Nadesico Ep. 26: For the Lady We Will Meet Someday

Erina orders her Aestivalis units to withdraw, well aware that with Inez and Akito in the ruins, Yurika won’t be attempting to destroy them for the time being. Akatsuki and Akito seem to have temporarily put aside their differences to break through the many layers of distortion fields protecting the deepest part of the ruins. Akatsuki asks Akito who it is that Inez wants him to meet, but Akito admits he doesn’t know. On the bridge of the Nadesico, Yurika wonders if it’s Ai. Ryoko, Hikaru, and Izumi seem to agree with her. Erina wonders what everybody’s talking about, so Ruri fills in for Inez by explaining that Ai was a little girl that Akito met before he escaped Mars. Her assumed death is the cause of much of Akito’s trauma. In the ruins, Inez comforts Ai, who tells her that she smells like her mother. Ai tells Inez that her mother went to sleep when everything exploded, and then her new friend Akito started to shine. She ran to him, but he disappeared, then she started to shine too, and disappeared herself. On the surface, a Chulip crash-lands nearby and before the Kakitsubata can react, they’re grazed by a gravity blast from the emerging Jovian battleship–the Kannazuki. Recognizing that one of their enemies is the Nadesico, the captain wonders what that ‘dashing man-of-action’ will do this time. He is followed out of the Chulip by another battleship commanded by Gen-Ichiro, who orders all manned and unmanned fighters to be deployed. The ruins come to life due to the boson jumping activity, and Ai begins to shine. Inez yells to Akito to hurry, as Ai begins to cry that she doesn’t want to go before she can see her friend Akito again. Inez tearfully tries to comfort her and tells her not to forget about Akito–even if she doesn’t meet him now, she’ll see him one day. Ai gains a bit of courage and tells Inez that she feels like she’s talking to her mother. Then she suddenly remembers that ‘they’ told her to give her something before she goes. Ai drops a mysterious rectangular silver plate and then boson jumps away. Akito finally makes it to the center of the ruins, just a few seconds too late. Inez re-composes herself and tells Akito that perhaps it was meant to be this way. She explains that Ai was caught up in Akito’s boson jump on Mars and wound up on ancient Mars. The ancient people who built these ruins sent her back, but thanks to all the activity caused by the Jovian Chulip, she jumped again and wound up in the middle of a desert twenty years ago. Inez reminds Yurika, Ruri, and the Aestivalis pilots that when their memories were joined together, they saw her past. Due to the shock of being in the desert, she lost her memories. She was picked up by some Nergal workers in the area, and only remembered what she had forgotten. Akito admits that he knew this, though he couldn’t bring himself to say anything, and apologizes to Inez/Ai for not being able to save her. Inez tells him that she’s glad to finally be able to meet him again. Erina finally breaks up the tearful reunion to ask for some cover, as the Kakitsubata is taking a pounding from seemingly every Jovian in the area. The captain of the Kannazuki decided that the best way to take down the Nadesico was to remove her support first. As the Jovian Gekigan-types break through the Kakitsubata‘s distortion field, Akatsuki orders Erina to abandon ship. Akito returns an inexplicably unconscious Inez to the Nadesico, which has followed Akito into the ruins, and begins to sulk about how it was his fault that she wound up lost in time. At the same time, Yukina decides that she can’t keep weeping when everybody else is working so hard, and asks her brother to please watch over them while she makes his dream a reality. The Kakitsubata survivors follow the Nadesico into the ruins as the Jovian armada surrounds the site. Gen-Ichiro sends a dispatch to the Nadesico ordering them to abandon the ruins and surrender within thirty minutes. Yurika tells the crew that she doesn’t plan to surrender, nor is she prepared to give the ruins to the Jovians. Meanwhile, Minato watches the last episode of Gekiganger in her room. Gekiganger V is cornered on the moon by a huge number of enemy robots. It all seems hopeless, when suddenly an unexpected ally appears: Joe and the Gekiganger III! Minato bitterly notes how convenient it is for those who are dead to just pop back up, and wonders if what he believed in was really this hollow. Yukina pops up and asks her if moping around her room is really how adults are supposed to behave. Minato says that it’s fine if she’s a child anyway. Yukina gets annoyed and tells her that she will replace her brother as Minato’s groom! 

