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Kamen Rider Die watches Kamen Rider Zi-O
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05-18-2022, 10:11 PM
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Kamen Rider Die
Kamen Ride Or Die
Join Date: Aug 2019
Location: Chicago, IL
Posts: 6,159
KAMEN RIDER ZI-O: SERIES WRAP-UP
Creating an anniversary season to Kamen Rider has such an insanely high degree of difficulty that it’s amazing they’re even
intelligible
, let alone any good. A regular season can be considered a success if it manages to tell a thrilling, thematically-rich story around its recurring cast. An anniversary season needs to do that, AND craft individual outings for returning actors that honor their past work in a way that both new and old audiences can appreciate, AND create an overall statement about the span of time the show is meant to celebrate. It’s nuts. It’s maybe too big of an ask?
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Kamen Rider Die
I don’t really know much about Zi-O, beyond the obvious. Watches. Anniversary. That’s it? It’s one that I’m… probably not going to approach the way everyone else did. I’m not terribly excited about the anniversary parts, if I can be brutally honest. I’m sure I’ll mark out over my favorite Riders or support characters (fingers crossed for a Cubi/Music Note tribute story), but revisiting old characters isn’t as much of a lure for me as it might’ve been a while ago. The Legend Riders project taught me a lesson on indulging in nostalgia (diminishing returns!), and Decade taught me a lesson on the value of an anniversary show’s recurring cast. I liked the Decade cast, a whole lot. I want that experience again. Not to see all of my favorite heroes come back, puffier but stalwart; but to get to encounter the history of Kamen Rider through new heroes. I already care about Heisei, but I’m excited to care about Kamen Rider Zi-O.
That’s a quote from when this thread kicked off a couple months ago, right before I started watching Zi-O. Not to take the fun experience of watching an entire Kamen Rider season and make it sound routine, but things went pretty much how I expected. Kamen Rider Zi-O was a show that succeeded for me
in spite
of its anniversary elements, not because of them.
I did appreciate what this show was trying to do with its Heisei tributes, though. I liked how it tried to take 19 individual lessons about growing up and arrange them into a road map for a poorly-socialized teenager. Some of the installments stretched the original shows’ themes a little bit (I don’t know if the OOO one landed very well?), but we more or less got stories that drew inspiration from a specific show in a manner that helped Sougo on his path to becoming a hero.
But the cavalcade of guest stars never really meant that much to me, regardless of how heavily they were used in an episode. Whether it was someone like Chase doing a speedrun of his character arc, or Kouta handing over a couple Ridewatches and peacing out, the most I could normally manage for the Big Guest Star moments was Hey Neat. I don’t really
care?
It’s not a series that’s about furthering those characters’ stories across a season, you know? (I am so grateful we didn’t have to see nineteen Legend Riders show up in the finale to back up Sougo!) They were like the Victims Of The Week: cool if they could be interesting, but they shouldn’t be as memorable or important as our regular cast.
That regular cast was
ridiculously
enjoyable to watch, and occasionally just plain ridiculous. Sougo’s growth from Actively Repellant to Brightest Star In The Heavens is the main reason I can’t ever quit these shows, no matter how unevenly they might begin. He was a character that grated on me, until I tolerated him, until I enjoyed his ingratiating enthusiasm, until I loved his hard-fought optimism and undying commitment to giving people the chance to find their best selves in their best futures. He
smiles a lot
, for a Rider, which was so weird at the start. It came off as flippant, which it sort of was. But then he just kept smiling, and it read as a port in a storm; the one thing you could be sure of was that Sougo was happy to see his friends, and he was happy to get another chance to go on an adventure.
Most of those adventures were with the Time Orphans, and I sort of love how one-note they ended up being. Tsukuyomi never really grew beyond being a Time Mom, despite the show trying a couple times to add complexity to her character. Both attempts sucked, so I can’t really blame them for sticking with the proven Time Mom role. (I think Tsukuyomi’s actor is great, but both the Kill Sougo and 2058 plots were among this show’s low points.) Geiz has charisma for miles, so it’s easy to miss how little his performance changes over the season. There’s a lot of depth added to his motivations – how his relationship to Sougo matches the viewer’s – but he’s hilariously taciturn throughout the entire show, and entirely unconvincing in his attempts to hide his affection for Sougo.
