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Summary:
Addressing C.C.’s body, Lelouch questions what she wanted him to do by giving him this power. An enemy Knightmare frame suddenly bursts into the warehouse and the female pilot sees all the dead bodies lying around. She tries to learn what happened here from Lelouch and uses gunfire in an attempt to intimidate him, but he doesn’t budge. Instead, Lelouch uses his left eye to try to get her off the Knightmare. When the effect doesn’t take hold, Lelouch realizes that it only works if he has direct sight of the person, so he uses a story about being a being the son of a duke. This causes the pilot to come out of the Knightmare to confirm his identity by checking his ID card, allowing Lelouch to make her give up her Knightmare with his eye. When the woman regains control of her mind, both Lelouch and her Knightmare are gone.
Meanwhile, Suzaku wakes up inside a Britannia medical trailer under watch of Knightmare frame developers Lloyd and Cecil. The reason that Suzaku survived the bullet from before is because his pocket watch protected him. Lloyd tells him of the official story about what’s going on, which is that the poisonous gas spread throughout Area 11 and that the culprit hasn’t been found yet. To Suzaku’s surprise, Lloyd decides to give him the keys to a special Knightmare frame. Around this time, Shirley is getting into her swimsuit at school when she gets a call from Lelouch. He asks her to check the TV news, but there’s nothing about Shinjuku except for a traffic restriction. Lelouch guesses that this will allow the military to report whatever is convenient after it’s all over.
Lelouch takes a walkie-talkie and contacts Kallen in her damaged Knightmare, directing her to the west entrance – she should trust him if she wants to live. With no other options, Kallen pilots her Knightmare onto a set of train tracks and heads for a train coming her way. Following Lelouch’s orders, she leaps over it while her pursuers stop the train with their frames. The pilot of one of the Britannia Knightmares, Jeremiah, watches as his comrade gets suddenly destroyed by a hidden Knightmare – Lelouch’s. Since he’s getting double-teamed by Lelouch and Kallen, Jeremiah decides to eject and get away. By the time Kallen turns around to talk to Lelouch, he’s already gone. But when Kallen’s comrades come running, Lelouch contacts them via walkie-talkie and informs them of the contents of the train: a whole set of Sutherland-class Knightmare frames. He also tells Kallen to get a new energy pack and to wait for his next instructions in 10 minutes.
Under Lelouch’s command, the rebels start rapidly taking out the enemy forces. The Britannia leader Clovis decides to attack what he perceives to be Lelouch’s forces’ positions from all sides, but it turns out to be a trap and Clovis loses all his units. He calls upon Lloyd to deploy his toy, which Lloyd calls Lancelot. With Suzaku piloting despite being still injured, the Lancelot easily starts taking out the rebel Knightmare frames with its amazing speed and superior array of shielding and weaponry. Lelouch realizes that something is wrong, but his Knightmare also gets found and attacked by the Lancelot. Fortunately for him, Kallen distracts and saves Lelouch, though doing so completely wastes her mecha. And the Lancelot is so fast that it can quickly catch up with Lelouch’s fleeing Knightmare. This time, however, it is Suzaku’s compassion for human life that spares Lelouch because when he sees a woman and child fall from a high-rise, Suzaku breaks off the chase and catches them instead.
Afterwards, Kallen returns to her friends and other refugees, but the warehouse they are in gets raided by the military. The soldiers raise their weapons to fire, but an order by Clovis surprises everyone with a ceasefire. Clovis appears to be doing this because Lelouch has a gun trained on him after he snuck into Clovis’ command center with the ability of his eye. Lelouch asks if Clovis remembers them playing chess together and how he always won. It’s been a long time since they’ve seen each other, and Clovis is shocked when Lelouch introduces himself as the successor of the 17th imperial throne: Lelouch V. Britannia. Clovis thinks that Lelouch should be dead, but that is clearly not the case. Lelouch declares that he has returned to change everything.
Preview:
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Wow…that was a lot of mecha fighting goodness. Lelouch remains an awesome character, one of my favorites this season. That mix of craziness and calculating is very much like Light from Death Note as some have suggested, but I prefer Lelouch’s character so much more. We find out here that Lelouch is indeed Britannia royalty, perhaps killed/sealed away/something to prevent him from succeeding the throne. I imagine his true identity has something to do with the mask and the outfit he’s wearing in the OP. For now, Lelouch’s intentions appear to be fairly good, but that’s mainly because the Britannia Empire is portrayed so unfavorably, and so overthrowing them isn’t a bad thing. But I’m sure that as the story goes on, that’ll get more complicated.
The other highlight of this episode was the Lancelot frame. As expected, it’s really powerful, which made for some rather one-sided but entertaining battles. They did a great job on animating those fights, with the quality as good as last week if not better. Anyway, it doesn’t look like Lelouch is going to get his own special mecha to combat Suzaku’s Lancelot, but it’s also not certain that the two will continue fighting through the entire series. And there’s still C.C., who played virtually no part in this episode. How she lives through a headshot – and I’m sure she did, being a main character and all – is a question that will be answered in a future episode, maybe as soon as next week.