KAMEN RIDER OOO EPISODE 10 - “FISTS, EXPERIMENTATIONS, AND A SUPER BIKE”

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FISTS:
We haven’t really seen Eiji lose his cool so far in the series. He’s generally shown to be laid back, occasionally melancholy, and frequently frustrated. (Ankh, for that last one, 1000%.) But we haven’t seen Eiji really lose it on anyone, especially to the point of throwing a punch.

And, y’know, he still doesn’t really hurt anyone; he’s still not that guy. His punch into the wall is just his way of showing Doctor Maki the depth of his misconception about Eiji’s easy-going demeanor. Eiji’s an easy-going guy because he likes people, and he likes spending time with them. Eiji’s upbeat because it makes him happy to get to know people, to bring them into his life. As a result, the only true enemy a guy like that could have is someone for whom life is merely an obstacle to a useful death.

Eiji’s only real enemy could be a guy like Maki.

EXPERIMENTATIONS:
He’s a good one, as far as natural nemeses go. The Greeed exist on an almost metaphorical or psychological level – their role is as unknowable avatars of humanity’s worst impulses. Kougami’s an interesting option for an adversary, but he’s more someone that believes in wondrous possibilities so much that he wants to drag everyone into his bright future with his own two hands; he’s a dangerous zealot, but his goal seems optimistic.

Maki’s a different breed. He’s the inverse of Kougami – where Kougami celebrates birthdays as the hope for something new, Maki thinks of beginnings as less relevant than endings. For Maki, a life is just an unfinished story, and unfinished stories aren’t worth reading. He’s the natural enemy of a guy who won’t stop reaching out to people: a guy who thinks reaching out is robbing lives of significance.

All of that maybe sounds layered and intense, but the performance is a nice balance of foreboding and goddamn ridiculous. Maki’s a cold, unfeeling scientist with a puppet on his arm, and its the only thing Maki makes eye contact with when he talks. As potential archenemies go, he’s a little hard to take seriously. But he’s operating in the right register for this show, and his idiosyncrasies slot in nicely with Benevolent Yet Shady Birthday-Obsessed Industrialist and Ice Cream-Addicted Sneering Bird Man. Maki’s weird, but weird in a way that’s creepier than the other two forces in Eiji’s life that seem to treat human life as fungible.

Kougami has had employees die due to his schemes, but it never feels like the lives are lost intentionally. Ankh has loudly opted to not help people who need it, and argued that some Yummy victims did it to themselves, but he hasn’t yet crossed a line and intentionally endangered someone irrevocably. (I mean, besides Shingo, continuously.) (Unless I’ve forgotten someone? Maybe!) With Maki, he’s a guy that's willing to sacrifice anyone and everyone in order to further his goals, because people dying is inevitable and natural. Sure, maybe not by the hands of shark monsters, but what’s the difference?

AND A SUPER BIKE:
Plus, when he gets all the data he needs, he’s fine with supplying OOO with new Medal System tech to clean up the mess. Like a new Toridevendor!

I admit, I completely forgot about this bike upgrade. When I saw “AND A SUPER BIKE” in the title, I was like, What? Does it fly or something? Was that a thing it could do? After seeing the Candroid-assisted form change, I still have zero recollection of this thing. I can only assume it shows up just a couple times more. (It feels like a Cat Combo bike, and I don’t think we get a ton more Cat Combo stories.) It’s a CG creation, and that means I’m almost immediately checked out on it. It’s fine. The rule with Mezool conclusions seems to be that OOO has to summon a new CG power to defeat the hordes of creatures, and this one’s a Cat Bike.

Knowing that one of the powers of the Toridevendor is that it can better harness the power of the Cat Combo to lessen the strain on Eiji, it actually makes sense that the show debuted the Cat Combo in the previous episode, because the With Bike part is its final form. I don’t love it, ‘cause I don’t love that CG bike, but it makes more sense.

Not really a huge episode for the Greeed (Mezool, Uva, and Gamel never even leave their base, Kazari is totally MIA) or the Yummy victim (he’s an evil mad bomber what bombs at daylight, the end) or even Ankh (a floating hand that says My Actor Was Needed Elsewhere This Week), but a great episode for giving Eiji an opponent that challenges his view of the preciousness of human life.

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Honestly, I like the idea of the bike combining with the Tora Can to give a Latoratah themed alternate form. I kind of wish it had been more of a feature, with each form getting its own variant, similar to how Kabuto’s bike had a Cast Off function, or Den-O having multiple DenLiner carriages for every form.

It would've been neat as a recurring feature, yeah.

The OOO's take of moments like Yuusuke being mad at Jaraji, Kouta being mad at Redyue, Sento being mad at EVOLTOOO, or Ikki being mad at Orteca. Guess it won't be a spoiler anymore to bring about this up; now it's the debut of the main antagonist of OOO. Though for this episode, Maki's rather like a more extreme version of Ankh, someone who doesn't care about the casualties, but is a help to OOO for now, like Ankh as well as Kougami, in him giving OOO the Toride Vendor. Eiji also deals with PTSD, having intense feelings where he feels like he's on the situation where the little girl he befriended got killed by bombings when defusing them, shaking hands while doing so.

