Somehow i believe that role is reserved for Kallen, somewhere near the end of their little adventure :)

I don't want Kallen to die, but it does seem like a possible future for her. Grr... :p

Sure, it's a valid interpretation, I don't think it's impossible for it to work that way...it just seems to me that it goes a bit beyond what little we know right now.

Obviously we're all speculating here, to an extent. :p Things could completely change in the future and any of us could be proven right (or wrong).

But think about it:

Could have been Lulu forgot to erase her memories of seeing him through the screen. Remember, he was still fairly new to the geass then.

I'm under the impression that the memory lost of Viletta is cause by geass entering the brain not Lulu commanding her to forget.

That is not the same as Shirley being commanded to forget. I doubt Geass' lasting time has anything to do with it either. Seeing how her eyes isn't red or anything afterwards, it must be a one time only command where the forgetting is done by Shirley's brain instead of forcefully by Geass.

So since the forgetting is technically natural, that means the memories aren't really permanently gone, least for now.

Yes, and as far as the show has shown, geassed individuals normally don't remember anything they've done while under its influence (unless specifically commanded otherwise, I suppose? That'd be interesting to find out).

It's not the same thing, of course. The forgetting process may be "natural", after all you can't use Lelouch's Geass to force people to do unnatural things (against the laws of physics, for example)...but the way in which it started was definitely forced and "artificial". The Geass power itself is what's unnatural.

Geass isn't actively affecting Shirley's mind right now, for all we know, but that's because the "rubber" already did what it had to do. There's no reason for her to have red eyes when the Geass already made her brain erase all the relevant information. It's not like the Geass is merely temporarily "keeping" her in a zombie-like state or something (unless Lelouch used an incredibly contrived set of commands...we didn't hear his exact words).

To use a real life example...people with, say, moderate to advanced Alzheimer's have no hope of recalling their lost memories, and that's natural too. Not to mention that even healthy human beings also naturally forget as time passes (the brain cannot store everything permanently and indefinitely). So Shirley's completely forgetting Lelouch might not be reversible at all, at least not in the traditional sense (other "artificial" means may or may not reverse the process...but reading a book or seeing a picture of LL doesn't seem enough).

This is incredibly open to debate, but I still think that they're permanently gone.

Sunrise might or might not agree, of course, we still don't know what they think. :p

It's been far far too long since I've heard this good an ending song in a Mecha Series, or an insert in any series that didn't make me cringe, but made me feel nostalgic. The only example in the past few years is Eureka 7. Normally the inserts take over the entire scene or aren't very good, but this one complemented it. It's also funny that it has the same name as one of the best insert songs ever from Tekkaman Blade, Masquerade. Man the genre is definitely back on its feet.