Lloyd Asplund Quotes

Cécile has just caught him trying to stop Suzaku from flying to Kamine Island, and asked, reasonably, whether that means he did not want the boy killed. This is the answer, and it is a cover story. Lloyd's cynic voice is the show's engineer reciting a pamphlet about human weakness so that nobody notices he just did something for a person rather than a machine; the next line, about finding another devicer if this one dies, is the actual Lloyd, and it is better writing because it is worse behaviour. As philosophy the sentence is a fridge magnet. Bodies break, hearts break, relationships break: true, general, and available to any character in any series with a lab coat. The scene knows this. Cécile answers that he cannot bend the world any way he wants, and the episode moves on without giving him the last word.

He is watching Zero's first broadcast, the one where the Black Knights announce themselves from the hotel-jacking at Lake Kawaguchi, and the standard reading is that Lloyd is the sardonic engineer seeing through the theatre. The irony runs the other way. His own machine is the Lancelot, named for the knight who betrayed his king for love, and it is being flown by an Eleven that the empire employing both of them refuses to knight for another nine episodes; the episode where it finally happens is simply called Knight. The man laughing at terrorists for borrowing a title has built his career on a borrowed one and staffed it with someone the title is denied to. Zero's knights are self-appointed. Suzaku's knighthood, when it comes, is a princess overriding her whole court. Neither is more legitimate than the other, which is rather the point of a series about a throne.