Full Metal Panic! The Second Raid

Full Metal Panic! The Second Raid

フルメタル・パニック! The Second Raid
2005 Kyoto Animation TBS / MBS 13 episodes Completed
Action Mecha Military Drama Psychological
Details & Synopsis
The original Full Metal Panic balanced its military thriller against high school comedy with a precision that should not have worked and did. The Second Raid removes the balance. The comedy is almost entirely gone. What remains is the military thriller, and something underneath it that the first series was too busy juggling tones to fully surface.

Produced by Kyoto Animation and directed by Yasuhiro Takemoto, The Second Raid aired on TBS in 2005. Thirteen episodes. KyoAni were not yet the studio everyone knew them as, this predates Haruhi, predates Lucky Star, predates the reputation. What it represents is the studio at the peak of their action animation capability, before they pivoted to the aesthetic that would define their next decade. The Arm Slave combat sequences are as good as the genre produced in the mid-2000s.

The story picks up with the Amalgam organization moving from background threat to primary antagonist. Sousuke Sagara continues his impossible double life, MITHRIL special forces operative and Kaname Chidori's bodyguard-slash-classmate, until MITHRIL pulls him off the protection detail. What follows is the series' actual subject: what happens to a soldier trained since childhood for violence and nothing else when the one assignment that gave his life adjacent-to-human context is removed. Sousuke does not handle it gracefully. Sousuke does not handle it at all.

Gates is the antagonist the series deploys against this. Unhinged in a register the franchise had not previously attempted, not calculating, not ideological, simply a man who has found war and found that he likes it, enthusiastically, in a way that makes everyone around him deeply uncomfortable including his own allies. He is one of the more genuinely unsettling villain performances of the era.

Kaname alone and aware she is unprotected. Al, the Lambda Driver AI in the Arbalest, developing something that functions like concern. Tessa Testarossa carrying command weight that the first series kept at the level of character detail. The Second Raid is not a larger story than its predecessor. It is a narrower one, focused tighter on what the original was too busy to examine. Thirteen episodes and it earns every one of them.

A one-episode OVA, The Second Raid: "Another", was released with the DVD. Kaname in the bath, framed as comedy, functioning as something considerably more uncomfortable. Watch it after the series.
Alt Title フルメタル・パニック! The Second Raid
Studio Kyoto Animation
Network TBS / MBS
Aired 2005
Episodes 13
Genre Action, Mecha, Military, Drama, Psychological
Status Completed
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Naval & Mobile Command

Mobile Command Base

Tuatha de Danaan (TDD-1)

MITHRIL's Mobile Command Base in TSR
The Tuatha de Danaan remains the center of MITHRIL's Western Pacific operations, but The Second Raid uses it differently from the original series.

There is no giant TSR submarine-versus-Amalgam undersea battle. Instead, the TDD functions primarily as the command space where Tessa, Mardukas and the rest of MITHRIL try to understand an enemy that increasingly seems to know their procedures and deployments.
Why it matters
The submarine is most interesting here as the place where MITHRIL's confidence starts cracking. They still possess extraordinary hardware. The frightening part is discovering that hardware alone no longer means they control the situation.
Teletha "Tessa" Testarossa Andrei Kalinin Richard Mardukas