Yurika tells the crew that she plans to overload the Nadesico‘s phase transition engines in the hopes that the resulting explosion will destroy the ruins. Erina is taken aback and asks her if she really plans to sacrifice all their lives for this. Yurika all-too-happily explains that the only person sticking around. Hearing this, the door to the briefing room opens, revealing most of the rest of the crew eves dropping, and Akito busts in with a loud objection. He asks her if she really plans to die for this. She pouts that she won’t die, and the proceeding childish back-and-forth argument ends with Akito calling her an idiot and nearly making her cry. Yurika unhappily tries to remind them that the war will end if the ruins are destroyed. Yurika argues that if they saved the solar system by destroying the ruins, that would make up for her letting all those Martian colonists die. Uribatake chimes in to suggest that, if Inez’s explanation is correct and the ruins are just one big time machine, then if they do destroy it, all boson jumps, past, present, and future would be voided and made to have never happened. Thus, there probably would have never been a war and their certainly wouldn’t have been a Nadesico. Suddenly, they hear the sound of a ukulele playing. Izumi, surprised as the rest of them, tells them that it’s not her. They open the door to see a very relaxed Admiral Fukube, sporting shades and a ukulele and riding on the back of a Jovian grasshopper. He tells them not to even think of such a thing as self-destruction. Inez pops up to explain that she met him in the ruins–it seems that he did not die on Mars, but was captured by the grasshoppers and interned in the ruins until now. Yurika asks him why they shouldn’t self-destruct, and he simply tells her that it’s stupid. Ruri and Omoikane also chime in against self-destructing. Ruri explains that if the ruins are destroyed and history is changed, they would be no war, but they’d loose something very dear to them as well. Thus, the Nadesico disconnects the boson jump core from the ruins and prepares to take it aboard. On the bridge Megumi wonders if it will still work, being disconnected like this, but she is assured that time and space are meaningless to the ruins. To the surprise of the bridge crew, Minato reappears to take her station. She seems to have regained her cheerful demeanor and tells that that she had to pull herself together for Yukina’s sake. Ruri thinks to herself that her time on board the Nadesico–her precious memories–are something she will never give up. Vice Admiral Kusakabe, annoyed that Gen-Ichiro gave the Nadesico thirty minutes, orders five Gekigan-units into the ruins. Ryoko resolves to keep them busy while the final preparations are made. Inez, Akito, and a somewhat despondent Yurika gather on the observation deck to attempt to boson jump the Nadesico. A rather amused Erina notes that the crew of the Nadesico has chosen their memories over world peace. Akito, Yurika, and Inez begin to shine, but before a stable boson jump field can be established, the whole thing conks out. Inez thinks about this for a minute and then tells Akito and Yurika to kiss each other. Since they don’t have a Chulip nearby, they need a massive boson jump field to jump the entire ship, thus membrane-to-membrane contact may be needed between them. Ruri reminds them that they’ll be in a pinch if they don’t hurry. Yurika is having none of it, however, and yells at Akito to go kiss Inez and then suddenly jumps away. Ryoko, Izumi, Hikaru, and Akatsuki keep the Jovian Gekigan-types busy at the entrance to the ruins as Akatsuki notes that it seems that only those born on Mars are capable of boson jumping. This is most likely due to the nanomachines that permeate the Martian atmosphere, which seem to have changed their bodies to be compatible with boson jumping. Erina agrees, but notes that one of their Martians is running off, with the another hot on her heels. On the launch deck, Yurika is in the process of stealing Akito’s Aestivalis, despite Uribatake and Akito yelling at her that she can’t move it without an image feedback implant. In response, Yurika sticks out her tongue to them both and shows them the image feedback implant on the back of her hand and takes off. Inez tells Akito to visualize the inside of his cockpit, which causes him to boson jump right behind Yurika, who immediately flips out. As they fight for control of the Aestivalis, they plunge right through the battle, causing the combatants to stop to listen to what sounds like a couple of lovers quarreling over an open comm channel. Yurika finally calms down a bit and tells Akito that she wants to turn back time so he doesn’t have to feel guilty about what happened to Ai. Akito tells Yurika that he finally watched the last episode of Gekiganger III–turns out it was really awful. Despite that, Akito admits to having shivers run up his spine as Gekiganger III and Gekiganger V fought alongside each other. Akito tells her that he loved the show because he always wanted to believe in the part of himself that has faith in hotblooded passion. Yurika interrupts his speech to suggest that that’s why he’s in love with her. Annoyed, Akito tells her that he was just getting to the grand scale of things, but admits that she’s correct and asks how she feels about him. Surprised that he has to ask, Yurika reminds him that she loves him a lot. Akito tells her that’s the first time she’s ever told that to him directly. She calls him a liar, but he persists. The ensuing argument is ended when Akito simply kisses her. With that, the Nadesico successfully boson jumps away from Mars and the Jovian fleet. They evacuate the crew to the upper portion of the ship, and send the bottom half (which contains the boson jump core) off to wander the depths of space. Ruri explains that she’s not sure if kissing was really necessary, but Inez has refused to explain it any further. In the end, Ruri admits that many mysteries were left unexplained, and the war between Earth and Jupiter will probably continue. But at least this way they won’t be able to do much more than glare at each other for a while.