Code Geass: Rozé of the Recapture

Episode 6

Are you serious, Rozé of the Recapture? Are you fucking kidding me? After all the dread and fear over the resistance fighters' failure to stop the last FLEIJA nuke, after all the death, it just crash lands outside the city, doing negligible damage? What did that whole episode even accomplish? What did pseudo-Ohgi and and the racist Gō Nagai character lookalike even die for?? You had a literal and metaphorical Sword of Damocles, and when it fell, it amounted to nothing.

I take back everything I said about the last episode. That whole action scene had zero consequence. One villain and one named ally, who I don't think was ever even named on-screen unless you had captions on, died. At the end of it all, there was no mass destruction, no sense of despair over all their efforts being for nothing. There's not even really a sense of relief, since the Damocles and FLEIJA missiles were introduced all of two episodes ago. Perhaps if I'd seen this in movie form, it would have worked better; I would see it as a disaster narrowly averted, allowing the tension to dissipate and allowing me to greater enjoy twenty minutes of Sakuya taking a well-deserved break. But as the resolution to a cliffhanger, after waiting a week? It was a letdown, a wet fart of an anticlimax that makes me madder the more I think about it!

It casts a pall over the rest of the episode, which, as predicted, is a denouement for this week's largely inconsequential battle and set-up for the next arc. I'm cheered slightly by the next scene, in which Catherine tells Sakura-not-Sakuya about the Damocles fighting, and honestly, any time Catherine isn't on screen, I ask, “Where's Catherine?” She's terrible, don't get me wrong, but she really brings a dynamism in the way she moves and talks that none of the other characters do. She unabashedly hates Sakura for her weakness, but it makes her even angrier when Sakura wants to change that. Is there some projection happening? I'm not sure, but she's the best character of the lot thus far.

It's the anniversary of Jugo's death, which is an excuse for Kuroto to drop some exposition about Sakuya's parents, who “treated everyone equally.” It's not a particularly interesting scene, so I'm going to take this as an opportunity to point out Hulu's awkwardly placed commercial breaks, which often involve the screen fading to black as a character is in the middle of a thought or even a sentence. It breaks the flow of the scene pretty much every time, and I wish that someone out there would put a little more thought into it.

The Black Knights are planning to send a peace envoy now that the Damocles is out of the picture. But really, why even have the Damocles? I know the show ended with it flying into the sun, so I assume the movies ended differently for it. But really, wouldn't it have been more satisfying to create a new threat that won't break continuity for people who watched the TV show? I'm back on the “Rozé of the Recapture is afraid to do anything new and constantly defaults to repeating the old show's story beats” train.

Instead of visiting her father's grave, Sakuya spends her time off breasting boobily in bed, the camera ogling her erect nipples as she naps, which… I don't think nipples work that way, but I guess it wouldn't be Code Geass without being inappropriately horny. She offers to help out at the cafe, which leads to her running into Ash when Mei sends her out on errands in disguise as Raspberry. The difference in how Ash treats his supposed brother Rozé and how he treats “Raspberry” is one of the best character beats of the series. It's really emblematic of the limits of Sakuya's geass – even if he thinks Rozé is his brother, it can't create a relationship out of whole cloth. There's nothing to fill the gaps, so their downtime together is filled with empty silence and awkward small talk. The way he talks to Raspberry is awkward as well, but in a totally different way; it's the awkwardness of a young man who has absolutely no idea how to talk to the girl he likes, so he just fills the air with whatever pops into his head, forcing Sakuya to face just how little she knows about him, and, it's implied, how little she cared before.

Their stroll is interrupted by Narah rolling up; luckily, Sakuya just so happens to have a bugged bit of cafe merchandise, so she won't miss out on the exposition between them! And oh boy, she would not have wanted to miss out a conversation this unhinged.

Why is Narah, who by all appearances is supposed to be “the sympathetic one” and scowled when Divock started dropping slurs, working for Norland, who she hates? It is, no joke, to secure the existence and future for the white children of Britannia. Seriously! After the Britannian Empire fell, apparently the conquered folks didn't feel super swell about the colonizers who stuck around. There was an orphanage of Britannian children, Lavender House, and I guess something happened to it, so now she's fighting on the side of the imperialists.

I don't have to explain that this is buck-wild, right? There's a genuine issue here–when an occupied state overthrows its oppressors, there's always a question of what will happen to the children of colonizers, for whom this is the only home they've ever known. But what Narah is doing is like trying to re-conquer the Congo because of what happened to one Belgian orphanage. What about all the Japanese children who are suffering from the violence of Neo-Britannia? Narah doesn't care. Maybe the show is about to pull some narrative sleight of hand, and it'll turn out that she's meant to be as villainously racist as anyone else, but I doubt the writing is that deft.

Oh, and Ash didn't kill Jugo and is Norland's adopted son. Those details are important but are less interesting to talk about for review purposes.

The episode also spends some time with Sakura, and without Catherine by her side, I kind of want to go to sleep every time she's on-screen. She's a total charisma void, an idealistic proponent of incrementalism who just wants to implement policies to make people happy rather than liberate her country. She wants to set up special administrative districts around the territory where it's illegal to discriminate against Japanese people, which is somehow an even more half-hearted version of Euphemia's plan from the Lelouch of the Rebellion. I get that her idea is meant to be unworkable, but she's just so milquetoast that I don't even buy her as a figurehead, even if she insists that she wants to grow.

The episode's strongest hook for what's to come was, by far, the scenes with good ol' Christoph Scissorman, the best-named character in the series. He's figured out a way to force people to remember being geassed: agonizing pain and interrogation, with a side of freaky eye stuff. Despite my lighthearted tone, it was quite an effective bit of horror, capping off a regular torture scene with a long-haired man in a skintight white suit doing something horrible to the nameless guard's eyes, blood leaking from the device around the poor sap's eyes as he screams until he slumps over, dead.

After the anti-climax of the Damocles' crash and Narah's “sympathetic” motivation for active participation in white supremacy, I've lost faith in Rozé of the Recapture's ability to follow through on pretty much anything in a satisfying way. But damn, if I'm not curious about what the story is with this bloodthirsty man in white.

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Code Geass: Rozé of the Recapture is currently streaming on Hulu and Disney+, depending on your region.