Double-post info-dump. Brace yourselves.
Episode 17
"These are all citizens' complaints. 'The sewers are backed up'; 'taxes are too high'; 'the neighbours are too noisy.' It's all self-centred nonsense; they've completely forgotten what life was like in the cellars."
We've got ourselves a time skip! And a new OP! All our gang are adults now, we've got... a sprawling city?! Gimmy and Darry are now commanders of a fleet of mass-production versions of Gurren Lagann, called the Grapearl Squadron, and we have— Oh my god look at the size of that GIANT ROBOT HEAD HOW BIG IS THE ENTIRE THING????
But that's for later. For now, going back to the quote in bold above, having toppled humanity's chief oppressor, our motley crew have had little choice but to take responsibility for their unlikely victory and become the administration of the newly founded Kamina City and beyond. Apparently gone are the days of talking big, dreaming bigger and flying by the seat of your pants in a white-knuckle thrill-ride of adventure: it's all about job roles, proper titles, mountains of paperwork and tedious bureaucracy now. Rossiu seems to be the one essentially running the show, with Simon, doubtless credited as humanity's ultimate liberator, not much more than a figurehead. I can see that Rossiu is just trying to hold things together and run a tight ship and all, but... well, he still has a stick up his ass, doesn't he?
This new order and structure extends even as far as the episode's title card with its blocky, angular text replacing the old scribbly, freehand style.
I couldn't help but notice a couple of possible callbacks to earlier Gainax productions in this episode. Yōko blasting off on her flying scooter is somewhat reminiscent of the end of
FLCL. Also, and I'm not so sure on this one, I'm wondering if the framing on one shot of the rocket launch is harking back to
The Wings of Honneamise.
And speaking of the rocket, it, the buildings and even a vase in the restaurant where Kittan, Dayakka and co. are seen eating all have faces on them. It seems that everything that the people of
GL's world are familiar with has a face. That neatly serves as another reason why this second story arc's faceless new threat to humankind's existence is so unsettling: they're robots without faces, the first of their kind.
The show manages to draw yet more eeriness out of these things by animating them in CG, giving the enemy an unnerving, otherworldly artificiality that contrasts with the more "organic" and "familiar" hand-drawn form of our heroes' robots. It's a clever trick that
GL director Hiroyuki Imaishi would later repeat as action director on
Darling in the FranXX.
But yes, things just got a bit more complicated in the world of
Gurren Lagann because apparently gone are the days where, to paraphrase
@Dai, any problem could be solved by sticking a big drill in it. Just look at the horror that's unleashed when Simon tries it now.
I know that this is only going to make this lengthy post even longer, but I'd like to dive back into some of my regular language-focussed episode dissection, because there's a neat subtlety in Japanese during the flashback sequence where Nia recounts Simon's proposal that doesn't carry over in English. It's his line
"Kirei ni natta darō?" This directly translates as "[X has] become beautiful, hasn't it?" with X being the thing understood in context. Japanese as a language often omits things already felt to be understood in context from the sentence, but here's the clever bit: Simon knows that he's talking about the city, but Nia doesn't. Because of that, she's left thinking for a moment that Simon might've meant "You've become beautiful, haven't you?" hence her slightly startled reaction before Simon clarifies that he's talking about the view. She actually then looks slightly disappointed for a moment after that. It's a nice touch; it shows that their thoughts are pointing in the same direction but they haven't quite communicated it to each other yet. Simon's proposal makes that jump, but they're still both a bit bloody hopeless in their own endearing ways.
For a final bit of trivia on this episode, there's actually a small continuity error with the scene of Gimmy and Darry fighting Viral in their Grapearls. Gimmy, airborne in the blue mecha, is fired at but is protected by Darry, who shoots the projectiles down in her red machine, which is revealed to be floating below and to the left of Gimmy's. In the next cut, though, the positions are reversed: Gimmy's blue Grapearl, holding a gun, is below and to the left of Darry's. This cut is accompanied by off-screen dialogue from Gimmy, who says "Your sharp shooting's as sharp as ever! Thanks for the save, Darry!" and is framed as if it's the pilot of the red robot who is speaking. Basically, the error makes it seem as if the robots have abruptly switched positions with each other, but not their pilots.
A few cuts later they're back to their original positions, firing away with one gun each. (This comes after another bit of loose storyboarding where Gimmy's Grapearl is seen equipped with
two guns in the cut immediately after the one where it had erroneously gained the one it was holding.)
As I suggested earlier in the thread, series director Imaishi does seem to occasionally lose track of the positions of the positions of characters and objects during action sequences (only due to his gung-ho excitement, mind!), a habit which has actually continued into an early scene in his film
Promare.
Regardless of any of that, though, the Viral sequence is another highlight of this episode, injecting a nice bit of moral complexity into the mix.
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