This is the flex move: out of a whole TV run, someone decided episode 22 was worth building a second time, and the reason is standing right there in a red cape. Emeraldas is Matsumoto's hardest character to write and his easiest to draw, the scar down her cheek doing the work that pages of backstory would ruin, and this special exists purely to give her the frames she never got the first time. The 999 keeps its absurd, perfect premise intact, a steam locomotive dragging its carriages through the void with Tetsuro and Maetel inside, and then a pirate who owes no one anything cuts across it. She never explains herself. She doesn't have to. If you have ever watched a kid stare at someone unreachable and quietly decide that's who he's going to become, you already know why this one got remade.

Galaxy Express 999: Eternal Traveler Emeraldas is a sci-fi special that remakes the twenty-second episode of the TV series. Two of Leiji Matsumoto's best-known heroines come together: Maetel, who travels in black beside the young hero Tetsuro, and Emeraldas, a bold pirate queen familiar from the Captain Harlock stories. A flashback shows the two women facing each other in a fencing duel. Most of the story concerns what happens after Emeraldas's ship forces the Galaxy Express to halt on a distant planet and captures Maetel and Tetsuro.