Legend of the Galactic Heroes – Die Neue These Episode 1: In the Eternal Night

Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These (The New Thesis) is a new anime adaptation of the ’80s space opera novel series Legend of the Galactic Heroes written by Yoshiki Tanaka.

Episode Summary

In the far future, two intergalactic powers fight in a seemingly unending war: The Galactic Empire and the Free Planets Alliance. Two massive fleets from either side approach each other in the Astarte star system.

The Empire’s fleet is vastly outnumbered by the Alliance; escape is an option, but the Imperial fleet commander – young Reinhard von Lohengramm – wants to stay and fight.

He’s noticed that the Alliance has broken itself up into three smaller fleets that they can pick off one-by-one.

Sure enough, it works and they’re able to destroy 2/3 of the Alliance fleet.

Thoughts

My first exposure to the franchise, and I got major Dune vibes; this is looking to be some very serious space opera. Most of the focus in this episode is on Reinhard and the Empire, which seems to be based on Imperial Germany.

This is the most large scale fleet battle I’ve ever seen in a sci-fi show, with tens of thousands of ships fighting each other all at once. Granted, the fighting mainly amounted to both sides just moving in a straight line zapping lasers at each other, but it was still an interesting sight. I wonder if the battles in this show will always involve massive fleets or if we’ll get some smaller-scaled stuff too.

So many characters and ships appeared with their names and ranks on-screen for several seconds. I have a hunch this show will have a supporting cast so large that you won’t know their names, and you’ll just have to know them by their actions or physical attributes (“The guy with the eyepatch,” etc.) like Game of Thrones.

The original anime series ran from ’88 to ’97, spanning 110 episodes and several short spin-offs. I’ve seen some comments online that it was a perfect adaptation of the novels and that there was no need for a remake, but, well, here it is. It’s on CrunchyRoll if you want to see it for yourself; there are currently 12 episodes, with 12 more coming next year (and maybe more after that?), so at the moment, there’s less of a commitment if you choose to watch this remake instead of the original.