This series REALLY suffers from lack of a good soundtrack. Yami's was hands down fantastic, and that really helped the series along. This series... not too great anything-wise. This episode was above par, but still not fantastic by any stretch of the imagination. And was I the only one who noticed the color of the candles on Raiga's cake? Red, blue, green, yellow, and pink, coincidence?

Okay, first things first: not even Keita Amemiya can make armor nipples work. I was constantly distracted by Joel Schumacher flashbacks whenever Biku was on screen.

That said, I did like her as a character. I like that we're seeing more of the different circles of the Makai this year: first we got black ops Knights like Crow, now we get something like a Makai Internal Affairs officer dedicated to taking down Knights who fall into darkness. Very cool. Biku may not be as awesome as Jabi, but a) who is? and 2) she's still pretty cool. I really liked the fights this week, especially what I think was the most extended use of the Garo armor so far this season.

Theory time: the camera was focusing a lot on Crow when Biku was talking about tracking down whoever shattered the monolith. Like, suspiciously lingering on him. Might it turn out that he's really the villain? Will anyone care because he's barely even a character?

That breast breast-plate was too distracting. However, I thought she was a cool character. If Crow was the bad guy, that would be awesome!

This week was kind of a letdown after the last couple episodes. Just another random Horror of the Week (and a pretty obnoxious one, at that). The fight at the end with the orchestra was neat, but this one was pretty forgettable.

Okay episode this week. I liked the stuff with the dad and his daughter, even if it was just a couple of scenes. The big problem with this one, though, was that it was focused around Crow, whose character remains flatter than a pancake on Keira Knightley's chest in the middle of Kansas. Raiga was good, but the final fight was insanely anticlimactic.

We watched 18-20 tonight and while they were good episodes (well, the music one was down right phenomenal), the show has only 5 episodes left and we still know next to nothing about Crow, there has been nothing in the way of plot development, and there hasn't been a truly truly epic battle at all. In fact, the character development has suffered a lot this series. I was okay with it in the beginning, but we should have had some sort of back story for Crow by now.

Raiga's unstoppable rage beatdown in episode 21 reminds me of the one Kuuga did to Go-Jaraji-Da, kinda unnerving.

I guess I was wrong about Crow being the secret bad guy this time; I really thought the show was going there, though, especially during that short scene with him and Gonza. He does seem to have some connection to the real villain, though. Son, maybe? Student?

I really liked the Horror this week. It's a pity he was killed off, though, as I really wanted to know more about him and why he was wielding that sword and eating other Horrors. It seemed like there was a lot of untapped potential in him. He definitely had a way to get under Raiga's skin, too.

I'm 3 episodes behind right now, about to binge-watch and get caught up, but I have to admit that this series is single-handedly killing my enthusiasm for the franchise. The nods and winks to previous seasons were fun at first, but it feels like maybe that's all they have to offer; the storyline begun in the first episode has gone nowhere and the character development is the same. I'll concede there have been a handful of good to great stand alone horror-of-the-week episodes, but for the most part this has been a very disappointing series.