Ultra Q was good. Some WTF episodes, recycled monsters, stock footage, but enjoyable. Hard for me to pick 1 best episode. There's the Goro episode, Baron Spider, Gamaron 2-parter, Kanegon, 2020 plan.

Well, I guess I named my favorites here. :p

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgDGy24H6Ns

I feel pretty confident in doubling down on what I said last time?

Taro's a great pal, don't get me wrong, but it's like he's reading off a platitude of the day calendar this whole episode.

Not to interrupt Absolute Conspiracy - this episode had quite a few moments, but Tregear is still just not a character I enjoy at all - but I somehow completely missed that Ultra Action Figure is doing Dyna and Gaia in February?!

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...96/unknown.png

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...16/unknown.png

Not an unfair assessment. Seems like he has very little to offer someone close when they're in a personal/philosophical crisis.

I'm not all that familiar with Tregear's backstory (or the brunt of it that has transpired up to this point), but it felt like a deep-dive by tying Tregear into Hikari's backstory. Granted, Tregear didn't realistically exist back when they did the OG Side Story for Hikari, but still an interesting approach. When one Ultra gives into darkness, it's such a shock to everyone that it can have deleterious effects down the line.

This didn't do the whole "Remember this character? We're bringing them back!", but I suspect we're getting close to something big.

“When you realise Taiga’s name is the last remnant of Taro’s and Tregear’s friendship.” Saw that in the YouTube comments section and it was really sobering.

Though I do like that they did a contrast between Belial and Tregear when it came to their backstories. It does help make the differences between them stand out more.

"I wish I was able to join the inter galactic defense force and fight instead of create things!"

Well, Tregear, now I see what's the problem here. You're blue!

I'd consider that worthy of an interruption, actually. It's really cool to see Ultra Action Figure is still quietly hanging out in the background, doing exactly what Rider Kick's Figure was supposed to but kinda gave up on (including keeping the prices both low and consistent), and all while being a height people care about, to boot! :p

I didn't really expect them tying those two backstories together, but I thought it worked pretty naturally. In general, really, I was pretty satisfied with what this episode did with Tregear, even though there's a part of me that's still of a part of me that wanted all this backstory to be in the hypothetical 50-ish episode version of Taiga that will only ever exist in my dreams. Which is definitely a "me" thing! So it's not like I was really going to begrudge the episode for that in the first place.

Besides, the fact that Absolute Conspiracy has all this genuine character drama on top of the action has been one of my favorite things about it so far compared to the first Ultra Galaxy Fight. An easily accessible and fun series on YouTube with appeal to fans of a wide range of works from the franchise is honestly a super great place to cover the backstories of popular characters!

Interesting thing about this episode is that it directly pulls every major event from a side story published after Taiga that went into Tregear's backstory -- his friendship with Taro, his jealousy of not being able to fight, Hikari being his chief who went missing, going to that planet. I bring this up because it's disappointing to see how the Taiga spark was named - in the original story, Taro named it the Taiga spark partly because it was what he would want to name his son one day, which I thought was really sweet. In this it comes off as the opposite; he names his son after a piece of technology!

So, an Ultra cloak means you're pretty much a veteran Ultra, right? Wouldn't there be Ultras older than Zero who should have cloaks or is there something I'm missing? And would there be more older Ultras down the line getting their own cloaks? Like Tiga or something?

The red mantles signify the wearer's status as one of the six main Ultra Brothers. Zero's is unique to him.