Christina Mackenzie

Christina Mackenzie (クリスチーナ・マッケンジー) is a fictional character in the Universal Century Gundam Universe. She is a main character in Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket. She is voiced by Megumi Hayashibara.

Appearance & Personality
Christina is a young woman of slim build, with long red hair, and dark blue eyes. She is often seen wearing not overly feminine clothing, but is still considered to be very attractive by a good deal of men. In cotrast to her delicate appearance, Chris is a strong individual, who can fend for herself, but is not without her soft moments. This is seen with her behaviour towards her long time friend Alfred Suzuhara. She is also very keen on protecting her loved ones, as she was willing to hit a man, whom she thought was a burglar, over the head with a bat, since it was Alfred's house he was breaking into. Christina can thus be desscribed as a motherly figure, both caring and protective of her friends.

Skills & Abilities
Christinas's outer appearacne deceives others into thinking she is harmless, but Christina is an exceptional pilot. While she is not a newtype, she has proven herself to be very skilled on the battlefield: taking out several enemy mobile suits, despite being outnumbered. The fact that she came out of the top of her class, as well as being selected to test pilot the newest gundam model is also a testament to her skill as a pilot and a soldier. Having been a babysitter at one point, Christina's other skills may include knowledge of how to raise or handle children as well as other domestic skills, such as cooking.

Background
An Earth Federation Lieutenant (Junior Grade), Cristina Mackenzie is the mobile suit test pilot selected to test the RX-78NT-1 Gundam "Alex" due to her exceptional piloting ability despite being a new graduate from the Academy. Her hometown is Side 6's Libot colony, the site of a secret Federation mobile suit R&D facility.

Chris is the neighbor and friend of Alfred Izuruha, being the closest thing to a big sister for Al. At the beginning of War in the Pocket, Chris just returns from Earth, and is assigned to collect field data for the new NT-1 unit, which is "designed for a pilot from White Base". One night, she sees a young man sneaking around Al's house, and thinking he's a burglar, she knocks him out from behind with a baseball bat. The man turns out to be Bernard Wiseman, who Al claims to be his "older brother". Despite the rocky start, Chris and Bernie get along well, and if the reaction of Chris' parents is any indication, their attraction to each other is fairly obvious.

In a tragic twist of fate, Bernie is actually a Zeon soldier and a junior member of a commando team sent to the colony to destroy the Gundam Alex. Chris manages to fight off the attack, leaving most of the team dead. Bernie, the sole survivor of the battle, later launches a surprise attack on the Gundam in a lone Zaku. Chris launches to fight and is drawn into an ambush site, sustaining injuries herself and heavy damage to her Gundam. When the two mobile suits charge each other for a final attack, Chris impales the Zaku's cockpit with her beam sabre and unknowingly kills Bernie. The resulting explosion also incapacitates the Gundam. Al, who comes in a rush to stop the fight, only arrives to witness the result of their battle.

After a brief recovery, she leaves the colony to head back to Earth. While fare-welling Al, she asks Al to say goodbye to Bernie for her. Al keeps the fact that Bernie was killed to himself.

Little is known about MacKenzie's fate after the war. In Char's Counterattack a scene towards the end features a group of people on a beach watching remains of the Asteroid Axis burn up in the atmosphere, one of whom is a woman referred to as "Chris" by one of the other beachgoers (who may or may not be a full-grown Alfred Izuruha), however, according to the old Gundam Perfect Web, this person is "Christina", the leader of the Newtype cult group that Quess Paraya joined (and forcibly left) at the beginning of the movie. No other indications show that this Christina and Lt.jg Christina Mackenzie are one and the same person.

In other media
Chris is tragically best known for unknowingly killing her love interest, Bernie. This is a powerful image, as it is easy to see similar tragedies occurring throughout the One Year War. As a result, she and Bernie appear quite often in other media that involves the Universal Century.

She is among the Earth Federation characters that appear in the SD Gundam G Generation series of strategy games, and depending on which title it is in the series may a) kill Bernie as in the OVA, b) convince him to switch sides, or c) not meet him on the battlefield at all. She is also a rentable pilot (i.e. she can be hired to pilot one of the player's mobile suits for one battle).

