for them. Let’s look at this with a little more detail.

Spoiler Alert. GET YOUR Usual Spoiler Alerts HERE. LOUD NOISES!!!!

Yamato Side

Let’s start off with the Yamato side; they are our main protagonists after all. After jumping getting a glimpse of the what the Earth looked like eight years ago (they were eight point six light years away from our solar system) and seeing how beautiful it was, the Yamato jumped nine more light years toward the completion of their journey. What they jumped into was not anything they expected. At first it was only a plasma cloud, which knocked out their electronics for a little bit. After those were fixed, they shot down a new torpedo, the Dressler torpedo. I should note that Captain Okita barely gave the order to fire on time because he was struggling.

At first, the Yamato crew thought the torpedo was dead in space. Then, a cloud appeared that could suck up and destroy anything. They found a weak point in the cloud to escape, but the exit had an extra hot (temperature wise) star behind it. Death was on both sides of this coin. Luckily, even with captain’s condition becoming even worse, they escaped the situation by having a solar flare from the star hit the cloud. The episode was concluded by the Yamato firing its Wave Motion Canon at a big solar flare to find an escape route and then jumping out again.

Gamilas Side

Let’s jump to the Gamilas side now. The episode opens up with Dessler giving a passionate Hitler like speech to his populous. There is a specific focus on a little girl that gets very excited and motivated in the crowd. From there, we move on to our charismatic leader inviting a lot of his officers to watch a game. Well, you know what the game is. Yamato vs Dessler Torpedo. You know what happens too, because I just described that to you. Still, we get a little more sense of Dressler’s ruling style. A random officer gets drunk and shouts during this charade, but Dessler sends that officer into a pit of doom. He repeats the act against an admiral that refuses to take responsibility for his subordinate’s failure, then asks for the name of the terran ship that escaped his plan, and then grants all the families of his deceased military men as honorary Gamilans. A tough, but fair ruler.

Schultz was back in this episode too. His ship was the one that fired the Dessler torpedo at the Yamato, it was the ship the game’s camera feed came from (with faster than light signal connection), and it was Schultz’ daughter that was focused on in the episode’s beginning. After the failure of the torpedo trap and turning off the transmission from a soon to be doomed officer, Schultz and his crew made one last charge at the Yamato. Unfortunately, they met their death before they even close to the Yamato due to a solar flare. Still, we do not have to worry about Schultz’ daughter’s life at this point since she is now an honorary Gamilan. That was a good end note to Schultz’ story.

—

Wow, a lot happened in this episode. It feels like an hour episode’s worth of content somehow made it into half an hour. That’s crazy. The fact that it was completely coherent plot, developed a lot of main characters, developed some side characters, and had amazing effects even that amount of time is completely astounding. I didn’t even tell you everything that went on. IF I did, this post would be a lot longer. I cannot say enough positive things about this show and how it handles its content. The direction of this show is impeccable and I love the amount of female roles in this show compared to original show. Especially since none of these roles seemed forced at all. With all that said, see you all next Friday.

—

This post is a part of the Yamato 2199 blog tour between me and DerekL. If you want to get involved: please click this link here, read what it says, watch the show with us, and post before noon on Fridays. Simple enough right?