Interesting! Thanks for the clarification!

Shotaro is genrally overlooked, yeah. I think I'd always say Shotaro is the better detective of the two, because he's not just (basically) plugging terms into a search engine until the result is produced. Shotaro actually has to go out and find clues, as well as understand people well enough to determine what information is most relevant to the search. He only looks like a joke!

Maybe it's just me, but I didn't find their interactions romantic at all. I felt it was more that they reached a mutual form of understanding and respect than anything.

Shotaro has no in-universe reason to suspect her, having just met her, and through Terui at that, who also appears to trust her. It's a case where he doesn't start with all of the details, so he's going by his faith in others as he usually does. Honoring the dead isn't exactly a foreign concept, either.

It was to help establish the bond between Wakana and Mick.

In context of the singular episodes, he always has. In context of the series overall, we learn the reasoning later on.

He's stopping Kujo both due to his duty as an officer as well as seeing how far she's fallen, like how he did when he almost killed an innocent last two-parter. Shotaro even directly brings that up at the start of the episode when Terui attacks an un-transformed Kujo.

Not at all the case. It's made clear that Kujo was already a vengeance crazy lunatic to begin with. The Gaia Memory overdoes only exacerbated the problem. She chose her fate long before getting drugs involved.

We had all of Part 1 for that.

Shotaro shows empathy when telling Kujo to turn herself in and letting her walk off. He also shows empathy for Terui in letting him handle the situation, seeing how important the whole situation is to him.

A Kamen Rider episode ending with a new toy and a fight. Boy, what a shock.

Except that he does. He stakes out the Police Headquarters to make sure she shows up. It's his misguided faith that gets him to leave the scene early. Maybe not investigated in the most thorough way, but still investigated.

Not really sure what separates this one from any other.

You're fine to not like these episodes, but alot of these complaints I just really don't get.

So it would seem! Thanks for the feedback!

No offense, but I recall from the Hibiki thread that you often criticize CGI monster fight scenes, so part of this seems like more your problem than a fault of the show.

But yeah, this is the debut of Accel's Gunner A, which is blue to match his eye! :p

More importantly, this is the first time we hear Accel's lyrical theme, Leave All Behind, which apparently was only ever used twice in the whole show, sadly. What's your opinion of this song?

It's fine if you want to see it that way, but I honestly think it's more to do with how the scale of the final battle misses the human drama that had been set up over the previous 40-odd minutes. We started with a nuanced story of revenge and rage, and we end with Terui cannon-blasting a giant CG monster in the face. It's not as emotionally rewarding, to me? But, sure, it's all subjective. Could just be me!

KAMEN RIDER W EPISODE 23 - “L ON THE LIPS - SINGER-SONG RIDER”

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I think I just fundamentally like these sorts of stories – stories of singular obsessions and small-scale disasters – better than apocalyptic threats and bloodthirsty monsters.

There’s just something more appealing to me about watching Shotaro and the rest of the gang have to solve some low-stakes mystery, with an obsessed fan, a deluded performer, several Celebrity Guest Judges, and two pissed-off idol singers. It speaks to the community of Fuuto more than any rampaging psychopath, because it’s about the interconnectedness of every random citizen, and how their hopes and dreams change the fortunes of each other. Some lunatic with a vendetta (hero or villain!) creates a set of stakes that are simple to parse, and direct to confront: a villain needs to be stopped or more people will die. A mystery like this one… it’s not the end of the world if Team Double bails on it. The Liar Dopant’s a problem, but more in the scammer sense of things. No one’s died yet, or is likely to. But the pursuit of truth and justice becomes more intriguing for how optional it is here. Team Double throwing itself into a story where maybe four people are going to live slightly better lives, and that’s it… I don’t know, I really like that. I like how much harder the story has to work to make those stakes feel worth pursuing.

It usually means the story has to get uniquely weird, and boy does this episode deliver on that front. This episode leans into all of its singing cast members, for sometimes tenuous (but always fun) reasons. Multiple songs this time out, and if they aren’t particularly appealing to me, I can definitely appreciate the ridiculousness of The Masked Singers just hopping on stage to test a Philip theory. And SPILK! How can you not love an episode that invents a horrible new form of music, and gives it the dumbest possible name? It’s all batshit ideas this time out, but every single one of them adds detail to a story of delusion and desperation, which is thankfully not lost on Shotaro.