And for Ankh not crossing a line, Eiji may play a part on it, in how he's not exactly controlled by Ankh, he can gain an upper hand to him as Ankh depends on him. If not, then Ankh probably would've murdered Hina or being responsible to more deaths of people by preventing Eiji from intervening; I mean Maki doesn't directly murder people either in letting the Yummy attack the researchers. It's not on Ankh, but the external factors preventing damages to take place, people like Kaito/Baron had no bodycounts thanks to Kouta defeating him, but he attempted genocide. The external factor is the heroes' complete victory, or specifically stopping the damage completely rather than mitigating it.

This as well as the previous episode displays the Greeed in a more vulnerable and sympathetic manner in them showing genuine care for each other, or specifically Mezool as their mother figure.

Pretty much just Gamel (Uva's just sort of pissed that Ankh and OOO are getting in the Greeed's way again, I'm not sure he cares about Mezool as more than a teammate) but yeah, there's a culture to the Greeed that helps them be more than just maniacal antagonists or genocidal warlords.

KAMEN RIDER OOO EPISODE 11 - “A TRAVELER, A BUTTERFLY, AND A CELEBRITY”

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A TRAVELER:
This is pretty much what I think of when I think of OOO episodes. This format, this structure. A person is letting their desires run amok, there’s a monster running loose facilitating it, and eventually someone learns a lesson about jealousy/gluttony/wrath/lust/etc. It’s a solid template, even if this episode isn’t its best representation.

Like, we’re just in a Professional Jealousy story, across a couple different threads. Tsukuba is trying to become a famous travel blogger, while Gotou is desperate to prove that a lack of charisma and an extra large rocket launcher can let him surpass OOO. (I don’t… remember Gotou’s performance being this wooden and unconvincing? He’s a pretty bad actor in this episode, never quite letting his semi-reasonable objections to Eiji’s primacy come across as anything more serious than pissy whining.) Both Tsukuba and Gotou chafe against the limits of their skills, hoping for a combination of bad luck for their rivals and good luck for themselves to show the world their capabilities. But they both sort of suck?

Tsukaba’s the harder one to assess, since we a) never really see much of his writing and b) probably couldn’t tell the difference between Good Travel Blogging and Bad Travel Blogging. But I think we’ve all felt a mixture of seething resentment at out contributions going unappreciated, and a desire to have the secret sauce that makes someone else better than us. It’s relatable, his mystification at his own irrelevance.

Gotou, on the other hand, is way way way easier to assess: he’s just a skinny dude trying to fight desire monsters, and he’s 100% going to get his ass kicked. We’ve never seen Gotou be anything greater than a delivery boy for OOO, and that’s not going to change just because he brought a rocket launcher. (Which: he brought a rocket launcher.) There’s a desire in Gotou to not just be a hero, but to save the world. It’s a hilariously high-minded goal, especially in comparison to Eiji’s more grounded hope to just help out if there’s danger. But Gotou’s animating principle is exactly the sort of ridiculous concept that’s prone to overdoing it – where Eiji can keep perspective by protecting people in immediate danger, Gotou always needs to be doing more.

It’s a problem he shares with Tsukuba, how an act isn’t important unless it’s bigger, better, more recognized. Tsukaba enjoyed his life as a traveler, but he let Being The Best Blogger compromise that happiness and endanger others. Gotou’s a solid helper, but his need to outshine OOO, uh, sort of got OOO blown up?

A BUTTERFLY:
The Yummy this time out is one of Uva’s, and it’s a butterfly. (Surprise!) I liked the suit, even if the monster plot was maybe the weakest part of this episode.

It’s not a very interesting sequence of events. It’s the monster going out and assaulting one of Tsukuba’s professional rivals (even if the rivals don’t even know Tsukuba exists), stealing their creativity, pollinating it (?) to Tsukuba, and then repeating it a couple scenes later with some other guy. It’s easy to follow, but sort of boring to think about. OOO only gets there after the Butterfly Yummy has accomplished its goal, and the first person to clock that Tsukuba has been changing is Hina, about two minutes before the cliffhanger. Once the Yummy comes in, OOO just plays catch-up for the rest of the episode, and it’s sort of boring.

The one hiccup is Gamel showing up, but that scene actually doesn’t make a ton of sense? Ankh says that they don’t have time to fight Gamel, tosses Eiji the Core Medals, Eiji loses Mezool’s Core Medals, then Eiji’s like We Don’t Have Time To Fight Gamel, and splits to take care of the Yummy. It’s a scene that only exists so OOO can lose the Core Medals Ankh snagged from Mezool two episodes ago, all without Eiji ever using them or Gamel being involved with this plot. It’s a weird scene, because it requires Eiji to pause for a fight that he doesn’t want to be in just long enough to lose something he never used. It’s weird! It doesn’t make sense!

AND A CELEBRITY:
Beyond maybe referencing all of the fictional celebrity bloggers in this one, and therefore Tsukuba’s jealousy of them, I can’t imagine what else this is in reference to. I mean, other than Tsukuba’s actor appearing in the most glorious Kabuto episodes of all time: The Dark Chef two-parter.

It can’t be anything else!

