Sit in the Hot Tub 'Til You're Sick!!

Crossing the desert, Kamina lectures Simon on why human eyes point forward: to fix on the far horizon and keep advancing. Simon offers his own reading, that forward eyes also let you watch the backs of those walking ahead, which he figures is what drew Rossiu to them. The mood sours when Leeron determines their target, the enemy return point, keeps changing location, and sours further when Yoko boots the reeking men out of the cockpit. Rabbit-shaped Gunmen then ambush the group. Gurren Lagann dispatches most of them, but one slips away, and Rossiu argues for tailing it back to the enemy base instead of destroying it. Thick fog swallows the fugitive machine, and the team instead stumbles onto an elderly man, Old Coco, who guides them to an inn where a crowd of bunny girls fawns over the crew as heroes. The proprietress even seems to already know of Kamina and his brigade. Rossiu alone finds the welcome suspicious.

Dinner brings another surprise: Kiyoh, Kinon, and Kiyal walk in without their brother, having chased a Gunman into the same fog and met the same old man. Everyone heads for the advertised hot springs, where a wall divides the men from the women, much to Kamina's annoyance. He passes the time telling Simon about reaching the moon someday and trading memories of the road so far. When the far side of the bath falls oddly silent, Simon hoists Kamina up for a look: the women have vanished. Moments later a massive Gunman tears out of the inn, the proprietress revealing herself as a Beastman. Simon scrambles into Lagann, but enemy Beastmen haul Gurren away before Kamina can board it. He leaps onto the giant machine to rescue the captured women, only to find Yoko already raging; she shoots the cage open herself, and a chaotic melee erupts against bunny girl and toad-like Beastmen.

Cornered by armed foes, a furious Kamina batters his way clear and calls Simon in for extraction, and somehow the entire group squeezes into Lagann's single-seat cockpit. Rossiu, left behind, happens across the thieves dragging Gurren off, takes the stolen mech's controls himself, and destroys them. Reunited and recombined, Gurren Lagann wields its giant sunglasses as a weapon to bring the huge Gunman down. The victory lasts seconds: an energy blast hammers them, and Viral announces his return at the helm of Enki, to the shock of the whole team.

Viral makes his second major appearance, and his new Gunman Enkidu debuts in the episode's closing moments. Rossiu pilots a Gunman in combat for the first time, single-handedly recovering the stolen Gurren. The Black Siblings' three sisters, Kiyoh, Kinon, and Kiyal, cross paths with Team Gurren, and the crew learns that the enemy return point is mobile rather than fixed.

The original cut was judged too risqué for Japanese broadcast and was reworked into a partial clip show before airing on May 6, 2007; a director's cut restoring the excised material appeared on the DVD release, which drops the flashback padding in favor of extra fan service and deleted gags, including Kamina being tricked into surrendering Gurren and Gimmy's misadventures in the bath. The alternate home release title translates as There are Some Things I Just Have to See!! It was also the single most censored episode of the American broadcast. The bunny girl hostesses are cameo redesigns of characters from other Gainax-associated works such as Gunbuster, Diebuster, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Mahoromatic, and Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi. The rabbit Gunmen can shift between humanoid and four-legged forms, an ability the series otherwise reserves for elite machines, and the bathhouse owner is a fox-like Beastman posing as a woman, echoing the shape-shifting kitsune of Japanese folklore. This is also the first Gunman battle fought at night; the enemy machine sidesteps the Beastmen's usual nocturnal weakness by running on an electrical power source, and its pilot claims her kind is naturally nocturnal.