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Kamen Rider Zero-One Episode 38- "I Am 1000% Your Friend!" Discussion
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07-13-2020, 08:35 PM
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Fish Sandwich
The Immortal King Tasty
Join Date: Jan 2012
Location: Every diner you've ever been to.
Posts: 3,833
My feelings on this episode are 1000% conflicted.
It was extremely bold, made a lot of daring choices, and had a lot of moments that really went for big emotional punches that pushed the story leaps and bounds forward. I don't feel a shred of hatred, or even true aggravation towards it.
It was also downright nonsensical, relies on payoffs to things that have never been set up, and left me sitting there, start to finish, wondering when and why this show's writing went down the toilet. I cannot bring myself to call it good, no matter how hard I try. And I hate feeling that way.
I think I'm going to have just go from the beginning here. I'm really sorry, but this is going to be another long one.
Right off the bat, I think part of my problem is that the episode basically laid out nitpicking bait for me with how Gai being accused was handled. The idea that nobody thought to copy all the incriminating evidence
before
bringing it to the guy you're accusing in a private room is baffling, but I'm also well aware Fukuzoe and his crew aren't exactly the smartest people around, and more importantly, it's standard fictional procedure. You've gotta have the bad guy rip up the papers or whatever. I get it, but it also gnaws at me as I'm watching it because it feels like an omen of how much the writing is willing to take shortcuts for drama. It puts me in a mood where I start getting ready to find faults. And that should be really unfair on my part, right? This kind of cynical thinking is exactly the sort of thing I discourage at every opportunity.
But then the thing that apparently finally takes Gai down after all this time, right after this, is that... he assaulted somebody as Thouser, and they have a video of it. That first thing has happened on
several
occasions before, with the only flimsy justification I can think of being that all those other times, Aruto was already transformed or something. "Just use video evidence" was also something the show explicitly showed the problem with back when MC Check It Out was hanging around. At the time, that was a smart way to plug a plot hole, and yet now, it's swung back around to making things even more confusing. The entire sequence was giving me nightmarish flashbacks to everything I ever complained about during the competition arc.
And that's such a shame! Because there's so much about the scene I fundamentally like! The idea of having our two rival CEO's meet back up in the presidential secret lab of Hiden Intelligence for one final duel, as our underdog heroes finally manage to put the villain in a position of desperation? That's like, THE most perfect possible way to end Zero-One and Thouser's run as enemies. It's a short fight, but it's shot as well as ever, and using such a confined space, that's also a set we've come to know so well as a place where people don't ever fight gives it such a great novelty factor. Takahashi even brought back the secret entrance that I think was only ever used if the episode that introduced Shining Hopper, which wasn't even written by him! That's great attention to detail!
So I'm just totally confused about how to feel after all this, and everything after that doesn't help much. The stuff with MetsubouJinrai right now is neither super interesting nor particularly offensive, so I'll completely skip talking about it to focus on the elephant in the room. Or the, uh, robot dog, in this case. Thouser's road to redemption here felt like a joke the entire time to me. I'm not even opposed to the idea, either, so that wasn't the problem. It's just that everything about the execution came off as almost... sarcastic? Or at least like it didn't really want to put in the time and effort to truly get us to that point.
This backstory may have been planned from the start for all I know, but it's something we've never got the
slightest
hint of until now, and I found it hard to not feel like it was a mistake to throw all of this out here right now. Giving Gai a sympathetic backstory of having an extremely s***ty dad is something I could've guessed. It was the backstory for Takahashi's previous evil CEO Rider, after all. It's also in the same camp of Gai's over the top evilness in that it's way more realistic than I think we all wish it were, so believability isn't the issue either. But going all in on it this late in the game, and having Gai realize the error of his ways through his previously undocumented love for a robot puppy, it just didn't feel authentic to me? Not helped by how Ai-chan's ability to get anyone to admit any deep personal truth feels like another cheap writing shortcut no matter how much it emphasizes the good AI can do.
And as much as I didn't like all the central drama with Gai, the absolute biggest cheat in this episode had to the AIMS Raider goons suddenly having conflicted emotions about their role serving under Thouser because it was convenient to Yua's arc. This is where I say "what if" again, but hey, what if those Raider guys had just been a recurring, specific duo of people who could've gotten names and more scenes to actually demonstrate the things they're saying about their faith in Yua or their doubts about Gai? Because as it is, unless I'm forgetting something, there are only a scarce few scenes that could even be construed as supporting this.
Judging by the other responses in this thread, I seem to be pretty alone in feeling none of this worked all that well, and man, I've never been happier to be the contrarian here, because finding out everybody hated this plot point was the only thing that could've made me feel worse. Good on all of you for seeing the good in this one. The whole "Thouser was a dog the whole time" thing, I desperately want to like it. It's exactly the kind of stupidly crazy concept I love from Kamen Rider, and selling me on villain redemption stories is as easy as can be. I'll probably even enjoy what they do with Thouser from this point on way more than I enjoyed how we got here. But, you know, I knew Adel had issues with his dad long before he went totally off the deep end. I saw that develop. I was given the time to understand why Mitsuzane would let his desperation to cling to the security of his familiar life drive him to madness. I could tell Kuroto Dan genuinely believed himself to be a benevolent god, and he never once actually made an attempt to reform, even when working with the heroes. All I've known about Gai for half a series is that he is just about the most repugnant human being imaginable, and literally nothing else. This episode had to do a ton of work to make that ending feel earned, and honestly,
it did
do the work. The way it's all put together, the music, the direction, it's all great, but, at least in this case, giving it 100% effort really might not have been enough.
Seeing Rising Hopper on a bike again was pretty great though.
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