Let's Go, Buddy

Simon opens the engagement by seizing an enemy flagship's central face and drilling it apart, then answers a bombardment of hurled planets with the Gurren Boomerang. The Anti-Spirals retaliate with probability-variation shells that slip straight through the spiral field, an attack Darry notes belongs in a god's domain. A voice within a blinding light then delivers the enemy's creed: spiral power ties life to the universe's boundless energy, and its runaway evolution will one day collapse everything into a black hole, the Spiral Nemesis. Lordgenome confirms the warning is genuine, suggesting Simon has already sensed it through his own use of the power, then adds a second truth: Nia is waiting. Steadied, Simon declares he will protect the girl and the universe both. The enemy flagship evades through Random Schrödinger Warping until a barrage fired across the axes of space and time flushes it into the open, where a Super Galaxy Giga Drill Break finishes it. With the interference gone, Simon can finally perceive where Nia is being held.

Before he reaches her, a dark face clouds his vision, and the crew is scattered into the Multiverse Labyrinth. Simon wakes as a boy on Earth, a jewel thief partnered with a cowardly Kamina who insists the smart way to fight beastmen is to rob them and fence the takings; Yoko exists in this world as a celebrated bounty hunter, and every other crew member is living out some other life. Only Lordgenome and Boota remain untouched. Manifesting as a featureless black figure, the Anti-Spiral explains that intelligence itself keeps each prisoner sealed in an alternate world, and concedes that its earlier restraint stemmed from an unidentified spiral reading that riddled its analysis with holes. When it moves to blast Lordgenome's head, Boota leaps into the line of fire and erupts into a humanoid form, his growth energy converted into species-level evolution by Lordgenome's spiral power. The transformed pig-mole lands real blows before the Anti-Spiral reappears behind him and, now that he is human, casts him into the multiverse as well, declaring its analysis complete and the crew finished.

In the dream, authorities corner the two thieves, and the false Kamina drops to his knees to beg. Simon notices the core drill missing from his neck just as a voice behind him asks whether he has lost it. The true Kamina of Team Gurren stands there, telling Simon to pick whichever Kamina he prefers and reminding him that the real drill lives inside him. Asked what that drill exists for, Simon rises, proclaims his the drill that will pierce the heavens, and flattens the impostor with a punch as the core drill returns to his hand. Opening the chest at his back, he finds light pouring out. Kamina urges him forward without letting the word if mislead him, tells him his universe will go on inside Simon's, and offers a final goodbye; Simon refuses the word, since the two of them will always be together within him. Absorbing the labyrinth through the core drill, Simon transforms into the Gurren Lagann itself and climbs into the sky. Across the dream worlds, each crew member grips a glowing core drill and follows, Yoko turning off a broadcast of her own wedding to Kittan, and Viral rising last from a vision of the wife and child no beastman can ever have.

On the homeworld, the Anti-Spiral is interrogating Nia about her defiance, draining her painfully as she insists Simon will come. Her ring begins to pulse, and she forces it forward until its flicker becomes a steady light. Out of that light bursts the Gurren Lagann, with Simon inside, arrived to save her.

The Anti-Spiral, leader of its race, appears for the first time and reveals the Spiral Nemesis, the doomsday that justifies its war on spiral life. Team Dai-Gurren is imprisoned in the Multiverse Labyrinth and escapes it through their core drills.

Simon meets Kamina once more inside the illusion, Boota briefly attains a humanoid body, and the team reaches the Anti-Spiral homeworld, where Simon reaches Nia at last.

The Japanese title, Ikuze Dachikō, corresponds to the English broadcast title Let's Go, Buddy. It aired in Japan on September 23, 2007, and in English on November 10, 2008, between Episode 25 and the finale.

The alternate universe restages the opening of the first episode, down to similar dialogue, and hides callbacks throughout: Yoko's skull hairclip and Kamina's glasses sit among the loot in the jewelry store, the container valley where Simon wakes matches the place Nia was found, and Yoko parts from Kamina at the forest edge where they once kissed.