[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER 555 EPISODE 39



--1--

I love it when a show comes up with an inventive way to resolve a cliffhanger. Last episode had Faiz completely at Kitazaki's mercy. How were Yuuji and Mari going to survive?!

Hey, what if some kids were flying a balsa wood plane, and Kitazaki wanted to do that instead?

It's such a perfect, in-character thing for him to do. All he wants is to be entertained. Fighting Faiz is okay, but doesn't that plane look way more fun? And then he just walks away, leaving Yuuji and Mari to escape. It's completely character-driven, totally established, but still wildly unpredictable. I'm so happy when shows can get a cliffhanger resolved using only what's at hand, only the things a character would do. Great writing!

--2--

The Ryusei Reunion stuff, though. Not crazy about how that story played out.

For a season-long mystery, it's important to pace it well. You can't just go There Is A Mystery And We Won't Solve It Until The End. That makes a show a slog. You've got to make the audience feel like it's being solved, create little milestones of clarification, while still withholding enough so that you can have that Big Reveal in the final act.

Misleading the audience is a great way to both resolve and add tension. You can do stories where the mystery seems solved, feels solved, go do other stories for a while, and then maybe make some firm details seem a little less firm as new information comes to light.

The trick, though, is that the lies you tell the audience have to be believable enough to be plausible, while leaving enough wiggle room to reframe things down the line. Make your lie too solid, and the truth will feel unsupported, tacked on. But if you make your lie too implausible, it's hard for the audience to feel shocked about the reveal.

So it was for me and the Ryusei Massacre, which shock of shocks sees Takumi absolved. I never, ever, for a single second thought he'd somehow murdered a group of kids and forgot about it, so the only tension was in waiting to find out what really happened. That made, for me, a lot of the Kusaka/Mari stuff feel pretty dull. Without believing Takumi's capable of this crime, I just couldn't invest in his eventual acquittal.

(I honestly don't know how much the show expected me to believe Takumi was even a little bit culpable? I don't think they ever played it as less than absolutely serious, so it's not like Takumi Is A Killer plays as too grandiose to be a real theory. I want to think that they knew we'd know it was false, but nothing on the show as played supports that. Tough to give them the benefit of the doubt!)

And, I mean, the way we got there depends on multiple false memories and a few convenient amnesias, which are rarely hallmarks of solid storytelling. It's been a season to get here, and it's hard not to feel frustrated. I don't know why Mari didn't remember that she and all of her friends had been murdered. I don't know why Kusaka lied about not being at the reunion. I don't know why every single murdered kid forgot they'd been murdered except for Sawada. I don't know why Mari's memory came back when she got extra murdered. I don't know why Mari remembered it wrong for several episodes. I just... it's so much contrivance for a plot that's fundamentally still not that interesting to me.

It still feels like a distraction from what this show excels at, in that it mostly excludes, at least on an emotional level, two-thirds of the cast. It's still a plot that only really affects Mari and Kusaka, and mostly just Kusaka. (I genuinely do not care about the fates of the other Ryusei doofs, so please don't bring them up as relevant characters.) Mari wasn't really haunted by the events of the reunion prior to two episodes ago, and she doesn't even want to know what happened for her sake, she wants to know to help Takumi. And Takumi gets dragged into it, but his story with Mari is about something so much bigger than being accused of a homicidal rampage. It's about how Takumi reconciles the person he is with the person people see, and it's about how Mari can make Takumi feel safe to solve that problem. Adding in the But Maybe He Murdered stuff... it's gilding the lily. It's unnecessary.

Just, man, a long road to get somewhere I didn't enjoy visiting. Hoping this plot is in the rearview!

--3--

Real happy to see Takumi interacting with Team Orphnoch, though. Hey, remember them?

I hope I'm not the only person who wanted to see Takumi get incorporated into their dynamic for a few episodes. Unfortunately, it's probably just this one scene. It's great to see Yuka's excitement, Kaido's puffed-chest button-pushing, and Yuuji finally getting Takumi into his be--- Yuuji seeing to his friend's safety. (I loved that, when Takumi went missing in the woods, it was Yuuji who found him, not Mari. TAKKIBA FOREVER.) It would've been nice to see more of that, but I feel like this is all we'll get.

--4--

And, man, this is a little bit of a Thank You But I Wanted More episode, because holy shit Mari and Rina simultaneously putting on the Delta and Faiz Gear?! I absolutely gasped in excitement. I was so happy with Mihara's weird I Don't Want To Go To School Today tantrum, where he fakes a debilitating injury so he doesn't have to be Delta again, that I wasn't even prepared to see Rina be all gung-ho and show up to the fight herself. And Mari! Throwing on that belt, ready to do her part.

So of course my joy is immediately snuffed out.

The Rina part was almost gallows humor, with her getting in zero offense and losing the belt in about three seconds. Worst showing ever for Delta, and a real disappointment for me personally.

Mari's part in the fight was weird, with her continuously trying to activate the Faiz Gear despite it never ever working for her. At first, I'm like, Why is she still trying? But then I remembered that, as a Ryusei School alumnus ("Go Meteors!"), she will keep getting shocked by the belt forever and never stop trying to use it. Like everyone who went to that school, she doesn't understand that pain is how we learn not to do things. It's like Orphan Daddy always said, "You can't spell 'Ryusei School' without 'OUCH'!"

--5--

I'm honestly pretty glad we finally got what's hopefully the final word on the Ryusei Reunion. I want that plot to be done. The meat of it, the What of it, it's fine. There was an Orphnoch attack. The Why of it is maybe/probably still to come, and I'm not even mad about that. I'd like to know what the point of that plot was, even if I feel like it took too much attention away from the character-driven stories that defined the show for me.

Still, yeah, happy to move on from the mystery of what exactly happened a year or so ago, and get back to stuff that matters in the here and now. 'Cause, like, a satellite made Faiz red all of a sudden? And I'm curious what that means!