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This'd be depicted by type of people like KR fanbase as how having a desire is bad, and the ideal way is to become like Eiji, that you have to throw away all your desires, thus you are free from any corruption, and that there's nothing blocking you from helping others because you won't be distracted in going after personal gain or even sacrificing yourself for the greater good. Having desire would be considered as dark trait of humans like their irrationality or biased judgments.

Guess regardless of the quality of his writing, I do find relation to Tsukuba's issues.... including about posting in Tokunation :p. Being less popular, unappreciated, or outshined, isn't necessarily about their quality/capability, but there can be many other factors. Like how most popular media aren't necessarily the best or most perfect/flawless thing, there are many medias that don't reach widespread recognition, but their fans feel those medias are better than the mainstream ones, at least becoming a cult classic. For this episode, Tsukuba's solution via the Yummy is purely to copy said more popular stuff, dunno if the lesson'd be to be yourself and maximize your own appeal.

Goto seems to be the closest to the usual, standoffish secondary Rider trope in OOO, to look down on the lead Rider and his mindset/worldview as naive or irresponsible and viewing himself as the superior candidate for the Rider. Goto hopes he's the one assigned to henshin as OOO, rather than Eiji. Feels that Goto just looks down on Eiji's easy-going and carefree attitude (like Ankh) rather than acting like a trained, hardened rigid professional like him. Eiji'd want to save the world too, if he's capable to, he'd help regardless of the danger scale. Though Goto doesn't intentionally ruin/sabotage Eiji's fight, it's still a flaw of him that results in him accidentally shooting OOO.

Well this greatly shortens the amount of work I put into my feature by about a third, so thanks for that.

Special Guest Alert

Shinnosuke Abe, playing our Yummy victim of the fortnight, aside from the antagonist of the Dark Kitchen arc, was also Kiba?s cousin who his girlfriend was cheating on him with in Faiz?s opening two parter. Outside of Rider, his most notable role is Impactor Logia, the rival from Chouseishin Gransazer.

As for the episode, it?s our first episode by another writer, namely our old hit or miss friend Yonemura. I remember that both Kurona and Fish were surprised this was a Yonemura episode? until the latter brought up the Gotou with a bazooka screenshot and could instantly see it.

I think a topic this episode's circling for Tsukaba is the experiences of travel and work of writing can and should be their own reward; people's perception of you and the associated fame (or lack thereof) shouldn't be the goal when you're expressing yourself.

That explains why this one seems like it's a draft away from being really good! (ESPECIALLY in looping Eiji into Tsukaba's story more.) The Tsukaba idea is well-suited to this show, but it lacks the focus and tight pacing that makes the rest of this series so fun.

It also helps eat up screen time to help make sure the plot fills two full episodes. I like to call that "Mashin Chaser-ing."

I know that we try to avoid covering future plot developments in the discussion, but it's really interesting to see these last few episodes starting to push more development for Gotou. We're getting close to the winter movie and, with it, the standard debut time for the show's secondary Rider in this era. We're starting to get more insights into Gotou and his dissatisfaction with Eiji, Cake Boss, and the whole OOO status quo. It's really hard not to get the sense that we're building up to Gotou... how do I put this vaguely... doing something other than being someone else's assistant for over half the series.

I just wish Gotou felt more deserving of the increased focus? He's such a dismissive jerk, and to Eiji of all people! Like, Ankh, sure, deserved. But Eiji's a genuinely sweet guy who has repeatedly thrown himself into danger; I feel like Gotou could be a little less constantly rude to him?

(Some of that, again, is how charmlessly and drowsy the actor plays his contempt. It's so wooden!)

This punch from Eiji is another one of those primal images from a Rider show I occasionally have where it's just stuck in my brain forever. Not because of how much I remember it from first watching the show, in this case, but specifically because I randomly was rewatching that episode one time, probably not more than a couple years later, and I found it so impactful I was shocked to realize I had ever forgotten it. In context, it's of course saying a lot about Eiji's character and his relationship with Maki and everything, but the context isn't what makes it something I describe using the word "primal". I probably immediately forgot the context again up until doing a full rewatch of the show more years later -- but the raw action itself contrasts so strikingly against Eiji's usual demeanor, not just before this episode but after it, that it's become this sort of symbol in my head reminding me that OOO is a show that always seem to turn out to be deeper than I give it credit for.

Oh, and also, LaToraTah is my fav Combo, by the way. The Cheetah legs, like I already said, are great. The tiger body has those awesome flip-out claws, and the Lion head is just downright majestic between the subtly asymmetrical, natural shape of the mane and the gorgeous blue eyes that pop so well off the yellow and black of the body... not to mention how well the yellow pops off the black. I also respect it for being one of the most budget-friendly Combos in the series, since the super bike is ultimately just an option. Even the super-speed effects are done in a really straightforward undercranking kinda way rather than anything more elaborate like you might see in, say, Kabuto. Oh, and speaking of Kabuto!

I had to go check back and see, but it looks like both of us were "surprised" in the sense that we thought Yonemura did a great job matching Kobayashi's style on the show. The funny thing about that bazooka comment I made is that I made it a little before rewatching Kabuto, because now... like I can *extra* see it? Gotou in this story definitely seems like he's giving off similar vibes to someone like early-series Yaguruma in that show. Driven by ego and jealousy? Trying so desperately to achieve some greater status in life, ignorant to the fact that his biggest obstacle is himself, rather than any of the external things he prefers to direct blame onto?