Deeper into our cast we had two characters that could’ve been comedy-only goofballs on a lesser show: a wacky uncle who accidentally turned his repair shop into the requisite Heisei Cafe; and a gloriously theatrical hype-man, variously spouting exposition and acting eternally suspicious. Uncle and Woz were so much more than that, though. Each actor found the requisite humor (Uncle in particular had what I’d swear were some scene-stealing ad-libs that busted up the actors, since they land right at the cut), but they also brought a warmth to their responsibility to shepherd someone, while they tried to let him find his own way. They cared enough for Sougo to let him make mistakes, but they were always at his side to let him know that it wasn’t worth giving up. As support characters go, they were all-time.
If only the villains were as nuanced! The Time Jackers never really came together as a series-long threat, and I actually just laughed when I realized that they
were
the series-long threat. Oma Zi-O exists as a larger plot complication and a staggeringly powerful metaphor, but the Time Jackers – and their Another Riders – were who our heroes spent a year locking horns with. They were… not good. Some of my least favorite villains, full stop. Their schemes never made a ton of sense, and their utility to the series was minimal at best. Pinning the entire endgame to Swartz’z ambitions and Ora’s duplicity and Heure’s safety was a fatal miscalculation, and I assume the stink of it lingers for fans more than the sweetness of this show’s heroes. The Time Jackers are barely coherent as a threat, and rarely entertaining.
Oma Zi-O, though. Heisei villain for the ages, if you’ll pardon the expression. If every Heisei show from Kuuga through Build was about teaching children how to grow up, it’s only fitting for the final Heisei villain to represent the fear of growing up into someone you don’t like. Reminding kids (and viewers of all ages) that they have to work daily to be their best selves, and that it’s okay to be scared of the future so long as you never let that fear define your choices… just great lessons for a Rider show to codify into their anniversary season. Beyond that read, it’s fun to think about the other stuff Oma Zi-O might represent: addiction, depression, isolation, a fear of vulnerability; the sky’s the limit for how you want to view Oma Zi-O as a metaphor. Legitimately a villain I can’t stop thinking about.
So many of the characters clogged up my brain for the last couple months, but I can’t say I expended much brain power on this show’s Time Nonsense, or the rapidly shifting landscape of its series arc. This thing’s a mess, even for a Heisei Rider show. It starts off as a time travel show, and then sort of abandons that for a more straightforward Legend Rider showcase, and then goes hard into a multiversal apocalypse. There were points where it felt like the show was trying hard to course-correct – watching each week’s episode and recalibrating towards only the parts that were working – but then the ending is even more of a disaster, plot-wise, than the beginning. The line-graph of this show’s plotting quality was a sine wave. For every clever character beat, there was an infuriating/opaque/infuriatingly-opaque episodic or serialized plot.
But, really, that’s what makes it such a perfect Heisei tribute season? I can’t even count the number of these seasons that I’ve ended feeling burned by the series plot, but wistful for the character beats. It’s just these
shows
, man. Their plots are all kinda dumb, and most of them have a tough time telling a complete, coherent story over 40-odd episodes. If this thing didn’t make me roll my eyes at Time Nonsense, or grit my teeth at a dumb twist, or resent a ludicrous villain plot taking up valuable screen time, it wouldn’t really be Heisei Rider. That stuff is as integral as a whole cast of characters that I’m 110% invested in, or outstanding fight choreography, or great music, or evocative cinematography, or or or. I dislike parts, but I almost can’t imagine these shows without them.
Kamen Rider Zi-O isn’t the best season I’ve ever watched, for sure. Too uneven. An endgame that leaves a sour taste, despite a final scene that’s one of my all-time faves. But by trying – and largely succeeding – to tell an original Kamen Rider story alongside a tribute to nineteen previous seasons, it was easily the
most
Kamen Rider season I’ve ever watched.
That’s enough for me.
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