Bust Through the Heavens with Your Drill!

Before the story proper begins, a battleship cuts through deep space; its crew detects an approaching enemy fleet, and the commander calls everyone to battle stations. The scene ends without explanation.

Far below the surface in Giha Village, fourteen-year-old Simon spends his days expanding the settlement with his drill. During one shift he digs up a small drill-shaped trinket that glows at his touch. Back in the village, girls tease him, and he wanders into Kamina, an older youth he reveres as a big brother despite no blood tie. Kamina ropes him into a scheme to punch through the ceiling and reach the surface, riding mole-pigs toward the roof, but the village chief foils the attempt, brands Kamina a liar like his father before him, and locks him up while Simon is sent back to work.

Digging again, Simon strikes something far stranger: a metal face buried in the rock. He hurries to spring Kamina from his cell and show him, but the chief catches them once more. Punishment never comes; a colossal robot crashes through the ceiling, and a girl drops in after it with guns blazing. Bare-handed resistance proves useless, so Simon leads the others to the face he found. The glowing trinket wakes the little machine, Kamina christens it Lagann mid-battle cry, and its drills tear the larger Gunmen apart before punching a hole clear to the open sky.

Simon and Kamina take in the surface for the first time, though the wonder is cut short when they realize they are falling. Everyone is thrown clear in the crash; Simon lands squarely on the girl, who introduces herself as Yoko, then pulls him close in alarm as two more Gunmen loom behind them.

Simon, Kamina, and Yoko all debut, as does the concept of the Gunmen.

Simon uncovers the small glowing drill and the buried Lagann, the machine that gives the series its name.

Lagann's first battle ends with the trio breaking through to the surface world.

The episode first aired in Japan on April 1, 2007, with the English broadcast following on July 28, 2008. Hiroyuki Imaishi directed it from a script by Kazuki Nakashima.

The space battle prologue went unexplained for years. The writers later endorsed a fan theory that it depicts a possible future in which Simon ignores the Anti-Spiral's parting warning and brings about the Spiral Nemesis, admitting they had lost track of that thread during production.