It's been a while since I've watched these episodes of OOO, but from what I remember and what Die is saying they're like, it's definitely touching on some similar themes to Kabuto. If Yonemura was only going to write two episodes of OOO, this seems like pretty much the perfect story to give to him. (Although, if he was going to write four episodes of OOO...)

The funniest version of this is a brief scene where Gotou runs into an old police buddy (it is incredibly hard for me to think of Gotou having a career that he abandoned to join Kougami because he looks like an underfed teenager) who's like What Are You Up To and Gotou just sort of sneers at the guy for not having the drive and dedication that he has. It's a very unpleasant characteristic! But not a new one for Yonemura!

KAMEN RIDER OOO EPISODE 12 - “EELS, THE WORLD, AND THE GRAVITY COMBO”

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EELS:
It’s very funny to me that this episode opted to begin their title with the brief debut of the new Candroid. The Eel Candroid isn’t really integral to defeating or even really stopping the Yummy – it’s just the new toy. I’d’ve rather the first thing in the title just been New Toy and cut to the chase.

Some of it is that I don’t really care about the Candroids on an entertainment level. I like them just fine on a thematic level – the power of desire packaged and resold – and on an aesthetic level – coins, vending machines, etc. – but I just think they’re sort of hokey on an entertainment level. They exist as the Necessary Role-Play Item for the series, and I just generally don’t think much about those because I am not a Japanese child who wants to pretend to exist in the world of Kamen Rider OOO. That is not a failing of the show! Show does a good job spotlighting the toys for children! But I sort of bounce off of that part, in a way no different than the Gochizo of the current year’s Rider. The Candroids… man, I don’t care.

THE WORLD:
I care about narrative, though, and this episode was stuffed with it.

Of the two main threads from last time, Gotou and Tsukuba, I feel like the Gotou one comes off the best; the most legible and explicable. (Which, if only half of a Yonemura plot is going to land for me, I’d rather it be the half with the guy who’s sticking around for the rest of the series!) Gotou’s story is that he thinks too big, and misses the way his desire overshadows his motivation, leading to ineffectiveness and jealousy.

Gotou wants to save the world, and views anything short of that to be both inefficient and shortsighted. He’s got a big mission, and folks like Eiji who can’t see the value in it are wasting their potential and standing in his way. But in discarding the small, hard work that Eiji’s doing to protect people, Gotou’s forgetting that he wants to save the world specifically to keep those very people safe. Eiji’s inability to see Gotou’s big picture is only because his dedication to helping people right now in the moment doesn’t give him the distance to think bigger. Gotou’s top-down approach was never going to bring results, because you’ve got to put the work in at a base level in order to effect massive change.

Which brings us to Tsukuba, and… I think there’s one twist too many in his story? After last episode’s seething jealousy over being overlooked after years of blogging abroad, this episode drops the bombshell that Tsukuba never went anywhere. (Other than Thailand, I think, because I’m pretty sure Eiji said he ran into him there.) Tsukuba wanted to be famous so he could shove it in the face of the bloggers who looked down on him for wanting to be famous (?), so he faked his entire blog.

It’s a bonkers twist, and it turns this from a neat parallel with Gotou’s story of chafing under a lack of recognition and striving to be in the spotlight, into a story where a massive fraud wanted to get famous despite being a massive fraud. I don’t think that works? At all? It’s got something to say about valuing the result more than the process – same as Gotou – but, like, it makes a lot Tsukuba’s story from last time too pathetic to invest in. I mean, yeah, no shit a book publisher turned you down: your whole blog is made up! Tsukuba isn’t some guy who let his need for the spotlight warp his core values, or turn him into someone he wouldn’t recognize. He’s a serial fabulist whose core desire has been to show up the people who correctly tagged him as a massive phony – this is a guy that never had an animating principle beyond faking it until he made it!

It’s not a twist that helped this story land for me, nor did it feel like it entwined Tsukuba’s arc with Gotou’s. (The opposite!)

AND THE GRAVITY COMBO:
Speaking of landings, it’s SaGoZou!

While I appreciate how this episode specifically called back Gamel’s Yummy from 9/10 as a potential way to ground this Yummy so OOO could finish it off, I think Eiji says it best when Ankh demands Eiji collect the Medal Combo from Gamel: “Don’t make it sound so simple!”

Ankh’s plan/”plan” counts on Gamel randomly showing up alongside Uva, when the show hasn’t shown them working together before – like, what if Mezool came instead? – and then Eiji somehow holding off multiple Greeed and a flying Yummy to quickly extract THREE Core Medals from Gamel. It’s a plan that requires both happenstance and luck in order to succeed, which isn’t a plan so much as it’s a wish. Ankh wished for this to happen, and it did. It’s not the tightest writing I’ve ever seen, is what I’m getting at.

