Galaxy Express 999: Episodes 71-78
, I will finish this show before I die edition.
Nothing new there, then.
Even for GE999, the morals of "It's more noble to spend your life literally hacking dirt in a barren wasteland out of a sense of duty to your father and a bunch of dead people than to abandon this clearly futile endeavour and try and better your situation" and "It's better to work yourself to the bone being paid a pittance and freezing in poverty than to accept charity" seem particularly harsh. The second gets undermined anyway since almost immediately after teaching someone that questionable moral, Tetsuro gifts them with a frigging
gun anyway.
Then we're off the Africa, the Dark Nebula, which is pointed out is exactly the same shape as Africa, has planets named after places in Africa and we're even treated to a brief history lesson about Africa beforehand. So naturally, just like Africa, the planet Maetel and Tetsuro visit here is an ice planet of technologically advanced 2-dimensional ghost-grasshopper men out to conquer the stars. "Please give up on science and learn to live peacefully," pleads the Queen of the grasshopper people to her subjects, before cowing them with the powerful laser weapons of her sleek, featureless spaceship so advanced as to appear magical. Typical hypocritical elites.
I've seen enough of this show to know the answer is going to wipe that smile right off Tetsuro's face.
We also learn for the first time (I think) that the Galaxy Railways is a
public company. Finally, an explanation for how it can possibly afford to operate with single digit passenger numbers. The poverty stricken citizens of Earth are subsidising Maetel and Tetsuro's little jolly through the stars and their nuclear armed security force with their taxes like British Rail, NASA and Trident all rolled into one. Perhaps that's the reason the people of Earth are so poverty stricken in the first place.
At least some of these episodes had kind of a decent ecological message. Even if they did also include a tribe of underwater native Americans (where did they get the feathers for their headdresses on a world that's entirely ocean?) who immediately know how to pilot a spaceship they find in order to pursue the people who destroyed their planet. And Tetsuro chooses
this moment to start believing in due process after all the extra-judicial punishments, killings and planetery scale genocides he and Maetel have been responsible for up until this point?
Speaking of, that's another planet blown to smithereens in the wake of the 999. Not that anyone will probably miss the planet of endless rain where a cruel witch-queen is sucking the life out of her people, her minions will only save your life if you give them bags of cash and the whole atmosphere seems to have a corrupting influence making formerly decent people just as selfish as she is. Wikipedia informs me these episodes were broadcast in May 1980.
Hmm.
