The bit that wrecked me was Yoko and her mom at the end. This was a two-parter that was INCREDIBLY dedicated to Hiromu's heroism and sacrifice (the first scene on Mission 29 is Hiromu's prophetic guilt dream!), so I'm glad that there was room to explore Yoko's connection to her mom amidst every Hiromu-centric thing.

That's probably still a very close #2 for me as well! It's a very emotional episode!

I still remember being incredibly confused when the end of Lupinranger involved the red version of the center mech showed up out of nowhere without having ever been seen or mentioned on the show itself. Not that it wouldn't have been a complete ass-pull even if I had seen the movie.

But that's the cool thing about lyrics, they can have different meanings depending on the perspective!

I don't mind it as an insert, but even then, it has to compare with the excellent Perfect Mission. It seems like a loss no matter which category I use to judge it, but at least, I like it enough on its own merit.

Yeah, the main difference that I notice between this and Rider's infamous staff changes is that the producer and writer haven't changed at all. I recall it was similar for Ohranger as well. We were still watching Takebe's and Kobayashi's story and other than the OP, it feels exactly the same to me.

Well, it does explain why Enter and Escape are such weirdos. Jin is an Avatar composed of one person's data, so he looks and acts like the real Jin from 13 years ago (maybe a bad example since that guy also happens to be a weirdo but it's the only comparison I have), while our monochromatic villains are composites of a whole bunch of people. It's a dark twist that the scientists who saved the world are now being used against their will to endanger it, including their own kids.

That's why I think this works best as something of a mid-season finale. The first 30 episodes were grounded in the past and we saw the oppressive toll that had taken on the Gobusters' personal lives. Even though the ending of that arc was bittersweet, or even cynical at worst, it leaves the last 20 (this show has 50 episodes after all) for them to seriously think about their future and dreams after the remnants of Vaglass are finished. I'd call that hope. The fact that you consider the second chapter as an improvement suggests to me that you can see that as well, even if you disagree with the execution.

For sure, I love that emotional moment before their climactic final battle with Messiah's humanoid form, reminding of how Hiromu has always honored the promise and how it pains him to now have to abandon it. But it's okay, since they're all choosing to break it mutually, knowing that there's something more important that they need to protect. It's a cool leader moment for Hiromu, encouraging Ryuji and Yoko to confront their despair and bring justice to everybody who sacrificed themselves in the past.

Ouch, just referring to the show as Lupinranger, huh. I guess I can't blame you for that.

Yeah, I mean... I don't think they're especially weird in the context of a tokusatsu show? They're certainly not significantly weirder than the technician who's afraid of speaking up or the teen girl who collapses if she isn't constantly eating candy or the well-meaning older brother who becomes a psychopath if he overheats or the tactless robot pilot who freezes up if he sees a chicken or all of the comedically strange companion robots or...

Anyway, I don't know that I spent a single second wondering if there was a root cause to Enter or Escape's personality/pathology, so if this was meant to be an explanation, it's both unnecessary and maybe insufficient.

TOKUMEI SENTAI GO-BUSTERS MISSION 31 - “SPACE SHERIFF GAVAN APPEARS!”

https://kamenriderdie.com/images/sen...busters31a.png

I don’t care about Gavan! I only care about Yoko and Shelly having a goofy friendship adventure in a dimension that runs on Showa rules!

Just an exceptionally fun episode, mostly because of the fantastic chemistry between Shelly and Yoko. I like the troublesome earnestness of Shelly, and how that plays off of the polite but exhausted Yoko. That duo is just my favorite thing on maybe the series to date, and I wish I could explain better why that was. I just… I love how wacky they are together. The scene of the two of them eating a bunch of desserts and then Shelly trying to pay with a massive diamond? I wish that was an entire show. Give me 50 episodes of these two toku ladies being good friends and occasionally being menaced by Space Criminals, and I will be happy.

The rest of the episode, it’s honestly all as solid as that, which was surprising. I groaned pretty loud when I saw that we were in a Gavan story (I did not like that guy’s part in the Sentai/Rider crossover movie!), but this thing worked all the way across for me. Thought I’d just have tiny morsels of RabbitBird to enjoy, but instead I got a rapidly escalating monster adventure that also included a new Metaroid! And a Megazord! Despite Messiah being defeated last episode! Developments!

A little strange to jump out of last episode’s massive conclusion into an extended Legacy Hero crossover event, but I guess I’m game if it keeps being super fun to watch. Yoko and Shelly! That’s all I need!

https://kamenriderdie.com/images/sen...busters31b.png

IT’S TIME FOR Space Sheriff Gavan!