But it’s a great suit, which I feel like I’ll never stop saying about the Combo suits on this show. The silver and black is nothing less than gorgeous, and I love the oversized punchers. The heaviness of the suit’s top half sells the power of it, and the suit actor imbues it with animalistic contours thanks to some typically great posturing and movement. SaGoZou is a terrific suit, even if its deployment is a little half-assed.

Which is sort of this two-parter for me! The details are half-assed, the first part sort of drags, and the Tsukuba twist is unnecessary, but the core narrative about doing the work instead of looking to the result is pretty pretty great. (I especially love how collaborative and gracious Eiji is in this episode to multiple people who think living his life would make them happy. Eiji has been through some terrible stuff, and he never throws that in anyone’s face. He just does the job!) Solid two-parter, despite itself at times.

Just like Gotou!

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So by random chance, I read some behind the scenes information about two thirds of this episode’s subjects.

The Eel Can was originally a Cobra Can, before they changed to something that had a Core Medal upcoming/released (I know nothing about what OOO’s release schedule for toys was, but I assume it was somewhat like how modern shows bring the toy out within two weeks of its show debut), which necessitated a slight redesign.

And SaGoZou was originally supposed to be “ZouGoSai”, but they swapped the rhino and elephant around because the former was easier to translate into an OOO helmet design.

Good thing they did! It's a great helmet design!

Good choice. Ankh is a fitting name and I like how the Egyptian derivation emphasizes how he's an outcast to the other Greeeds.

Yui actually did stuff like this several times to knock sense in to her friends. Breaking glass in Episode 3 led to the recurring joke of Ren putting Shinji in more and more debt and later she slapped Ren at the end of Asakura's big highway chase scene.

Satoneko is the best for sure!

OOO's merchandise has a lot of focus on Medals, so I appreciate Ridevendor getting a Candroid-assisted upgrade instead.

Yep, we're totally on the same wavelength here. I like cats and I like super speed, so it's giving me everything I want.

Geez, nobody's mentioned the official romanization yet though. It's Latorartar BTW.

Honestly, who would've imagined the legs being a rhino's distinctive feature anyway? It has to be the head!

Ha ha, that's what I called that gif! Great minds!

With certain exceptions, people who'd help anyone regardless of who it is including if it'd risk their life, should automatically want to save the world, if the situation demands it, and if they're capable of it. Eiji focuses on right now in the moment is him healing a part of the world, the difference is just the threat level in how much they'd affect the world. Goto seems to have his secondary-like issues, like him refusing to take responsibility for firing OOO, solved now (quick), in him actually contributing what he can to save the world in him genuinely helping OOO.

Yeah I feel the twist was weird and sudden too.... but this seems to be the advantage of MOTW-based shows, that because people seem to overlook the MOTW plots/stuff, these type of flaw wouldn't be brought up when discussing OOO. Him being a fraud does still run the theme, in how Tsukuba wants to prove his critics wrong, yet he has never done anything to actually prove them wrong (including his fraud accomplishments), so he should own up about him really being wrong and actually take action. At first, Eiji and Hina just thinks their friend was possessed, but it's really the dark side of him (despite him not agreeing on harming others), which seems hidden because of his carefree nature earlier.

Sounds rather like above, like Goto or Tsukuba, they want something, but hasn't done something to make them happen. So does Ankh who wants these core medals, and Ankh doesn't make it happen directly by himself. Just OOO happening to get all 3 core medals at once despite being overwhelmed by 3 enemies at once. Obviously, this one wouldn't be touched upon by the story. Then again, for some people, everything about the heroes' success in these shows are always happenstances and luck (plot armor).

True, but this one's specifically about splashing them with water.

It's also... like Saving The World is sort of insane thing to say, and it's also a task that's almost impossible to achieve, What would that even look like? How could you even do that? What Eiji's doing is addressing the immediate problem, and letting that trickle up into being a larger good. It's a very empathetic goal -- just helping people -- rather than a goal like Fame or Saving The World that never quite reaches a resolution.

KAMEN RIDER OOO EPISODE 13 - “A SIAMESE CAT, STRESS, AND A GENIUS SURGEON”

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A SIAMESE CAT:
Let’s not talk about this episode’s Yummy design, because I hate it. (Why does this Genius Surgeon Yummy need to be dressed up in lingerie?! It’s a terrible design that doesn’t really suit the narrative!)

Instead, let’s talk about Kazari.

I like that Kazari is already starting to put a plan into place that, even if it doesn’t immediately secure his Core Medals, at least gets him the passive income-equivalent of earning Cell Medals. He’s got his Yummy out there plumping itself up on desire and metabolizing that into Cell Medals, which is Plan A. But if the Yummy gets defeated by OOO, he’ll just move on to Plan B: taking the 60% of the defeated Yummy’s Cell Medals that OOO will pass along to Kougami, which Kougami will pass along to Maki, which Maki will pass along to Kazari. It’s a cunning yet lazy plan, which is the perfect one to come from the Cat Greeed.

Meanwhile, the other (lazy) Greed are starting to realize that Kazari’s schemes in the human world are putting him far ahead of their meandering lair-based plots, so they’ll need to follow Kazari and Ankh’s lead and start leveraging human society and connections to speed up their regeneration.

STRESS:
Ha ha, but just ask Ankh how that’s going!

