SSSS.Gridman Episode 6

Introduction

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been enjoying SSSS.Gridman more and more, and this week’s episode only served to reinforce that trend. However, at the same time I’m a bit worried about how exactly the series is going to play out in the end.

Mecha anime are typically at least two cours in length because they tend to go into some pretty substantial world building. Even Darling in the Franxx was two cours and that series threw all of its world building out the window. But, SSSS.Gridman is only one cour.

This single cour would be fine if the series stays solely as a super robot anime, but with this latest episode we’ve begun to learn more about the surrounding world, and this new information has raised more questions than it answered. This also may have been the first episode to not follow the monster-of-the-week format.

So, will there be enough time in the remaining six episodes to answer all of the new questions which have arisen? While this is something I’m worried about, I also trust that Trigger knows what they’re doing. Sure, FranXX was a mess, but that wasn’t a true Trigger original anime.

Contact

In this episode each of our three protagonists have unforeseen interactions with others. Utsumi is approached by Akane, Rikka takes care of Anti, and Yuuta is helped by a Kaiju. Let’s go through each of these interactions in that respective order.

We know that Utsumi has had a crush on Akane since the beginning, but Akane never really seemed to pay him much attention, as he expected. However, this week Akane surprises him in a bookstore by showing interest in the same Kaiju manga as Utsumi.

The two then continue to talk for the rest of the day until Akane asks Utsumi about Yuuta. Specifically she asks if anything has changed about Yuuta ever since he lost his memory, and at this point Utsumi all but ends the conversation.

I had mentioned last week that Utsumi would probably allow Akane to join the Gridman Alliance if she asked, and I still stand by that assertion. The reason Utsumi refused to give Akane information in this situation, however, was due to her explicitly asking about Yuuta.

If she had told him that she remembers all of the Kaiju attacks as well, and then said that she once heard him and Yuuta mention the Gridman Alliance, he probably wouldn’t have gotten suspicious. But, luckily for the Alliance, Utsumi isn’t about to sell out his friends for the girl he likes.

Next up, we have Rikka who meets Anti once again in a park, this time as he’s digging through a trashcan to find food. While Utsumi is suspicious of Akane, Rikka doesn’t really seem to be suspicious of Anti whatsoever, even though she saw him after the previous Kaiju attack.

I’m fairly sure that she just thinks he’s homeless. She buys him food, then takes him back to her house to give him a bath because he’s never had one before. Getting washed by Rikka, that kid doesn’t know how lucky he is.

Luckily for Rikka, Anti doesn’t know about her connection to Yuuta and Gridman. Obviously her connection to Gridman would be a problem, but Anti also just learned that Yuuta “is” Gridman, and so has vowed to kill him as well.

This revelation that Yuuta and Gridman are one and the same, flawed as it is, was one of the more interesting parts of the end of the episode. When Anti attacks Yuuta, only to be stopped by Max and Calibur, they tell him that Yuuta can’t be Gridman because he’s clearly a human.

The important takeaway here is that by using this logic on Anti, the Gridman Alliance have cast doubt on his beliefs. He was born to defeat Gridman, and was told that Yuuta is Gridman, but he’s now realizing that Yuuta can’t actually be Gridman. So what else is he wrong about?

I’m still predicting that Anti is going to end up helping the Gridman Alliance in some way, and this episode may have started that process. Rikka took care of him when Akane wouldn’t, and the Alliance has called into question what he thought he knew about Gridman.

Attack on Kaiju

And now we get to the most interesting part of the episode, Yuuta’s confrontation with a humanoid Kaiju. If you couldn’t tell from my subheading for this section, this part of the episode gave me some serious Attack on Titan vibes.

The child who appears behind Yuuta in an alley introduces herself as a Kaiju who Yuuta is supposed to recognize, but due to his amnesia he has no idea who she is. He also doesn’t believe her when she tells him she’s a Kaiju, but his disbelief is quickly dissolved after she changes her appearance before his eyes.

From this Kaiju we learn a lot about the world, but as I mentioned in the introduction, even more questions arise. For starters, we find out that although this girl is a Kaiju, she wasn’t created by Akane, the creator of the Kaiju which have recently been attacking the city.

It’s also revealed that Yuuta saved the predecessor of this female Kaiju, and that’s why she believed Yuuta would recognize her. But, it doesn’t seem like this Kaiju is really on Yuuta’s side. Instead, she’s merely passing helpful information on to Yuuta as thanks for saving her predecessor, whoever that may be.