In the Gihren's Greed series of games, Chris also appears on the Federation side. In the OVA Chris was implied as being an exceptional pilot, and that is reflected in her statistics. Her shooting stat, for example, is well above average. She appears once research on the Alex is complete, but may be temporarily unavailable due to injury (as depicted in Gundam 0080). On the Zeon side, it is possible for Bernie to successfully capture both the Alex and Chris. What becomes of Chris should this occur is unknown, but it is reasonable to assume she is held prisoner for the remainder of the war. In the Playstation Portable release of the game, Chris could potentially join the Titans if the player's alignment reaches Law, implying that her continued service in the Federation discouraged her from joining the Anti-Earth Union Group.

Chris also appears in the PlayStation Portable game Gundam Battle Universe. Should the player choose to play as a Federation pilot in the 0079 campaign, she appears as an allied ace pilot in the mission 'War in the Pocket', a mission based on the OVA episode of the same name. In the mission, the player must defeat several Zeon mobile suits to trigger the simultaneous appearances of Chris in the RX-78NT-1 "Alex" and enemy ace Mikhail Kaminsky in the MS-18E Kampfer. After the player has defeated Kaminsky, he/she must, with Chris, defeat Bernard Wiseman's MS-06FZ Zaku II Kai in a field full of large Santa balloons. After the successful completion of the mission, Chris becomes available as a 'guest pilot' (she can be assigned to pilot either the player or his/her partner's MS for one mission). Conversely, Chris is an enemy ace in the Zeon side mission 'War in the Pocket', whom the player and his/her partner must destroy with the aid of first Kaminsky and then Wiseman. Chris appears as an enemy for the Zeon campaign in the mission 'The Glory of Solomon', piloting a GM mobile suit alongside Yu Kajima, but only after the player has destroyed all of the Federation mobile suits in the first few waves. This seems to indicate Chris's reassignment as an active service combat pilot after her recovery, although this never occurs in the actual series or the OVA.

Because of Gundam 0080's Mobile Suits are generally weaker than the powerhouses of other Universal Century series, Bernie and Chris do not appear very often in the Super Robot Wars games. Chris is often part of the player's forces from the beginning, and Bernie may be convinced to join during the course of the game. They last appeared in Super Robot Wars GC/XO, where Chris shows Amuro Ray the Alex and the Gundam "G-3" and reprises her role in the OVA. In the sub-scenario of the stage depicting the demise of Bernie's squad, depending on the player's choice, Chris may either kill Bernie (as in the OVA; this will result in Al playing Bernie's video letter) or cripple the head and limbs of his Zaku and then convince him to join the player's side. If recruited, Bernie (and Aina Saharin, if the player recruited her) becomes playable once the arrival of the Muge Empire forces the evacuation of Solomon, which the player's party has captured in the previous stage.

In many mecha games based on the Universal Century, such as Encounters in Space, Gundam: Lost War Chronicles or Gundam Climax U.C., Bernie and Chris often have special dialogue when opposing each other on the battlefield. For example, in Lost War Chronicles, Chris exclaims "Bernie?! You're a Zeon?!" while in Climax U.C. Bernie calls on Chris to stop fighting as he doesn't want to hurt her. In the final stage of Climax U.C. (where the player must battle the main Gundams of the U.C. Gundam series), Chris is notable as being the only female Gundam pilot (It can also be noted that she has the weakest stats of all the Gundam pilots).

Chris and Bernie are also the unfortunate butt of many jokes in various 4-koma comics based on the Gundam and Super Robot Wars series, mostly surrounding the fact that while Chris pilots a Gundam in an army composing of other high-powered mobile suits and Super Robot warriors, her (apparent) boyfriend, Bernie, pilots a comparatively very, very weak Zaku. In SRW GC/XO, the Zaku's presence in the player's barracks in justified somewhat by the fact that the game's body part damage-tracking system also allows the player to capture crippled enemy units with his/her team's mothership and then sell them for money, disassemble them for parts, or (if they are Real Robot units) assign them to any pilot from the unit's series. The player may sell or disassemble Bernie's Zaku if he/she desires, but if Bernie is sortied in a Zaku II Kai and Chris in the Alex, and the two are brought side-by-side, they can perform the combination attack, "War in the pocket", in which Bernie charges at an enemy with his Zaku's heat hawk while Chris attacks with three shots from the Alex's beam rifle.