We’ve landed on something close to a status quo – any other show would lock this in for a series, with OOO we might get a few episodes – so it’s time to see how this whole “living at Cous Coussier and letting Chiyoko think Ankh needs socialization” thing is going. It’s not going great for Ankh! He’s a Greeed, so he’s a lazy piece of work that assumes all of humanity exists to serve him, which means that having to choke down Chiyoko’s (very well-meaning) attention while also being tethered to a human form that needs constant care and is overseen by a freakishly-strong sibling… it’s not going real good for our favorite avian asshole. He lacks humility, and this is the most humbling situation he’s ever been in.

AND A GENIUS SURGEON:
Just like our Yummy victim of the week, Doctor Tamura!

I don’t get this story, for the most part. I mean, I get what it’s about – thinking too much of your own abilities is a great way of driving yourself crazy, hurting others, and keeping you from getting what you want. (See also: Ankh and Gotou.) But the initial medical conflict in this episode, that comes back up to kick off our Yummy climax… what?

Like, why is the hospital keeping Tamura from doing surgeries in the first place? We’re told that she’s a genius surgeon, these are her patients, she’s never shown to be a liability in the operating theater, but the closest we’re ever given to why she hasn’t operated on anyone in a month (A MONTH!) is that she needs to be humbled because she's too cocky. And, yeah, that’s this episode’s whole thing, but everyone at the hospital is such a condescending prick about it (ALL DUDES!), and people’s lives are probably at stake here. Why in the world are they keeping her around if she’s going to get basically suspended for being passionate about her job? (Her first meeting with the main boss, she’s completely blown off while her dipshit colleague smirks over her upbraiding!) Like, for sure, it is not cool to do a bunch of surgeries at night all by yourself with zero authorization, but the impetus of this plot is that a bunch of dudes are trying to put a female surgeon in her place. I do not love the optics on this one!!!

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So I can’t get into a lot of details until the second part, but I think if someone held a gun to my head and asked for my favourite episodes/storylines from every series (Ryuki and GAVV might be hard, but I’m sure did come up with something), this would be my strong contender for this series, mostly because I like the Yummy’s design (primarily for not going for a more stereotypically ferocious feline and just settling for a simple cat look) and the gag of Ankh being taken to a hospital. Also the Birth Driver debuts, but that’s neither here nor there (they don’t even name it, I think)

Also, the return of this section of the feature.

Rider-lert

Our head doctor for this two-parter is played by one Akira Hamada. While Heisei fans might know him for having his cane broken in a scene that went memetic, fans of Showa Rider will know him as Titan, the villain for Kamen Rider Stronger’s first third (along with voicing his monster forms, One-eye Titan and Hundred-eye Titan). Notably, his appearance here is his one Rider role that is not a) a villain, b) a regular role and c) on TV Trope’s page for community agreed “Complete Monsters” (ie. The character is utterly evil, depraved and unsympathetic to a greater degree than other villains in the setting) for Kamen Rider

I feel wanting to save the world is a common trait in the franchise, or at least most of the main Riders. The fanbase also seem to view those main Riders as those who wants to save the world (and nothing else, character wise, for some). Maybe saving the world is about defeating something that threatens the entire world (those who can/want destroy the world), and by defeating them, the world won't be destroyed by them, thus is saved.

Yeah lately, only Kazari is the Yummy who's in league with Maki. So the difference is noted by the other Yummies. Then again, Maki might not be that trustworthy to work with, which I find suspicious when he brings up his promise and that Kazari expects Maki to fulfill that, which may be also a downfall for the Yummy who works with him. Kougami unwittingly makes the situation seemingly heads I win tails you lose as regardless of the outcome, a Yummy (who knows their machination) would benefit from either.

Other than still being overseen, it seems Hina has been more tolerant of Ankh, seemingly also accepting Ankh's baby steps to be more civil. Hina only carries Ankh away in this episode as it's something necessary, Ankh is scaring the children in the hospital, and she tried to reason with Ankh from fighting Goto.

This is a 2 parter, so yeah it might be brought up in the next episode, but yeah I don't understand why the hospital forbids Tamura to perform surgery. I thought it's done to give other surgeons a chance to be better and increase the number of competent surgeons in the hospital other than Tamura, but the director is just overbearing boss with authoritarian way of leading. I don't know if this is an intentional misogynistic stuff though just because the one on predicament happens to be female.

I don't know, this might get a vote from me after the first part!

I would maybe push back on this? Most main Riders (the Heisei/Reiwa ones, anyway) tend to be more focused on the little ways you can change the world for the better, like what Eiji's been doing over the past dozen episodes. The goals are usually Protecting Journeys and Protecting Smiles and Making Friends and Making Positive Changes In Your Life, you know? Sure, a Rider's going to step up during an apocalypse, but that's not their everyday goal. If anything, the misguided Secondary Riders are usually the ones that come in with impossibly high-minded goals and need to learn empathy and humility from the main Rider, leading to an embrace of the main Rider's worldview. Which, y'know, Gotou...

KAMEN RIDER OOO EPISODE 14 - “PRIDE, SURGERY, AND SECRETS”

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ONII-CHAN:
We’ve got three characters dealing with Pride this week – five, if you count the two cats! – and I don’t know that I loved any particular outcome.

