Mintyfresh Anime Blog

An extremely distraught Simon takes center stage. Becoming somewhat bestial, Simon rips and thrashes at the enemy mechs, all the while his world turning both physically and mentally gray. As if summoning chaos and carnage will bring his beloved brother back Simon falls deeper and deeper into despair. His reasoning to act a savage is simply that he needs to man-up and act like Kamina. Lagann rejects Simon’s new attitude and spews out the green energy that powers it through both a vomiting motion and mechanical pores. It even goes as far to separate from the Gurren mid battle.

Away from the scene of the battle, Simon finds a girl locked in a box which is somehow opened by the same drill shaped key he uses to power the Lagann. As ridiculous and incredible as this sounds, it seems to make more sense while watching the episode. The pretty girl is completely oblivious to the outside world and must be told what the simplest of things are … people, shoes, food, etc. Evidently she has never seen another human before and asks if all humans look like Simon. Too much comical effect (which is an extreme relief from the utter despair this episode reeks of), she befriends Simon and casually asks “what is that” to the enemy mech behind them which is about 3 seconds away from blowing them both away with a missile.

Once again Lagann rejects Simon … or rather it would be more accurate to say due to Simon’s distraught state he is unable to control it. Unwilling to see another person die, Simon rips the drill from the Lagann and decides to fight the enemy with his bare hands. Before the obvious death which was to become him, he is saved by Yoko and other members of his crew who pronounce that they are also unwilling to watch another person of their team die.

Fast forward to find out the girl Simon discovered is actually the daughter of the Spiral king. The spiral king did mention that he gave birth to humans during this episode, but we are led to believe that he somehow gave birth to all of humanity rather than a solitary girl. Perhaps he gave birth to both, who knows at this point. The girl, Nia, commands the new attacker (sent by the spiral king) to cease fire on the newly acquired battle station of the Gurren Brigade. Much to the crew’s dismay they are unable to understand how or why the girl in front of them is the daughter of the seemingly highest threat to humanity.

Pretty cool how the one chick was able to create a ton of water for her water based machine to forge an attack of the humans, I must admit. I’m not entirely sure what to make of the direction the series is taking at this point. On one hand it’s always darkest before the storm and eventually things will become bright again, but the thing that made this series special was the oddball humor… which isn’t going to be present for awhile, as the entire crew is mourning over the death of their leader. I want to watch more, if for nothing else than to see how Simon stabilizes and becomes a man and the leader of the Brigade.