Judau is a junk dealer forced into a war he never asked for, surrounded by kids who shouldn't be pilots. The show stops pretending that's tragic and starts treating it like comedy, and it works because the cast actually likes each other, which changes everything about how you watch mobile suit combat. First twenty episodes are rough enough that you'll understand why people quit, but the moment the show stops fighting itself, it becomes something Zeta never was: a story about teenagers who make terrible decisions together and somehow survive anyway.

In Universal Century 0088, Judau Ashta is a 14-year-old junk dealer on the run-down Side 1 colony of Shangri-La, scraping together money to keep his younger sister in school. When the battered AEUG cruiser Argama docks there for repairs, he slips aboard hoping to steal the Zeta Gundam and sell it for a fortune. Instead he is pressured into joining the ship's crew. The Argama is being hunted by Neo Zeon, a powerful faction led by Haman Karn, and by a determined officer named Mashymre Cello. To protect his sister and himself, Judau has to learn to pilot the ship's newest mobile suit, the ZZ Gundam. The Neo Zeon attack pulls him and his friends into a war that carries them across space and down to Earth, in a drama built around mecha combat.