Could Yuuta’s saving of this predecessor be the reason he lost his memories? We know that after Kaiju attacks people’s memories of the incident are erased, so perhaps something similar is at work in the case of Yuuta’s amnesia.

Next we learn that although Akane is destroying the city with the Kaiju she creates, she’s also the one who rebuilds the city again each time, also by using Kaiju. It seems like the massive Kaiju we always see in the distance are the ones used to rebuild the city after its destruction.

The way these Kaiju rebuild is by spraying some sort of gas over everything, which seems to also reset the memories of all the civilians. Akane is continuously destroying and rebuilding the city to her liking, because, as we learn, she’s basically a god. Haruhi Suzumiya, anyone?

But, although she’s a god, she isn’t an evil one as we might believe based on her actions. Alexis, the anti-Gridman being who lives in Akane’s computer, is apparently some sort of alien who has been using her to fulfill some unknown goal. At the end of the episode we see he can also manifest himself outside her computer.

In one of my previous posts I predicted that Akane would also join the Gridman Alliance at some point in the series after the protagonists accept her for who she is, and the fact that she’s just being used by Alexis seems to reinforce that. Further, I made a prediction that Akane actually wants Gridman to beat her Kaiju.

From her interaction with Utsumi, we learn that Akane is interested in super sentai vs Kaiju manga, which makes sense considering her creation of real Kaiju. But, what if the reason she wanted to create Kaiju in the first place was so that someone like Gridman would appear to fight them?

If this is the case, then I assume Alexis appeared before her to grant her this wish by making her Kaiju come to life. But, he did so knowing that he would be able to manipulate her once he gains her trust, because he needs her power to fulfill whatever diabolical plan he has.

Now you don’t even need to watch the rest of SSSS.Gridman, you know what the whole plot is going to be.

But, there are a few more questions I don’t have the answers to, so I guess you can keep watching for those. One such question is what happened to the world outside the city? The female Kaiju takes Yuuta on the train to see the outside world, and what’s there, or what’s not, is fascinating.

Outside the city is a vast expanse of nothingness. It’s unclear if this extends on forever, or if at some point it’s possible to cross through it into the outside world. What I can assume though, is that the world outside the city wasn’t always like this, and I’ll explain why shortly.

First, let me explain for anyone who hasn’t seen the episode that there’s a vast cloud of gas emitted by Kaiju surrounding the city. This gas puts everyone who ventures into it asleep unless they’re listening to music, because music fairies or something. I don’t really know.

So, this could be an explanation for why Yuuta, Utsumi, and the Gridman Alliance all fell asleep on the train in the last episode. If this was the reason for that, then that means their final destination was somewhere beyond the gas, which is why they woke up there.

However, them falling asleep on the train could also have simply been a kind of foreshadowing. Either way, Akane is the cause of this gas it would seem.

I wasn’t sure what exactly we were seeing at the end of last episode, so I didn’t mention it, but after the fight with the mountain Kaiju the ground was still being destroyed as our heroes were leaving on the train. I think what we were seeing was the destruction of the world outside the city.

There are two possible causes as far as I’m concerned. The first is that Akane is unaware that the outside world is being destroyed by her Kaiju and that the gas is slowly spreading outwards to envelop the whole world. If this is the case, it’s likely part of Alexis’ evil plan.

The second possible option is that Akane chose for the outside world to be destroyed because she didn’t like it for one reason or another. In the case of the rafting site from last week, Akane didn’t have fun on the trip, and this could have caused her to destroy that area.

And, finally let’s get to the reasons for my comparison of SSSS.Gridman to Attack on Titan. First of all, we have our second Kaiju-shifter, but this time she’s not an enemy. Will we learn that Yuuta is actually a Kaiju-shifter as well?

Second, the Kaiju are creating the gas which essentially keeps the humans of the city in, much like how titans make up the walls in Attack on Titan. Is the Kaiju gas actually protecting the city from an even greater threat? Will Yuuta have to seal a hole in the gas by using his Kaiju form?

Conclusion

What do you think is going to happen in the next six episodes of SSSS.Gridman? Do you think my predictions about Akane, Anti, and Alexis are correct? Or do you think something else is going on behind the scenes? Also, who do you think this Kaiju predecessor is/was?

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My review of the next episode is available here.