The opening theme was good, but is no Take Me Higher. Oh I can't wait to hear that glorious song a million times come Oct when Mill Creek's DVDs come out.
Eh, I've never understood what all the fuss was about with Take Me Higher. It's a pretty generic eurodance song from that time period. It's just that rather than let the Italian guy who originally wrote it release it, they translated the lyrics and got Daigo's actor and his band to sing it.
As for continuity, Tiga clearly happened as they talk about him appearing and Reina is Kengo's mother. Makes you wonder if Daigo is his father, which means Daigo better show up later or I'm calling bullshit!!
I believe I read that the two characters names are spelt using different characters in Japanese. Until we something more concrete, I'm not yet sure they are doing anything more than sprinkling in similar names as homages. For example, the name that Kengo gave his plant is the same as the name of the ancient civilization in whose ruins the Tiga statue was found in that show.
Though part of my reluctance to regard her as being Rena could just simply be because Tsuburaya have told that story before a couple of different ways.
There was a Tiga Gaiden in which Daigo and Ren's teenage son becomes Tiga.
Rena's actress also appeared five years ago in the Ultraman X movie as a new character - an archeologist who uncovers an ancient artifact that turns out to be a Sparklence variant - which her young son uses to become Tiga.
Why did Gemn stop subbing Saber? Who is doing the subs for it?
IIRC real life just got in the way. One of their team needed to start working more hours and couldn't continue. At first it seemed like it was only temporary, but they've only done two episodes since, taking them up to episode 20.
In terms of numbers of downloads, the most popular seems to be Izu Subs. However I've heard that their subs kind of ignore characters' speaking patterns so everyone sounds the same. They also apparently have a habit of shortening names, so for example when a character says "wonder ride book" the subs just read "w.r. book." Again, that's just what I've heard from other people; I haven't really watched their work.
The subs I have been using during my catch-up were from FlameSubs. They are much more like a continuation of the Genm Corp subs (though without the text effects Genm had started using). They can be found on "the cat site." IIRC episodes 21 and 22 were just the sub files that you had to attach to a raw video yourself. It was only from episode 23 that they started making them as soft-subbed video files.