And also rumored to be one of the CODE Lords.

I was thinking maybe it's related to him not fully sleeping? I'm not sure, I could be looking at that all wrong. Like, is he fully sleeping?

I really enjoyed this episode, how NOX seems to be working with the Lady to as a means to take down CODE. But finding out she has telepathy is very interesting. I'm excited to see what more they do to showcase her abilities.

And next episode is going to be pretty awesome, having Nasuka getting to see how Baku portrays himself in the dream realm.

Something I just thought about, I feel like the end of this episode sorta re contextualizes the meteor Nightmare scenario from a few episodes ago. I wonder if the plan there wasn't actually to cause humanity's extinction but instead another attempt to lure Zero out into the open by making the situation desperate enough to necessitate him coming out to deal with it himself. Especially since wouldn't that Nightmare actually succeeding completely ruin Nox's chances of personally getting revenge on CODE, and by extension whatever The Lady's plans are? Since presumably they would all be dead if Baku didn't stop that Nightmare and until proven otherwise I don't think The Lady has the ability to survive something like that.

Also by that point Nox could transform so he probably could have destroyed the Meteor Nightmare himself if it came down to it.

This two-parter in particular felt very much in the balance I felt Ex-Aid always had that used to bother me. The guest character gets their scenes in among everything else going on, with the absolute essentials of a clear beginning, middle, and end to their personal story, squeezed in with an almost brutal sort of efficiency that I could argue whispers "...but let's get back to the *real* characters already" the whole time, if I still felt like making that argument. I just sorta don't mind it being like this anymore though? Brutal or not, the time *is* used efficiently, resulting in a plot thread that's still totally complete, and as long that part is true, and you can also clearly see why an episode wanted to focus more on other things (which I think is easy here), I think I could also argue this sort of formula is a happy medium that allows a series to actually still show the hero helping people regularly even when the drama hinges much more on the ongoing conflicts between the main characters.

Personally, if I'm going to question anything about the Dreamer plots, it's how often Baku has turned out to just walk up to people and be like "hey remember me FROM YOUR DREAMS???" and be able to get people to go along with it without too much hassle. I'll stress that I'm not complaining about this at all, because I think it's obvious why the show would want to handle things this way. I mostly just find it interesting because it's another assumption I had about ZEZTZ that's turning out to be ~somewhat~ mistaken? With a central hero who fights mostly in dreams, and the emphasis on Black Cases as these things Fujimi can't prove Nightmares are the cause of, I figured they were going for that vibe a lot of the early Heisei stuff especially had where it's this secret conflict between good and evil happening off in the shadows of a world you can imagine is your own... and it isn't *not* that, but it's also turning out to have the sort of "open secret conflict" style I associate more with the back half of the Heisei shows. I guess I just didn't expect that for some reason?

Eventually I'm going to run out of chances to ask this, so, while I still can -- are we *sure* the reason Zero uses a robotic body isn't because he's a robot? The fact that NOX, the self-proclaimed "one who knows all", buys the remote control explanation puts something of a dent in that idea, but like, that can still be technically true if they end up saying he's like, a program or something?

It's just that there's that one line of dialogue from episode 2 and the handful of lines afterwards validating it, up against a mountain of scenes of stuff like Zero sniffing tea/fuel, brooding all alone in the ZEZTZ Room, reacting in pain when NOX hits him during their fight, not being able to take a phone call after getting blown up... I just, I sorta trust what my eyes can see in this show more than what the dialogue tells me, and they've gone so far out of their way at this point to ingrain in the viewer that the bike functionally IS Zero -- constantly doing the exact opposite of emphasizing the Zeroider's alleged status as a mere drone -- that it seems like one of those absolutes that will never be betrayed no matter how much the status quo shifts.

There's a lot about that they'd need to square away later, but it's really difficult for me to imagine anymore they'll ever just have Some Guy show up and try to tell us it's the "real" Zero. Like, even if this is one of those things I'm completely wrong about and there is in fact Some Guy out there, I don't think we'll get much more of a glimpse of him than we already have?

That's a surprisingly compelling case you've got there (I kinda forgot Mukki had his whole thing about the darkness too), but I will note a crucial difference between the two characters -- NOX actually *is* cool, instead of just desperately trying to be. :p

Off topic as hell, but I wanted to say that I truly appreciate and enjoy everyone's perspective on this show.

I haven't had this much fun since the HenshinJustice days.

You know, I've been wanting to bring this up, but I keep wondering how I would feel about Ex-Aid nowadays. It was the first Kamen Rider show I watched as it aired and back then Yuuya's writing style felt pretty novel to me, but I've soured on him so much over time that I'm almost afraid to see how I would feel on rewatch. As you have illustrated here, I think Zeztz is perhaps closest to Ex-Aid among his works and I've really had my ups and downs with Zeztz so far. I do think that Ex-Aid has the advantage of being far tackier, hammier, and generally tonally all over the place in a way that made it very entertaining to watch week to week. Maybe I'm just deluding myself with faded memories of a decade old show, and honestly I don't think I'll find out any time soon because watching even more Yuuya Takahashi shows is a not a good way to resolve my feelings of burnout on the guy's writing. :lol

Frankly, NOX's inability to answer the question without spawning dozens of new ones makes me think of him more like a farcical parody of cool, mysterious characters. Although I'm not sure that it's intentional.

Well, I was going to save this thought for later, but since we're talking about Ex-Aid, I'll share it now. I think Takahashi likes cool and clumsy protagonists. In his first work, Ex-Aid, he didn't quite understand how to combine these two in one character, which is why we got Emu and M. In Zero One, the shift was toward clumsiness, and in Geats, toward coolness. And now in Zeztz, with more experience, they're once again trying to create a hero who combines these characteristics. While formally, the protagonist is still divided between the clumsy Baku and the cool Seven, but the line is very arbitrary and easily crossed. That's what makes Baku such a likable hero.