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Episode 2 - "Legend of the Stone

In which we get stats, a defense team vehicle gets a rare win, and the show is not renamed "Mountain Gulliver."

• We open the episode with a group of miners running away from something in the tunnels that they call "Gakuma." It goes poorly, as they're hit by a blast of energy that turns them into vaguely human-shaped lumps of stone. The audience is treated to an ominous face in the darkness.
  
• In response to this incident, the TPC calls in... not GUTS, actually. We instead get a group of mostly ill-fated TPC officers with their own distinct uniforms, most of whom end up either petrified or yanked through a rock wall by a giant claw. I like that this wasn't our main crew; it implies that the TPC is a larger organization that GUTS is just a small part of. It also reminds me of Ultraman Arc because this is absolutely the kind of job that the SKIP crew would have handled (probably with fewer casualties, if for no other reason than their weren't as many of them).
  
• The remaining miners refuse to go back to work, even in the face of the mine owner insisting that there is no monster and those missing men presumably just petrified and/or ate themselves.
  
• The miners give conflicting descriptions of Gakuma. This will be important later.
  
• Back at GUTS HQ, the crew is working to upgrade their GUTS Wings to fight kaiju. Again, I really appreciate that they aren't ready to go right out of the gate. This was a world where kaiju weren't a thing before last week, so it makes sense that they wouldn't have anything already kitted out to fight one.
  
• While this is happening, Daigo and the guy who operates the HQ's computers give us a rundown of Tiga's different forms. It's directly spelling out things that were already fairly apparent, but this is a show that's aimed at least partially at kids so I can't fault it for wanting to clarify things.
  
• The hologram of Yuzare returns, revealing that it's actually an AI that only Daigo can fully understand. She explains to an initially reluctant Daigo that he is, in fact, Tiga and that he's a direct descendant of a heroic bloodline.
  
• One of the neat things she reveals is that Ultras normally don't interfere in the progress of humanity, but she implies that Daigo can at least modify his behavior. We're still very much in the classic "the Ultra is a separate entity with no voice or direct interactions with the host" mode that the New Generation era would eventually break away from.
  
• We do get confirmation that Golza escaped in the last episode.
  
• Gakuma fully surfaces and begins using its stone breath to turn toy construction vehciles into mid-90s Photoshop filters. Rena and one of the guys whose names I don't know yet take off to fight it in the GUTS Wing 1. This doesn't go well and they almost immediately crash.
  
• Fortunately, GUTS Wing 2 is also ready to launch and is able to use its large cannon to destroy Gakuma. Do not get used to this, it's an Ultraman show.
  
• So remember how the miners couldn't agree on what Gakuma looked like? Yeah, there was a reason for that. A second Gakuma emerges and scatters the GUTS crew who had already exited the Wings under the assumption that they had won.
  
• This gives Daigo the thing that every Ultraman host prizes above all else: the chance to slip off while nobody is watching. He proceeds to summon Tiga to fight Gakuma 2.
  
• I'm not going to try to describe fight scenes in detail. I will say that I do like how Ultras usually end up going for more of a wrestling style for fighting than Kamen Riders or Sentai teams with their martial arts and weapons. I feel like we've gotten a little bit away from that in the modern era, but it's very much still a thing in Tiga.
  
• Gakuma 2 almost completely undoes Tiga's transformation from statue to real live boy, but a shift to Power Type and a CGI orb attack effectively turn the tables. Due to the kind of narrative convienice some of the later shows avoid, Gakuma's corpse first petrifies and then explodes and dissolves so that nobody has to deal with disposing of an enormous kaiju corpse.
  
• Back at base, GUTS accepts their new role as humanity's first line of defense against the kaiju and, because this isn't Nexus, conclude that Tiga is here to help them. Daigo decides that it's time to give him an official name instead of just calling him "The Giant." One of the other members briefly floats the moniker "Mountain Gulliver" but everyone is more receptive to calling him "Ultraman Tiga."
  
• Fun episode. I want to say that the whole "monster in a mine" thing is a callback to the very first episode of Ultra Q but I never finished watching that, so I can't be certain. I know that "underground kaiju" is not a wildly unique Ultraman concept, but this one worked well. The twist of their being two Gakumas was nice and it allowed GUTS to score their own victory without Tiga's immediate intervention.