Gotou comes out the best, weirdly enough. (I’m mostly bummed we didn’t get to see him filling in more for Satonaka. Everything with the Kougami Foundation was comedy gold this story! The cutaway to her enjoying spicy food is one of my favorite Kamen Rider things of all-time!) It’s relatively brief, but I liked how the show makes a solid case for Kougami’s advice, that Gotou’s pride is getting in the way of his goals, by mostly just pointing out that Gotou’s inability to stay on the same page as everyone else is only getting him knocked out by Ankh and playing second fiddle to a vagabond. But then he’s like, No, It’s The Rest Of The Cast Who Are Wrong, and just rolls up to shoot a shotgun around the heroes like nothing ever happened. It’s a commitment to Gotou’s current prickly irrelevance that I actually sort of love.

Ankh’s story… I mean, what’s even going on here? His departure from Shingo doesn’t really help him in any clear way – it only puts him at risk of being mauled by an adorable corgi while the non-stop cry of ONII-CHAN acts as the only discernible soundtrack to this episode. (Hina probably said it an infinite amount of times, at a minimum. I can still hear her saying it. I will always hear her saying it.) It’s mostly just Ankh throwing a tantrum, and I can’t articulate anything that changed in the core dynamic to bring him back. Like, Eiji begged Ankh to come back, but I feel like he’s done that before? It’s weird. It all seems both charmingly minor – I do actually like that the whole story is just Ankh being a pissy little baby about nothing in particular – and also not really about much that ties into the two-parter. It’s just Ankh being Ankh, but at a slighter higher volume?

ONII-CHAN:
Which just leaves Doctor Tamura, and, man, I did not like this plot!

The whole thing ends up being about her dad/boss trying to get her to feel the fear of losing a patient, in order to make her care more about saving them. This is a vaguely good thing – I like empathy! But, man, I do not think it’s good for a surgeon to be scared that she’s going to fail and kill her patient! (The hospital specifically has rules against family members operating on each other, which tells me that an emotional distance between doctor and patient is sort of considered a good thing?) We never got a sense of Tamura being sloppy or overconfident before, either. The two-parter starts with us being told a) she’s incredibly good at being a surgeon, b) she’s very happy being a surgeon, and c) she’s gotten some acclaim for being a good surgeon. I feel like all of that is good enough for a surgeon? I don’t think she needs to be scared she’ll fail and kill someone? I feel like that sort of terror would actually being counterproductive in a surgeon?

It’s super weird. I don’t think the show did any work making her seem like she was haphazard with her patients’ lives pre-Yummy, and I don’t think Benching Her Indefinitely was proving any sort of point about internalizing the fear of losing a patient. (Boss Dad is right that this is all his fault! Bad boss! Bad dad!) It’s a lesson that’s super useful in general, and worth telling on a show about people letting their desires blind them to their weaknesses, but none of the setup for this two-parter really establishes what this conclusion is trying to tell us. It’s like the heartwarming ending was supposed to be attached to a completely different previous episode.

ONII-CHAN:
Meanwhile, so many things are happening in secret!

As Ankh is dealing with Kazari and his Yummy, the rest of the Greeed have just, like, been effectively farming Cell Medals completely undetected. I like that they aren’t just waiting for their turn in the story to come around, you know? Uva distracted Ankh and Kazari (minimally, but still) while Mezool spawned Yummies off of some rich guy’s embezzlement. It’s not a flashy plot, which is why it’s the fourth-string one, but I like that it lets the other villains move forward independent of the heroes. Mezool and the gang didn’t take a week off just ‘cause it was Kazari’s turn!

And then there’s our end-of-episode stinger, teasing the imminent -slash- currently in theaters debut of Kamen Rider Birth. Feels a little gratuitous to just toss it in at the very end when we didn’t spend any other time this episode with Doctor Maki, but hey! We’ve got a goddamn movie and Secondary to promote! Don’t let a little thing like pride in storytelling get in the way of your desire to set up Q2!

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Yeah, the family reveal between Titanba and daughter is why this isn’t a definite favourite. I don’t think it was foreshadowed even in the episode. And like I said, the reason it was in the running is due to the monster design, so it probably didn’t leave that much of an impact otherwise.

I do feel that Tamura is the kind who prioritizes maintaining her reputation and record as a surgeon, rather than saving lives because it's the right thing to do, and it's the problem the director brought up about her. I felt she was being smug and throwing her weight and superiority around to others before in why she insists on doing it. It's never about her skill, it's the opposite about her being potentially sloppy. It can be likely that Tamura would for example, refuse to perform a surgeon if it's something she doesn't feel confident for, so she can maintain her acclaim, rather like Kitaoka's lawyer verdict in Ryuki before, but she's forced to face her fear of mistake/failure, as it's her dad that needs it in this case. But I do think the dad is at fault, him just forcing Tamura to follow his orders and dismissing her completely obviously won't help her problems (which I admit, it'd be problematic for a doctor to have no empathy), just contrived miscommunication stuff.

It's not foreshadowed, but it's also not not foreshadowed. There isn't really anything in the previous episode that precludes the two of them being related. It's just a sort of dumb twist.

