_Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion_
Mind control, Mecha, and Pizza Hut product placement.
You can watch this on Netflix, Crunchyroll, or Funimation.
We open with an alt-history voiceover.
In 2010 (slightly into the future when this was released,) the Holy Empire of Britannia (shown as all of North America on the map,) declared war on Japan.
Their war Mechs, the Knighmare Frames, defeated Japan's conventional forces.
Japan is know conquered territory, denied even its own name, it is simply known as Area 11.
A young boy swears that he's going to destroy Britannia.
A conventional opening follows: action shots of a large number of characters.
Opening subtitles move the timeline up to 2017.
Lelouch Lamperouge is busy wasting his brain on hustling noblemen in chess matches instead of studying.
Prince Clovis, ruler of Area 11, gives a televised address decrying the recent terrorist attacks.
Some terrorists in a stolen truck are thrown off their original plan.
The terrorists swerve to avoid hitting Lolouch and his friend and crash. Meanwhile Clovis has scrambled a force to retrieve whatever was stolen.
Officially, it's medical equipment. Obviously, that's a lie.
Lelouch comes over to check on the accident, and gets trapped inside the rig when the terrorists decide to retreat.
Kallen, one of the terrorists, has a Knightmare in the back of the rig and takes it out to fight off the military pursuit.
She draws off some pursuers.
The rig gets stuck, and a Britannian soldier mistakes Lelouch for a terrorist. Luckily, he's an old friend, but before they can get reacquainted, the stolen capsule opens.
It contains, not poison gas as rumored, but a girl.
The soldiers who arrive get it all wrong.
Before they can kill Lelouch, the actual terrorist blows a bomb he had hidden.
Prince Clovis, fearful that he's lost control of the situation, orders a purge of the ghetto that the terrorists were fleeing towards.
Lelouch and the girl flee, but there are soldiers waiting.
The soldiers capture the girl, and make to kill Lelouch, but she breaks free and blocks the bullet.
As the soldiers invent an explanation for their superiors, she offers Lelouch a deal: he will get The Power Of The King, but it will isolate him. He can use it to escape.
When he comes to, he orders the soldiers to die, and they all willingly commit suicide.
A Knightmare arrives. Lelouch orders the pilot to turn it over to him.
Too bad his power only works on people he can look in the eye.
But a careful deception get the pilot out, and Lelouch steals the mech.
Now, Lelouch stole one of the terrorist's communicators, originally intending to turn it over to the authorities, but now he uses it to rendezvous with the resistance.
There's no news of what's happening in the ghetto, which means they want to keep it quiet.
This means they can't call for reinforcements. Lelouch helps pick off Britannian Knightmares, and rescues Kallen. Conveniently, there's a train full of spare Knightmares. Lelouch makes an offer to the resistance: do what I say, and you can win.
Lelouch's Knightmare is still connected to Britannia's coms. He has the heading and location of all the other Knightmares on the battlefield. It's easy to set traps that way.
They break ranks to fill the gaps and get sucked into an even nastier trap.
Meanwhile, Lelouch's childhood friend Suzaku has miraculously survived the earlier fracas and has been recruited by Lloyd Asplund, head of special weapons engineering for Britannia, to pilot the experimental Knightmare, Lancelot.
With the ordinary Knightmare's losing to Lelouch's sigint advantage, now is the time for Lancelot to enter the fray.
And it's a monster. Suzaku has a massive hardware advantage. Worse, he thinks that if he defeats the terrorists and stops the fighting, he can rescue Lelouch.
Kallen buys Lelouch time to get away and eject. Suzaku stops his pursuit to save a woman falling from a collapsing building.
The soldiers close in on the resistance, but just as they're about to win, Prince Clovis calls and end to hostilities.
Wait, what?
He moved his guard Knightmares out to fill holes, letting Lelouch get close enough to speak.
Game over, man.
But here's the kicker: Lelouch is a lost prince. 17th in the line of succession. He tells Prince Clovis that he has returned... to change everything.
Lelouch wants answers. Specifically, who killed his mother? He suspects assassination.
With use of the power, Clovis gives up that it was masterminded by Prince Schneizel and Princess Cornelia.
Lelouch kills Clovis. Can't change the world without getting your hands dirty.
In the second largest piece of tonal whiplash ever, we jump to school where the student council president is chewing out Lelouch for his absence yesterday.
And look who's come back to school! It's Kallen Stadtfeld, daughter of a wealthy family.
Too bad her recurring illness keeps her out of school so often.
(The illness is called Secretly A Member Of The Resistance.)
Mind control let's you skip the dance and just confirm that she's the same Knightmare pilot.
But when he tries to keep her silent, it doesn't take.
Here's Lelouch's younger sister Nunnaly, who is a blind and wheelchair-bound.
If you had to ask why Lelouch hates the empire, what happened to his sister is a good start.
Lelouch tests his power. The limit is: he can only use it once per person.
Kallen begins to suspect that Lelouch is The Voice who directed the battle. Or at least knows something.
He throws off suspicion with a ruse.
Kallen is recruited to join the student council, because of course.
They finally admit that Clovis is dead. And they pin it on Suzaku!
Lelouch arranges a meeting with the terrorists. (He wears a mask.) He wants them to switch from terrorism to actual war.
To prove himself, he arranges a demonstration of his ability to make the impossible possible: he breaks Suzaku out and throws doubt on the accusations.
