In which we get to meet another Gundam pilot, it's revealed that there's some serious SNAFU all 'round, and Relena is revealed to have the intelligence of moist toast.
At the school, there's some fencing going on, with assorted students lazily whapping foils against each other. One of Relena's classmates, annoyed at the dissing Heero gave her last episode, has challenged the little sociopath. They fence a bit. Heero quickly gets fed up, however, and lunges forwards, lazily dis-arming his opponent - and snapping his own foil blade in the process. He then rams the jagged end through his opponent's visor, although he's nice enough to not actually impale the guy's head.
For obvious reasons, nobody else challenges Heero.
Out in the ocean, Earth Federation... er, Alliance... er, whatever, ships are deploying water-capable Mobile Suits to try and retrieve the downed Gundam. Unfortunately, the ships they've sent for the job are an aircraft carrier and a bevy of missile frigates, none of which are particularly well equipped for recovery. So they make due by simply tossing their Mobile Suits off the deck of the carrier, where they land with satisfying splashing sounds and the shrieks of the pilots.
How they're going to get those darn things back *up* again is another story.
On the carrier's bridge, several crew-members comment to the Captain about all this, and he just surls at them.
Meanwhile, Zechs has retrieved a giant submarine and is en route. He contacts the Captain and they surl at each other a little before the Captain agrees to allow Zechs to launch his own under-water mobile suits to go retrieve the Gundam. One of Zechs loyal crew volunteers to lead the mission. Clearly, he's doomed.
Meanwhile, at the school, which is apparently some kind of really high-class prep school, everyone's taking horsemanship lessons, except for Heero, who's taken his horse off on a little jog to the dorms, where he's broken into someone's room to use their computer for a little hacking. One of Relena's friends notices him skipping out with a horse and is impressed with his bad-assedness. Yes, Heero is James Bond, Jr - he proceeds to hack into the local military computer and browse around for ordinance, then, as an afterthought, breaks into the school's computer net and clears out all those troublesome "hasn't paid his dues yet" notes, and validates all the checks they were running on him. Yawn, just another day as a bad-ass anime hero.
Out in the ocean, the carrier's mobile suits are being blown up. Zechs is suitably concerned. The Captain gets really surly when all his mobile suits are destroyed and has all his ships launch a barrage of torpedoes. Sure enough, Zechs gets caught up in it and gripes a bit about what an idiot the Captain is. Meanwhile, the Gundam responsible, the DeathScythe piloted by, er, Duo, I think, pops up and lazily obliterates the fleet, stomping around on the carrier a bit and blowing up a helicopter that tried to get away.
Okay, admittedly, killing anyone you run into is one way to maintain secrecy. But geez.
Relena, meanwhile, heads off to her birthday party and makes the realization that the reason Heero threatened to kill her was that she knows his secret. Keep this in mind for later. Heero, meanwhile, is off stealing torpedoes so that he can set off his Gundam's self-destruct.
Zechs three mobile suits encounter Heero's downed Gundam and accidentally trigger the security system. Oops. Before they can get too concerned, though, Duo shows up in the DeathScythe and disposes of them. The guy with speaking lines manages to put up a good fight, at least, and has the time to remark about how cool Duo's mecha is before he's obliterated. Back at the submarine, Zechs shows no concern at all that one of his loyal followers just bought it. Kill all you want, he'll bring more.
Duo examines Heero's downed Gundam, realizes it's much the same as his, uses this knowledge to dis-engage the auto-destruct, and decides that he'll use it as his back-up machine. Never does it occur to him that this might belong to another colony pilot... yes, it's clear that this mission is so secret that none of the colony pilots were told about each others existance! Idiots, idiots, idiots, idiots, idiots. It's not like the Federat... I mean Alliance isn't going to know.
Relena, meanwhile, has a nice party. Her father is there for a bit, but gets called away, not before he accidentally drops some plot-relevant files for Relena to look at, though. Relena finally fits it all together - Heero must be one of the pilots of the 'meteors' she saw! Keep in mind, in a few moments, that she's figured all this out. On the radio, the government is cheerfully denying that anything at all is going on. Just meteors. Nothing to see here, move along...
The classmate that Heero whupped on in fencing is zipping along on his motorcycle to the party when he sees Heero trundling along in the ambulance. "Hm," he thinks, "That's odd." When he gets there, he remarks on this to Relena, who immediately realizes Heero's up to no good. So, her reaction, quite naturally, is to head off alone to confront him.
...
Insert a few cut scenes with the other three pilots. The one with spectacularly bad hair is trying to get a job in the circus, and doing quite well as he's a bad-ass. Another of them, Quatre, is slacking off and doing nothing at all, guarded by several minions. Where'd he get the minions? And he's got a butler! What?! Quatre remarks that Earth is really beautiful (so beautiful, in fact, that he uses that word at least three or four times in his incredibly brief little scene). Pink flamingoes are perching on his Gundam, which is parked right out there in the open for anyone to see. COVERT operations, you cretin! COVERT! The last, Wu Fei, is buying up lots of explosives. Why? Who knows.
Heero continues his James Bondism by causing lots of explosions in the local base. Or was that Wu Fei. Or Duo? Anyway, Heero gets into the local military base in the confusion, trundles his torpedoes over to a submarine, takes over the submarine, and starts loading them on. Um.
Somehow, Relena divines what he's up to and runs around the base until she finds him (all the soldiers having apparently done a Sir Robin as soon as stuff started blowing up). Relena confronts him alone. Heero looks at her for a moment, murmurs "Relena..." which causes her to perk up. For a moment at least. Then he pulls a gun on her, comments that she's gotten in too far, and prepares to kill her, only to be shot by Duo!
Er, what? How Duo got there, I just don't know. Heero is also surprised by this, as well as the fact that there's strangely no blood on his gun-shot wound, due to squeamish American re-animation. Now Relena shows what a goombah she is by getting all worried for Heero and bandaging his wound. Duo is baffled by this, as he got involved to save her ungrateful butt, and mutters "Hey... how'd I get turned into the bad guy, here?"
Duo's Gundam shows up in the background, towing Heero's. Heero sees this and decides it's his last chance to finish his mission. He hops onto the torpedoes, fires them off (apparently they're /rocket/ torpedoes...) and does a brief Slim Pickins impression as he aims them at the Gundams. Then he falls off and decides to have a nice lie down in the water. Duo lets loose a mighty "D'oh!" as the torpedoes send both Gundams to the bottom. Realizing that only a fellow Gundam pilot would know just what weapons to have around to smack down a Gundam, Duo "d'oh!"s again as he figures out he just shot someone who was probably supposed to be his ally.
Relena blinks in a baffled manner.
So, now they've just dumped two super-advanced battle machines in a few hundred feet of water right in the middle of an enemy harbor which they're now stuck in. This is going to be awful hard to explain when the authorities arrive...
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