Code Geass: Rozé of the Recapture

Episodes 11-12

The final three episodes of Rozé of the Recapture have sent me on quite an emotional journey. The tenth episode, “Purple Surf,” enraged me with its poor plotting and ideas. “Devastating Force” left me mostly numb; Norland takes out Catherine, and then Ash, standing still in his Foulbout and firing lasers from his hands, knees, and face. There's some fuss about the Loki robots and the Situmpe Wall, but none matters. Now, with the airing of “Breaking Dawn,” I find myself feeling… contemplative. Peaceful, even.

"Breaking Dawn" picks up where “Devastating Force” left off, with Ash tumbling toward the Earth, frozen from any attempt to save himself from his despair and trauma in the face of Norland's overwhelming power. Even if he could theoretically fight back, he would find himself unable to in the face of his father figure, a figure of immovable cruelty. Sakuya rescues him and once they reach safety, the two talk, really talk, as Sakuya Sumeragi and Ash Phoenix, for perhaps the first time. They reflect on what got them to this point, their goals, and how to move forward. Finally, Ash asks Sakuya to give him a new Geass that will allow him to protect her. She balks, realizing what it means to overwrite someone else's will and what an intrusion it is, but he insists. Finally, she relents, ordering him to act as her knight and defeat Norland at all costs.

As I was watching, my first impulse was to joke about how the two are entering a kind of D/s lifestyle arrangement, but looking back, it was a fairly smart bit of character writing. Ash is so deeply traumatized by Norland that as he is, he cannot stand up against him. Even if he has the fighting capability and the reflexes, his foster father has such a psychological weight against him that he will freeze every time. Sakuya's Geass will overwrite that mental block, allowing him to defeat his foster father in combat and find peace.

The two of them move forward, combining the Apollo and Artemis to defeat Norland and his Lokis, staving off the conversion of humanity into bloody red mist. The battle scene that follows is, frankly, excellent. The Foulbout doesn't move much; it tends to stay in one place and fire lasers from its limbs. To compensate for that, the camera follows their highly kinetic motions as they dodge the beams, occasionally shifting to cockpit shocks that emphasize the physical stress this puts Sakuya through and give a sense of how difficult this is. The two communicate their observations about the Foulbout's capabilities in terse sentences. Finally, they break through, and Ash skewers the Foulbout with Apollo's two swords, echoing Nichol's murder. Norland is dead and the Lokis are no longer a threat.

This should be a victorious moment, but then Ash realizes: there's no way for them to safely return to the surface after all the energy they just expended. He loses himself from the Artemis and falls toward Earth again, this time having accomplished his goals. His breath shakes as he says his final farewells, the camera holding steady as the Apollo grows smaller and smaller until it breaks apart in a flash of light. Finally, Sakuya wails. Grief for the man she once assumed was her enemy, for the man she deceived and controlled, for the man who forgave her and, for far too short a time, was the only person she could truly rely on. The man who, in a different life, she may have fallen in love with.

And from here, the action falls. Kaguya delivers an address, describing humanity's efforts to recover from the devastation caused by the Loki, and Hokkaido's designation as an autonomous zone. Narah is running an orphanage, realizing her dream of protecting white children, now with some help from Catherine. The Seven Shining Stars have disbanded. Haruka is spending time with her dad. Sakuya leaves her voice-changer and flowers on two graves in a field. Finally, before delivering her first speech as Empress of Hokkaido, she looks at herself in the mirror and uses her Geass to render herself mute, sealing off the power forever.

This was the finale of a much better series: tight and focused, finding the emotional thrust to contextualize and inform the action. It almost works on its own, a short story of love blooming on the battlefield for a brief moment before being cut short.

I have griped and groused that Rozé. of the Recapture is too short to do everything it wants. This show wanted to take a maximalist approach when it simply didn't have enough time, resulting in episodes that jumped at random between half-baked subplots. It needs to be at least twice as long so that all the plot beats have room to breathe and the story gets all the proper connective tissue so that the pathos feels earned instead of cheap. I stand by that.

However, there is an alternative: a stripped-down version, similar to what we got here. Nothing with Sakura or Catherine ended up mattering. Haruka's arc was an afterthought at best. The politics were undercooked and extraneous. If we'd had twelve episodes, four movies of Sakuya and Ash navigating their trauma and tricky situations, with the Seven Shining Stars as supporting characters, it would have been a very different but much better show. Instead of aping Lelouch of the Rebellion, echoing it in a way that only invites unflattering comparisons, this could have been its own thing, quieter and less dramatic but memorable for its power in its own right.

But that's not the show we got. Instead, Rozé. of the Recapture is a paragon of mediocrity and overstuffed ideas, doomed to be forgotten by all but the most ardent fans of Code Geass.

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