Now known as Zero, the masked terrorist has held a crowd hostage, taken responsibility for killing Clovis, and broken Suzaku out.
But when asked to join him, Suzaku refuses. He'd rather make Britannia worth from inside than destroy it. He turns himself in for his court martial.
Remember the girl who gave Lelouch his powers in episode one? She's less dead then advertised.
She calls herself only by her initials, C.C. She moves herself in with Lelouch and his sister and starts wandering around the school.
Suzaku has been set free for lack of evidence. He falls in with a girl known as Euphy. After showing her around town, he meets up with Lloyd and regains the Lancelot to break up a battle.
Euphy is really Princess Euphemia. She wants to end the fighting, but how?
Suzaku transfers into the school. He and Lelouch resume their friendship. Secretly at first, until a cat steals the Zero mask, and Suzaku publicly saves Lelouch from a fall.
Princess Cornelia becomes the Viceroy of Japan and takes over control of the military.
Zero and the resistance rebrand as The Black Knights Of Justice. Including matching uniforms.
They take the fight to another terrorist group who have taken civilian hostages. (Including most of the student council and Euphemia.)
Attacking the unarmed is out of bounds now.
A drug that gives vivid hallucinations of the past becomes popular among the Elevens.
The Black Knights bust the distribution ring, but Kallen's mother is caught tripping.
Kallen and Lelouch have a fight about his attitude: all he does is make snide comments from the sidelines.
The Black Knights recruit. Kallen gets a custom Knightmare: the Guren Mk II.
Cornelia moves to crush the JLF, a major terrorist organization active in Japan. The Knights interfere.
They nearly capture Cornelia, but Lancelot rescues her and nearly captures Zero.
C.C. uses her power to give Suzaku mental trauma. But when Lelouch touches her, he gets a vision of her history.
Including her real name. (We don't get to hear it though.)
Cornelia's army retreats. This battle, everyone loses.
Shirley finally works up the courage to ask Lelouch out on a date. But they both have something to do first.
Lelouch has to arrange an alliance with a Kyoto, group that funds rebels.
Shirley has to identify her father's body. He was killed by Zero's actions in the prior fight.
Zero throws good effort after bad and uses the JLF as bait for Cornelia. The win will justify the deaths.
Shirley follows Lelouch to see what he's up to and comes to the battle.
When Lancelot interferes to save Cornelia, Zero ejects and lands next to Shirley. She sees his face.
I need to backfill here. Viletta Nu is the Knightmare pilot that Lelouch stole a Knightmare from back in the first battle.
She has no memory of the incident, but she does remember Lelouch from right beforehand.
She's the one who told Shirley to follow Lelouch.
Shirley shot her with Lelouch's gun, but she didn't die. She was rescued later. She saw that he was Zero.
Shirley, meanwhile, is having a crisis. The man she loves also killed her father.
This is not helped when Mao, another geass user whose power is mind reading, finds her.
Mao manipulates Shirley into proposing a murder-suicide with Lelouch. Proposing at gunpoint, that is.
Lelouch uses his geass to force her to forget everything about him.
He's shaken by the loss of something he didn't even know he had or valued.
Mao is obsessed with C.C., and fair enough; he got his geass when he was just a child and was both raised by her and saw her as the only real person.
He wants to take her away to an isolated location. But he's ax crazy.
Lelouch entraps him and kills him.
Lelouch learns the difference between "shoot him" and "kill him" when Mao turns out to be less dead than advertised. He kidnaps Nunnaly to force Lelouch into a confrontation.
Suzaku has his back and helps rescue Nunnaly, but Mao reveals his dark secret: he killed his own father.
Have I mentioned that Suzaku's father was the former Prime Minister of Japan before Britannia invaded?
It turns out his "suicide" was actually a coverup for a young Suzaku killing him.
This is why Suzaku is so reckless in battle; he's suicidal.
Colonel Tohdoh, the last leader of the JLF is scheduled to be executed. Zero springs him. But when Lancelot interferes, his cockpit is broken open, revealing Suzaku as the pilot to everyone.
Lelouch feels betrayed. Euphemia picks him to be her Knight Champion.
Zero tries to capture Lancelot and turn Suzaku. But he cannot be swayed.
Higher-ups order Suzaku to hold Zero in place and launch missiles. His sacrifice will be in all the history books etc.
Kallen face-reveals to try and convince him to stand down.
Something happens off screen that leads to Suzaku, Kallen, Zero, and Euphemia being relocated to an isolated island.
Prince Schneizel leads a mission to that island, but not to rescue them.
A mysterious artifact known as a thought elevator is located there.
It's possible that Britannia's wars of conquest are actually to capture these artifacts.
Meanwhile, Euphemia has figured out that Zero is Lelouch. The four lost people reconvene and are brought to Prince Schneizel by accidentally activating the artifact.
Zero and Kallen steal a prototype flying Knightmare and escape.
Suzaku is arrested for mutiny. Lelouch had used his geass on him to force him to choose to live rather than throw his life away.
Suzaku resigns as Euphemia's Knight, feeling himself unworthy.
A group calling itself The Japanese Government In Exile, backed by The Chinese Federation, attacks and conquers Kyushu.
Zero rejects their claim and suggests that the Black Knights declare Tokyo independent.
Cornelia sets a trap for Zero, and Lelouch can't help take the bait.
C.C. bails him out by disguising herself as Zero and drawing attention away from him right before he is caught.
Cornelia is a higher class of enemy than Clovis was. Lelouch will have to up his game.