Milky☆Subway: The Galactic Limited Express (2025)

The ending centers on a final showdown aboard the runaway Milky Subway, where the conflict reaches its most dangerous point and Makina is the one whose fate becomes the most directly tragic, with the story later opening on the aftermath of that catastrophe. Chiharu survives long enough to be questioned afterward by Ryoko, which frames the ending as a story being told from the ruins of what happened on the train.

At the end of the series, the train has already turned into a full crisis, and the last episode is explicitly titled "Death of Makina," which signals that Makina does not survive the finale in the same form she began the story. The theatrical version and review material describe the ending as following a "catastrophic event" that leaves Makina "damaged beyond repair," making her fate the central endpoint of the story's conflict.

The ending begins with the train in motion and the group no longer able to treat their punishment as simple community service. Chiharu, Makina, Kurt, Max, Kanata, and Akane are all caught inside the Milky Subway as it races out of control, and the situation becomes a final struggle to survive the train itself.

Scene by scene, the ending unfolds like this: the crew is already trapped in the impossible situation created when the train suddenly takes off into deep space, and by the finale that chaos has reached its breaking point. Ryoko, the police officer who gave them the punishment, is no longer merely an authority figure assigning labor; in the aftermath, she becomes the person who receives Chiharu's account of what happened, placing the ending after the disaster rather than before it.

Makina's fate is the clearest and most important. The ending episode is named for her death, and the later summary says Chiharu is being interrogated after an event that left Makina "damaged beyond repair," so the story ends with Makina not coming through the final crisis intact. The material provided does not fully spell out the exact mechanics of her final moments, but it does make clear that the ending resolves around her catastrophic loss.

Chiharu's fate is survival. She is the one who remains after the disaster, and the framing of the ending shows her alive in the aftermath, giving testimony to Ryoko about what happened aboard the train. That places Chiharu as the witness and survivor of the finale rather than one of the casualties.

For the other main participants, the provided material confirms that Kurt, Max, Kanata, and Akane are all part of the same runaway-train crisis and are trapped with Chiharu and Makina when the finale begins, but it does not give individual post-ending fates for each of them in the sources here. What can be stated factually is that they are all involved in the final emergency aboard the Milky Subway and are part of the group whose punishment turns into a survival crisis.

The final point the story makes through the ending is shown through structure rather than explicit commentary: a routine punishment becomes a catastrophic space-train disaster, and the surviving character is left to recount it afterward. The ending therefore closes on aftermath, loss, and testimony, with Makina's destruction at the center and Chiharu living on to carry the memory of what happened.

No characters are shown to permanently die in Milky☆Subway: The Galactic Limited Express. The title of episode 12, "Death of Makina," is misleading in context: Makina is shot by police drones during the final confrontation, but she survives by transferring her consciousness into a floppy disk and then into the train's control panel, which turns her into a mecha body.

The closest thing to a death scene is Makina being hit after she inserts the control key into the back carriage during the showdown against O.T.A.M. and the police drones. The series frames this as a dramatic "death" moment, but the episode description makes clear she does not actually die; she continues afterward in a mechanical body and is still present in the present-day framing scene.

So, based on the available episode summaries and series description, the answer is: no confirmed character deaths.