The penultimate episode of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is another epic affair, no question.  It’s a serious contender for the best of the series (though my chips would still be on #25 I think), and another effort that has so much GAR, it’s leaking out of every pore.  One thing this rewatch has done is remind me just big a hole Gainax’ decline and fall has left in my anime psyche.  GAR is a funny thing, hard to define but unmistakable when you see it, and no one understood it better than Gainax.  It’s just remarkable that when it collapsed it collapsed so totally – and that the scattered expats of the studio have almost invariably failed to capture its magic elsewhere.

My thoughts on this episode are so colored by my feelings about what happens in the next one that it’s hard to discuss the one without bringing in the other.  But when I watched it the first time, of course, I didn’t know how this show would end.  I think the entire series is a testimonial to Simon, who garners so little love from fate, yet continues to give everything he possible can for his friends and his people.  The extent to which that’s true doesn’t become totally clear until the finale, though, so I suppose it’s best I don’t go too far down that road just yet.

One of the near-miraculous things Nakashima-sensei does in this series is serve up scientific mumbo-jumbo time after time, and make it so palatable.  I’m well aware of how preposterous this final arc is, but somehow it has a literary elegance to it that I can’t deny.  Forget the talk of Planck’s Constant and whatchamacallit cannons – this all feels like nothing more than an allegory for life itself.  To travel to the edge of the universe and face the ultimate enemy, only to be told that your very existence means the destruction of the universe.  And to fight on anyway, for the love of a girl (and truthfully, for existence and evolution).  That’s some powerful stuff.

The ultimate weapon the anti-spiral have, when all their other cards have been played, is indeed existence itself.  They trap Simon and the others in an infinite series of alternate realities, futures that never were and now are, but only in their perception,  Simon and Kamina as jewel thieves, Yoko as a bounty hunter, and – most movingly – Viral as a family man with a wife and child.  It all seems very real to them, but their true forms are trapped in eternal stasis, and not even Boota reboota-ing to humanoid form can free them.  Worse, it makes Boota susceptible to the same trap.  Only Lordgenome remains aware, and he can spar only verbally with the anti-spiral.

That Viral scene gets to me, just as it did 13 years ago.  His dream is the most humble and meaningful of all, because it’s the birthright of every spiral being and one that’s forever denied him.  Lordgenome granted him eternal life but he exists outside life, a participant-observer at best.  That’s not to diminish the power of Kamina’s final conversation with Simon (back in bozu form), though.  In truth this is a much more poetic way for Kamina to go out than he did back in Episode 8, and a poignant reminder of just how much he still means to Simon, the boy that always has and always will love him as a big brother and mentor (even as he surpasses him in pretty much every possible way).

Simon’s loyalty…  It guts me, seriously.  I think it’s the purest reflection of spiral there is, a living refutation of the anti-spirals’ core argument.  Simon is too pure for this (or any) world, truly, but he’s always there for us – it’s just who he is.  Nia, trapped in her own hell, never loses her faith in him – she knows that when Simon says he’ll do something, he does it.  But Simon isn’t omnipotent – there are limits even to the scope of his power to defy fate – and once he fulfils his promise to Nia, fate is no longer his to command.