Episode Guide

The complete series spans 27 episodes, counting the special installment slotted as Episode 16, and divides cleanly into four parts. A signature naming device runs throughout: each episode takes its title from a line of dialogue, and the character supplying those lines rotates by arc. Kamina's words name the first part, Nia's the second, Rossiu's the third, and Simon's the fourth.

Part one, covering Episodes 1 through 8, follows Simon, a timid digger in an underground village, whose unearthing of a small glowing drill leads him to the buried robot Lagann. His swaggering sworn brother Kamina drags him toward the fabled surface world, where the sharpshooter Yoko and the pet pigmole Boota round out a band swept into open war against the Beastmen. Part two, Episodes 9 through 15, picks up a week after Kamina and Thymilph fall in battle. Simon fights on with rage in place of purpose until, at his lowest point, he opens a discarded box and finds Nia, daughter of the enemy's supreme ruler, the Spiral King Lordgenome. Together the unlikely pair press toward the capital, Teppelin.

Part three, Episodes 17 through 22, jumps seven years past Lordgenome's defeat. Humanity thrives on the reclaimed surface under Rossiu's administration, Dayakka and Kiyoh await their first child, and Simon proposes to Nia. The calm shatters when the dying warning left by Lordgenome comes true: a dormant Anti-Spiral gene inside Nia awakens, transforming her into a messenger of the being called Antispiral, and the Humanity Eradication System unleashes an invasion that strips Simon of everything he built. Part four, Episodes 23 through 27, begins a week after the moon's fall is averted and Nia is pulled away into the Antispiral's universe. The team plots a rescue expedition drawing on Lordgenome's recovered knowledge, Rossiu wrestles with despair over his wartime choices until Simon reaches him at his home village of Adai, and the series closes with the greatest battle the universe has ever seen.

Part one (Episodes 1 to 8) charts the surface journey and ends with Kamina's death. Part two (Episodes 9 to 15) introduces Nia and drives the campaign to Teppelin, culminating in Lordgenome's downfall. Part three (Episodes 17 to 22) covers the seven-year time skip, Nia's transformation into the Antispiral's messenger, and the start of the extermination war. Part four (Episodes 23 to 27) mounts the rescue of Nia and the final showdown with the Antispiral.

The 27-episode count includes the special positioned as Episode 16, which sits between the second and third parts. The rotating title-speaker convention doubles as a signpost for whose growth anchors each arc, moving from Kamina's bravado to Simon's fully realized resolve.