[Frontier]

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Originally Posted by Fish Sandwich

I didn't really mention this beyond Fujimi's goofy finishing move, but I did really enjoy that the episode made it a point to have Baku's allies involved in the action? With everything else going on, it'd be easy to forget to make a big deal out of it, but as I remember, the show (perhaps consciously) held off on having anyone who wasn't already a lucid-dreaming agent actually directly confront Nightmares any of the previous times they were attacking the "real" world. So having the whole crew show up, and having dedicated beats for them like Fujimi finally getting a chance to lay the smackdown on one, or Minami immediately grabbing a gun since we know she's really an agent now, it all stresses the extra "realness" of the situation this time around, which is good, because without a way to level up the scale like that, that part of the plot probably wouldn't have felt particularly fresh.

This is also the really real first time Zeztz has appeared in the real world, let alone seen by other people, it's the Zeztz that Baku created.

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One thing I like about the structure as it is now is that it implicitly makes Baku's struggle within his own mind the "fight" scene for this episode that lacks any and all Rider action? Baku finally transforms at the very end, but it's more like the finishing move, right down to defeating the actual monsters. I can see how the normal thing to do would've been something along the lines of Baku dying as the shocking cliffhanger, and then him building the new Driver as the premise for the back half, which would climax with a proper fight scene for the new form right away, but I feel like we'd lose out on a beautiful point this episode ends up making, intentionally or otherwise, by making the struggle of creation itself a battle worthy of just being the climax of an episode.

Also they weren't going to waste the Final Form against some scrub Nightmares when it's clearly intended to fight against Dawn.