Gundam Thunderbolts second season is exactly what I called it in the summary: the burned out husk of a once great show. A boldfaced insult to the glorious first season it succeeded which sucks it dry of the energy it once had in favor of hollow pandering and incomplete shallow storytelling. Lets start with the very basic premise of this season more specifically how its broken from the very foundation. What defined the first season of Thunderbolt was the intense morally gray rivalry between its two leads and the squads they represent. The show gave you time to truly get to know both Io and Daryl grow attached to them and know their understandable reasons for fighting. This in turn. made it all the more weighty when the two sides clashed perpetuating their selfdestructive cycle of vengeance over an ultimatelyworthless sector of space in a fashion which is both exciting and tragic. Its here where Thunderbolt Season 2 utterly fails. Being set after the One Year War the fundamental conflict which defined Season 1s themes and characters is gone and with it goes everything which made the story interesting. In its place we now have the South Seas Alliance an entirely new faction whose defining traits are is evil and is vaguely cultlike made up entirely of faceless minions with no definable character traits or motivations of their own. Consequently every battle in this season is absurdly boring the character motivations and emotional intensity of the first season traded out for brainless plotless schlock where no meaningful character writing or investment can be found. The real nail in the coffin for this sad excuse for a story however is the fact that Now in response to this some of you might say that a big part of what makes Thunderbolt good is that its cool action spectacle which you can turn your brain off to so the fact that the writing has went to shit shouldnt be a huge impediment to ones enjoyment. Im sorry to say however that the action and spectacle in this season are also rather lacking. Now to be clear the show isnt exactly bad looking. The art style is still on point the Mobile Suit designs are great and the animation is a bit above your average seasonal trash but its still a major step down from Season 1. Moving the setting from space to Earth did a number on its action choreography which now feels so much more sluggish and watereddown compared to the infinite creativity of the first season. The storyboarding rarely feels very striking or impactful outside of a few memorable scenes in the first episode and the new color palette means that so very few of the visuals truly pop like they should. This isnt helped by the fact that it just drags. Each episode is a few minutes longer than in Season 1 and while that might not sound that bad on paper in practice it means that the season is collectively over 20 minutes longer than the first one yet not nearly as much happens in it. Fights are drawn out longer than they should be and the plot tying it together is too thin to justify the extra time given to it. The collective result of all this is that the entire season just feels so stale. watching through it all feels like it actively drains ones energy simply because its so much more of a time sink next to Season 1 without nearly as much to get invested in. And coming out the other side it just feels like youve actively wasted your time. In many ways this season feels more like a crude parody of Thunderbolts first season than a true follow up. A work which sets out to be a vague facsimile of the action fest it looks like on the surface while failing to understand the human core which made it work. Its a truly soulless product rather than a story and I cant in good faith recommend such a thing to anyone who truly enjoys Thunderbolt.