Remember how I mentioned the show’s episodes after 26 got delayed by a week? Well that meant, by lucky coincidence, that this milestone episode with every Rider Mook (or more specifically, Shocker grunts, Destron grunts, Dogma Fighters, Crisis Empire’s Chaps, Makamou Ninjas, Salis Worms, Leo Imagin and Masquerade Dopants) aired exactly 40 years to the day the original episode of Kamen Rider (1971) aired. Sentai tried doing the same thing deliberately 4 years later, but ironically, the episode got delayed by a week, due to having an episode in February pre-emptied by live coverage of a murder.

And the reason we get so many seemingly random cameos (the fangirl who intrudes on the filming and the fat and skinny female grunts who make a Susan Boyle joke) is that their names (or in the case of the latter two, their comedy act’s name) contain the kanji for “thousand”.

And I mentioned that OOO’s action figure gimmick was the circle on his back, well here we see Birth’s. Namely, his armaments combine into a scorpion when not in use. Which honestly, I quite a clever way to avoid losing them.

It might have taken the franchise another decade, but I think there's a contender for Best In-Season Episode Where The Characters Make A "Kamen Rider" Movie.

Neat! Thanks!

So this'd be a place where the term mook (fodder villains) is actually used in-universe. Guess this is the substitute for the recap episodes for other KR series.

If Goto is wooden then I wonder what'd be the difference between being wooden as in they can't act or being wooden as in it's just their character, like perhaps Maki. They somehow can manage to get the main antagonist of the series to take part normally (even for his initial rejection) in a work about the main cast. Just that Maki's more blunt about Goto and Hina's failure.

Megumi was a good fighter so.... Probably more suitable if Sendo's Yummy are just literal Shocker mooks where, they'd be killed off easily and Sendo is about quantity over quality that he can constantly produce more so they can show up. But it's likely more unexpected if Sendo's Yummy looks like usual MOTW rather than the disposable mooks.

I mean, for me, it's if the performance is compelling. Maki isn't emotive, but there's a lot the actor is doing that's fun to watch, and he's clearly interacting with the energy of other people in the scene. Gotou's actor for sure has a different mandate than Maki's actor, in regards to what the producers want them to be doing as performers, but the Gotou stuff to me is always very perfunctory: saying his line, hitting his mark, making eye contact with his scene partners, getting across which of two emotions his character is feeling in a scene... it's just never a compelling take on what his character is supposed to be going through. It's very Tell instead of Show, on an individual performance level. He just doesn't seem to be as good at his job as the rest of the cast?

Hello all,

I have recently gotten into Kamen Rider, and I've been lurking these threads for the past 6 months or so as I watch various seasons, and I just have to say, Die, thank you for hosting such interesting discussions about so many Kamen Rider shows! It's insanely difficult to find episode-by-episode discussions for earlier seasons, so your threads (along with everyone else posting) have been a great companion piece as I've been getting more and more into the bugmen. It's probably part of why I've been able to watch so much in such a short time (6 seasons in 6 months, Faiz is my favorite so far btw), and it is 100% why I've just made an account to share in finally keeping up with the discussion as I watch OOO for the first time. Keep up the good work!

Anyway, I LOVED this last 2 parter (27 and 28). It was so wild and crazy, I could barely believe what I was seeing at times. W is my 2nd favorite season (though may be 3rd if OOO continues), and part of why is how unpredictable each episode's tone, setting, and characters could be. This felt like a return to that idea!

Now for some random OOO thoughts/comparisons as a somewhat newbie: I think Eiji/Ankh is like the Shinii/Ren dynamic, but much more interesting. So much of Ryuki is Shinji pleading with Ren not to do a thing, Ren does it anyway, and Shinji shrugs his shoulders (and vice versa). It just got very tiresome and repetitive. Here it's a lot more push and pull, especially with Eiji leveraging his ability as OOO, which is much more fun to watch in my opinion! It feels like they really could break apart at any moment, while Ren and Shinji lacked spice in my opinion (they're supposed to be fighting for their lives! Why does everyone just kinda hang out in Ryuki!) Also, another side note, the counting medals screen at the beginning of each episode is SO helpful. I have no idea why they didn't do something similar with the Build bottles. It was so hard to keep track, everything moves so fast in Build!

Okay, rant over, thanks for reading and I will be certain to join the discussion again soon!

Aww, you're incredibly sweet for saying all that! And you have excellent taste in great Kamen Riders who are also sort of terrible friends! Or at least terrible to be friends with!

I can definitely see what you're saying about Eiji/Ankh evoking that Shinji/Renenrgy (there's a real sweet and sour thing going on in each pairing) because that's sort of the stuff that Kobayashi likes to talk about, but I mostly enjoyed the dynamic on Ryuki -- even -slash- especially the ways it might feel repetitive -- because so much of Ryuki was about the hard work of understanding another person. Staying in each other's orbit like that speaks to how Shinji is innately trying to understand Ren's intensity, while Ren can't stop wondering why Shinji can be so generous to everyone he meets. I think both those guys fundamentally don't get the other for large chunks of the series, but they're fascinated by the ways each other doesn't make sense.

I genuinely don't know why they all work at a cafe, though, other than the crushing gravity of that setting in this franchise. Not even Gotou could escape it, and he's a former police officer who became part of a private Medal-powered corporate army! Dude still needed to do time in the Cafe Mines to become a real boy!!!

Ankh really depends on other people like both Eiji and Kougami, so he has to do their biddings, even if they won't always give him what he wanted, like Eiji prioritizing people's lives and killing the Yummy created from his Core, and also Kougami being the one ruling over the Medal Systems so he's the best lead.

Maybe it fits OOO because well, because 1000 has 3 zeroes at the end, fitting OOO's name. And ironically, about what you said of OOO story to take a couple weeks off, during this episode's airing, there were a massive earthquake on March 11, 2011 that spawned a tsunami and led to a Level 7 meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors, thus all the programming was cancelled that week, including KR, in favor of news coverage, delaying the OOO story a week off.

Goto and Hina coincidentally both use rock to intervene in the fight. Goto being literally hard-headed (as Ankh mocks him) and using it to headbutt the Yummy, and the show actually making use of Hina's super strength in fight. Only for one moment here in comedy setting and Eiji's line of the super strength being useful rather than making full use of said super strength for the rest of the series... Dunno if this stuff would be canon to the actual series, just that I can't see Maki being willing to work normally with the good guy cast.

That definitely worked out in the production team's favor!

So...Date definitely lost his medical license, right? Bro could be making incredible amounts of money as a doctor and instead chooses to don silly costumes and risk his life fighting against ancient monsters :lol

I assume that Date's tendency toward Adventure (he was formerly a Doctors Without Borders guy from his flashback, not, like, House) led to him deciding to forgo extra shifts at a local hospital in favor of becoming a Gashapon-themed mercenary. I don't think Date's decision-making matrix values safety and risk in the same way yours does!