[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER FOURZE EPISODE 22 - “KICKING YOUR TRUE NATURE”



Oh, right: It was Kijima.

I sort of thought it was? I remembered the rakugo thing not being some minor details, but a big clue, and Pegasus didn’t act like Utsugi at the quarry. This episode more or less immediately offers Kijima up as too suspicious too ignore, and Utsugi too confused to be a cover, leading to a pretty enjoyable solution to what’s normally an Act 1 mystery. There’s some genuine effort made to have the clues divulged organically, with very little of the dialogue bending over backwards to phrase things in a way that triggers a forced Eureka moment – though, even when it does, that’s a little ode to the wordplay of rakugo, maybe? (The biggest one is Shun’s whole Gosh Magnetic Fields Are Powerful bit, but even then he’s talking about cell phones, which Ryuusei links to watches.) Kijima framing Utsugi out of a combination of spite and ego makes for a compellingly villainous motivation, and a worthy new Horoscope for our team to deal with.

But that’s only half of our story! The other half is devoted to Utsugi’s professional malaise, and I liked it just fine, even if it missed the zip and zing of the Zodiart story. (Kijima’s a more interesting actor! I’m sorry!)

Shaping Utsugi’s story into a more adult take on following your dreams is a neat swerve for this show, and it’s especially welcome around a discussion of what the kids are going to do with the rest of their lives. Like, there’s your dreams, and then your career, and sometimes those don’t get to be the same thing. Utsugi dreams of being a kickboxer, but that’s not the sort of thing that’s going to pay the bills, so she became a teacher. (I’m not going to say that people don’t end up in careers they abhor via accident or inertia, but I’d love to hear how she ended up in a job she clearly despises, instead of, like, becoming a gym teacher? Or a physical therapist? Or any number of sports-adjacent jobs that aren’t dressing up in a suit and listening to the problems of teenagers you resent?) But Gentarou – both a high school student and a superhero – helps her understand that you can still follow a dream while working a job, and you can even find the things in your job that help you get closer to your dream. It’s cute, that little acknowledgement that being an adult means maybe doing a thing that isn’t what you’d hoped for, but can maybe still be something you find fulfillment in if you work at it. (Like teaching a kid how to kick the crap out of a wordplay monster!) It’s a minor victory, her starting a kickboxing club at school, but it does feel like a victory.

We’ve also got the Meteor/Aries storyline cooking in the background, but I wasn’t really feeling it here. We get a little duel with Virgo, but mostly it’s stuff that didn’t feel as dialed-in as the rest of the story did for me. Some of it’s just… like, Pegasus only had a 1 in 8 chance of even becoming the right Horoscope, and I kind of laughed about that at the end of the episode more than I should’ve. It totally tracks that those odds are good enough for Ryuusei, but this does not feel like a strategy I’m going to be super invested in. (A 1 in 7 chance now!) My favorite Ryuusei beat in this one was probably him trying to sneak away to Henshin, but JK thinks of him as the other coward in the KRC, and sticks to him like glue so they can both avoid combat. It’s a fun gag! The rest of his story was plot stuff for the future, and I’ll hopefully care more about it there.

This one was good! I like how much work went into the reveal of Kijima as the Zodiart, and I’m excited to see more of him as the Cancer Zodiart. And Utsugi! Liked seeing her smiling at the end! This one ended super sweet!