GKMP is surely the United Nations General Assembly Building of death flags.

We received the somewhat cryptic news this week (via a corporate press release from one of the sponsors on the Production Committee, as it happens) that “A second season of Ginga Kikoutai Majestic Prince is being considered”.  That’s pretty nebulous, but there was never a time that the notion of another season wouldn’t have pleased me – and with the show kicking into plot overdrive and seemingly shoehorning an alarming amount of drama into the last few episodes, never more so than now does it seem like a good idea.

Gone but not forgotten are the two deceased members (I was never totally convinced that a fast one wouldn’t be pulled with Patrick, who didn’t get a classic anime death by a long stretch) of Team Dobermans.  Chandra does indeed survive – just what happens with him as a pilot now I’m not sure – and we get classic “burial at sea” for his teammates.  He also gives Tamaki the gift Patrick had planned to give her – not just pickled squid guys, but premium pickled squid guts – which was only the right thing to do, I suppose.  But there’s a part of me that feels it was somewhat cruel, because that’s given the incredibly childlike Tamaki some emotional baggage she’s singularly unprepared to carry.  Even she can figure out what this really means, and turns to Kei for emotional support in dealing with it.  It probably would have been kinder to eat the guts and keep the truth to himself, but I don’t really blame Chandra for what he did.

Izuru performs his own tribute to Dobermans by drawing a manga image of them (a somewhat loose resemblance, in truth) but his inability to hold the pen reveals the first big dramatic development of the episode, that his telomeres (flashed back to SSY, there) are deteriorating, and he may in fact be dying.  Naturally he and the Rabbits aren’t told this, but they’ve been lied to for so long and so often that they seem to be developing a sort of sixth sense about it.  Majestic Prince has a funny way of exposition, never revealing the entire truth, or at least never making it clear just what the truth is.  There’s a lot to take in here, and it seems intentionally vague, but for starters the gist seems to be that Izuru was created directly from Theoria’s DNA, which I suppose makes her his mother and leaves that ship grounded on the beach.  That gives Kei a puncher’s chance, assuming Izuru survives long enough.

But wait, there’s more – much more.  When Akagi stands in for Izuru during some tests on Red Five (a bit of a plot contrivance, to be honest) it starts up – which should have been impossible given that each AHSMB is DNA coded.  Suzukaze halfheartedly lies to Akagi when he asks her about it, but he calls her out and she relents – apparently (and again, this isn’t exactly crystal clear) both Akagi and Izuru are Simon’s sons.  Akagi seems to have suspected this too, though I have no idea why.  This seems to make the two pilots half-brothers – and of course leads to some interesting questions about the rest of the Bunnies, including Ange, who of course exhibits some of the same behavior patterns as Izuru herself and thus, he might be subject to the same illness as Izuru.  Another well-deserved lemon of guilt for Suzukaze to suck on.

As all this is playing out the MJP is making their final pitch to the rest of the world powers for help in their all-or-nothing gambit to destroy the gate whose location Randy and Patrick paid for with the full measure of their devotion.  They’re rightly skeptical, and no less so when a holographic Princess Theoria makes the case – not surprisingly they’re more concerned about the fact that they were never told she existed.  Frankly I think the MJP has done very little to earn the trust of anybody, internally or externally, but when Theoria decides to come to HQ and make the case in person, she proves a fair bit more persuasive.

There’s an awful lot happening now, with only five eps left to wrap it all up.  I think fans of Izuru should be quite worried at this point – he’s got what’s been described as a “possibly terminal” illness, Akagi has been shown to be compatible with his AHSMB, and the object of his romantic ambitions has turned out to be his mother.  He shouldn’t buy any green bananas, that’s for sure – but more generally, the feeling of melancholy that’s been hovering over the series for a while is growing ever stronger.  I said last week that GKMP could just go for an all-out despairing ending and nothing I saw in this episode disabuses me of that suspicion, though at this point I still think it’s unlikely to go uniformly dark.  But too many people are being put in positions where noble sacrifices might be in order to think everyone will escape, and the fate of Randy and Patrick has proved that death flags in this show aren’t to be taken lightly.