Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann · Season 1 · Episode 8 · 20 May 2007
S1E8 Farewell, Comrades
THE MOMENT Simon cradles Kamina in the cockpit. The 'Who the hell do you think I am?' speech is delivered, and its weight only increases in every episode that follows.
The episode that reshaped the entire series. Kamina's arc ends here, and the show makes a structural bet that losing its most charismatic character will deepen rather than deflate the rest of the run. Critics and fans uniformly call it the pivotal hour of the series.
Full episode analysis below. Spoiler-light verdict above.
Updated
Gurren Lagann Episode 8 'Farewell, Comrades' aired May 20, 2007 on TV Tokyo and became the single episode most cited by critics and the Gainax community as the structural pivot that defined the series. Kamina - the show's most charismatic character, the figure whose belief in Simon and whose 'who the hell do you think I am?' register had set the series' entire emotional tone - reached the end of his arc in this episode, and Gainax made the structural bet that losing him would deepen rather than deflate the remaining twenty episodes. The bet paid at a level that retrospectively reframed every prior episode: Kamina's death was the event that revealed what the series had always been about, which was Simon rather than Kamina, and the question of whether Simon could carry the show's belief-system forward without the person who had installed it. IMDb's episode score places 'Farewell, Comrades' among the highest-rated individual episodes in mecha anime history. Simon cradling Kamina in the Gurren cockpit was the moment the anime community recognised as the series' defining image.