Boy, is it ever. I think half of the dialogue was folks saying “Space Sheriff Gavan–?!” I liked him in this, thankfully, because he’s in too much of the show for me to just ignore him. I like how Geki is a real modern hero – smug, hot-headed, smirking in the face of death – but Gavan is all shot-for-shot Showa stuff. The little break to show us the Electroplating!!! Bonkers. The second Gavan shows up in costume, the logic of this show tilts into completely insane Showa nonsense – the Metaroid gets a dirt bike from Somewhere, the Makuu Space makes evil three times stronger in a quantifiable way – and it’s awesome to watch the Busters try to retain their sanity in the face of such absurdity. Gavan’s a toku fever dream compared to the coherence of your normal Go-Busters cause-and-effect, and the collision of those two sensibilities made for a fairly rousing climax. I will give this Gavan guy one more shot!

Even by tokusatsu standards, the Space Sheriff shows were completely bananas. The plots barely made sense, the villains were extremely bizarre, and the climax of each episode took place in a fever dream surrealist landscape.

That being said, Gavan has what is easily one of the greatest toku theme songs of all time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lK-2xoCxYBk

Geki's partner Shelly is played by Suzuka Morita, most known for her role as Kotoha Hanaori aka Shinken Yellow in 2009's Samurai Sentai Shinkenger, written by Kobayashi. The show also has familiar faces such as that one person from the Kamen Rider Eternal movie and that one villain from Kamen Rider Saber as rangers, and Kaido from Faiz as a dude. :lolol

So you probably don’t remember, but this was in one of those watch parties we used to do I mentioned back in the Saber thread. It was watched with Zyuohger 29 with the theme being “Sentai version of last week’s event”, which consisted of OOO 28 and Gaim 30 with the theme being “weird team-ups”.

Which is my way of saying that, like the Gaim episode, this is here to promote an upcoming movie. Though unlike the Kikaider movie, Gavan’s is a sequel to the tv show rather than a reboot (which leads to some uncertainty wih who the movie is targeting, since it doesn’t explain much to those unfamiliar with the series, but focuses on new characters the old guard won’t be invested in). But people can’t say this one is disrupting the plot, because, there isn’t a plot to disrupt (at least until the mid-episode reveal that seemingly everything Vaglass survived the previous episode).

And being written by Kento Shimoyama, who’s probably the Toku equivalent of Al Ewing with Marvel, has a lot of homages to the tv show.

Rhino Doubler is homage to Sai Doubler, the first Doubler Monster from Gavan (though not the first monster. That would be BEM Kaiju Mantis Shrimp Monster).

Like in that show, Gavan (and Hiromu, Shelly, and Yoko) fight untransformed for a while before his transformation. The original Space Sheriff shows were primarily an excuse for actors who were also stuntmen to show off (with Shaider being the exception, where they cast a pretty boy as the lead to boost ratings and had his female assistant do the action scenes).

As Gavan’s Deposition process begins, the OST shifts to that of Space Sheriff Gavan (it honestly fits Go-Busters better than its own OST, strangely enough). The subsequent replay stock footage is a faithful recreation of the original scene with Geki replacing his predecessor Retsu and Go-Busters’ narrator (who’s been mostly redundant for a few episodes, having nothing to do but read the title cards) filling in for Gavan’s narrator Issei Masamune (also known for The Transformers and Kamen Rider Black RX), as is DolGiran, Cyberian and the Gavan Dynamic scene.

The footage superimposed when Rhino Doubler sends people into the Makuu Zone (the Earth spinning backwards, a black hole and tides crashing) evokes the imagery of the “into the Makuu Zone” stock footage from the show, albeit without the accompanying dialogue…

Don Horror: Damn you, Gavan. Send him into the Makuu Zone. Axis Shift System, activate!

Narrator: Don Horror can reverse the Earth’s axis and create a Makuu Zone similar to a black hole. Inside this zone, (insert type of opponent) becomes three times more powerful.

The IRL reason for the Makuu Zone is because in traditional Japanese action stories, the enemy attains a more powerful form in time for the final battle, that’s 3 times as powerful. Sentai does the same thing with the giant battles, while Rider does it by having the monster primarily operate in human form prior to said final battle (or of they’re in monster form constantly, transform into a more powerful monster).

As for my noughts on the episode… more next time. This tie-in isn’t over yet.

Ryuji looked like he wanted to quit the Go-Busters and become an engineer that day as Shelly and Geki tried to explain to him that evil is three times more powerful in Makuu Space.

Thank you both so much for the trivia!