That’s maybe my favorite touch in this one, how both Shotaro and Akiko immediately see the similarities between Jimmy’s deluded grandiosity and Shotaro’s cosplay detective nonsense. It makes Jimmy into less of a constant joke, by suggesting that Jimmy’s naive bluster is a product of his vulnerability and sensitivity, just with zero self-awareness. (I love when this show lets Shotaro be sort of pathetic!) Like, Jimmy’s never annoying in this, despite how horrendous his music is. He’s sweet in how dumb he is, how blinded by optimism he is. Shotaro’s got that same thing, where his cosplay detective stuff is charming in how ridiculous it is, instead of being aggravating. Setting these two up in one story is such a fun idea.

Again, I just like these dumb little stories that don’t, like, matter. I don’t know if they’d all the time work (I think you need the stories of killers and death in order to make the series-long stuff land?) but I like getting a couple episodes where the resolution is less about defeating one homicidal adversary, and more about figuring out the best way to improve a stranger’s life. That’s real Kamen Rider storytelling to me.

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DIE-A MEMORIES

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-Yeah, the songs in this one… not my thing? Just not musical genres I’m super into. I’d be curious to hear if y’all found them to be good or memorable.

-Terui briefly wears a black leather outfit over a blue t-shirt, and it felt viscerally wrong to me. It was Player 2 Terui, and I wanted to write a strongly-worded letter to Toei circa the year 2010 and ask them to restage that scene with the correct Terui costuming.

-Adding Terui to the team for W Cave scenes necessitates using its multiple levels for staging, and that’s so nice to see. It makes these largely expository scenes into something more visually dynamic.

Maybe that's the point. I think Kujo going CGI could be symbolic of how she became so obsessed with her quest for revenge that it came at the cost of her humanity. It could be like a warning to Terui, that he needs to be careful not to become a berserk CGI monster himself. Pink Triceratops is the inverse of White Whale, I guess. But that's just my take and I respect that the execution here doesn't appeal to you.

What about Leave All Behind though?

I mostly remember this for TV-Nihon’s April Fools video from 2010 being a gag sub of the first few minutes (among the highlights are “Fuutic Idol is a talent show for people who cannot sing”, “If you vote for us, we will show you our bodies” and Shotaro having had an affair with the female judge, which she uses to blackmail Q+E into a contract). And talking of the judges.

Special Guest Alert!

So two of the three judges are the couple that signs the show’s OP (hence the modified opening credits showing them singing it), but the third, Simon Cowell-esque judge is the late Ichirou Mizuki, the “Emperor of Anime Songs”. He’s only one of three artists to have done all of the main 4 Toku franchises (Ultra, Kamen Rider, Super Sentai and Metal Heroes) (the others being Isao Sasaki and Shinichi Ishihara). Within Rider, he sung the OP and ED for Kamen Rider X, Kamen Rider Stronger and Kamen Rider (1979), along with insert songs for Kamen Rider (1971) and Kamen Rider Black RX. He wasn’t keen on theme songs that didn’t name drop the show or relevant terminology, which is probably why he never did anything song-related for Rider in Heisei or Reiwa (since they switched to that type of songs with Ryuki).

As for the songs… I liked the cover of Finger on the Trigger more than the original, mostly because I found it more memorable

That's an interesting interpretation, but I'm not sure there's much on screen to support it. As soon as Terui shows up, he's just like It Is My Grim Responsibility To Destroy You, and there's no real reflection on his own desire for vengeance. One of my bigger complaints about this story is how quickly it abandons its main utility, which is using Kujo's story to force Terui into some self-analysis. Instead, her vengeance is portrayed as The Bad Kind, and then she just goes crazy because of a USB drug metaphor.

But, y'know, I totally understand trying to read something into a scene! It's a good choice!

It was okay? I wasn't really into the scene it was playing over, so I didn't give it the best listen.

Neat! Thanks!

I think there's a solid idea for a TTFC series where that thing and Ixa's barrel-throwing dinosaur tank do odd jobs while trying to break into show business.