This is all definitely possible. The problem is, none of it is shown at any point pre-Yummy. The first thing we're shown is her getting ready to operate and being told No. The next thing we're shown is her fighting for the chance to operate on her own patients, and being told No. I'd be way more into this story if we'd spent any time pre-Yummy showing Tamura to be reckless, egotistical, selfish, etc. It's just a bunch of dudes telling her she thinks too highly of hereself, though?

originally posted on December 4th, 2021, as part of “Kamen Rider Die rewatches Legend Rider projects (and more!)”

KAMEN RIDER X KAMEN RIDER OOO & W FEAT. SKULL: MOVIE WAR CORE

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Not my favorite movie. I didn’t really love it the first time around, and I don’t love it now. The thing is, my opinion on the two sections/portions of this film – OOO and W – have sort of completely flipped around?

I really disliked the W portion on this viewing. Like, a lot. Setting aside the incredibly weird Daddy Issue stuff of having Akiko’s actress play Melissa, a woman who is in love with Skull (HER DAD), it’s a story that traffics in one of my least-favorite Kamen Rider tropes: Heroic Abandonment.

Skull’s portrayed as a stoic, suffering hero. He’s betrayed by his closest friend, called a monster by a woman he gave up everything to save, and unable to ever touch his daughter again. It’s a story all about the lengths Kamen Riders have to go to in order to protect the people they love, even if it means they have to cut those people out of their lives.

It’s horseshit. Even before he became Kamen Rider Skull, Sokichi wasn’t answering his daughter’s phone calls. (He totally forgot about her birthday!) He lives in a completely different city for reasons that aren’t established in this film, and I don’t recall from the series. He’s making a choice to ignore his responsibilities as a parent, way before he’s forced to abandon his daughter for her own safety.

(Which, two things. The No-Touching Spider in his body will only kill Akiko if he touches her. He could still, like, see her. Or call her. Like everything else in their screwed-up family, it 100% feels like Sokichi is looking for any excuse to bail on his parental commitment. The other thing… like, killing Matsu doesn’t kill the spiders? It dissolves the webbing immediately, but it doesn’t defuse the time bombs infecting everyone in the city? What… what did Sokichi even accomplish by killing Matsu, then? Everyone who didn’t already blow up is forced into a life of misery? This is what we’re calling a victory now?)

This should be a story about sacrifice and duty, but everything in it reads like a story about deadbeat dads with poor work/life balance. Which, honestly, fine. I don’t need my Kamen Riders to be completely logical and emotionally healthy. I like Faiz, you know? But there’s basically no judgment on Sokichi’s actions in this movie. Akiko is furious about the ways her life has been negatively impacted due to Kamen Riders failing her as friends, family, and lovers, but the moral at the end is just Her Suffering Is A Small Price To Pay For Justice. It’s an entire story where Akiko’s theatrical-but-honest emotional turmoil is brushed aside in the face A Man’s Silent Suffering. Whatever.

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The even more galling failure of the W portion is that the OOO portion is specifically refuting that worldview. The W portion is about how Kamen Riders are solely focused on helping people, even if they have to give up on happiness as a result. But the OOO portion is about how hollow and unfulfilling it is to solely dedicate yourself to anything! The OOO portion – which I originally thought was laughably bizarre and generally irrelevant – pretty much ended up being the only part of this story I liked.

It's Inoue, which was nice. Inoue Forever and all of that. (There's a bit where Eiji says that Nobu is still Nobu, which feels like a secret message between me and Inoue.) It does the Eternal thing of crafting a villain that reflects/inverts our hero’s shortcomings, but turned up to Evil. Nobunaga, a man whose name autocompletes with ‘s Ambition, is someone who is consumed by his need to attain, to control. He’s everything Eiji isn’t. Nobunaga sees the world around him as both a birthright and a banquet, all of it waiting for him to claim it.

But in seeing the world that way, he misses the point of it all. Nobunaga can’t understand how Eiji can find joy in a life without taking. What Eiji points out to him is that the world exists outside of the ambitions of men. The sky is blue. Art is created. It doesn’t need people to control it, because it doesn’t bow to that control.

It’s a pretty basic Stop To Smell The Roses moral, and it could probably only work when applied to the story of Oda Nobunaga. (It’s a bit like only being able to land a simplistic message like Don’t Bite People in a story with Dracula.) But I think it worked here due to its own bonkers commitment to the story of a cloned warlord who used his heretofore unrevealed healing powers to undo the damage he caused a woman he was stalking, as well as the proximity to a much less appealing story in Skull’s celebrated abandonment of his daughter.

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But at least Kamen Rider Birth shows up!

I like Birth okay, but its introduction here is like nearly every other Fan Service thing in this story: missing the point entirely.

It’s just the Birth suit, not either of the Birth characters. Date isn’t in this movie at all, and Goto’s turn as Birth is both noncanonical (pretty sure the series doesn’t let him be Birth for a good long while) and robbed of its significance. There’s a really great arc in the series about Goto becoming Birth, but here it just happens off-camera. Same thing with Tajador; awesome suit, fun to see it kick ass, but it’s almost unforgivable that it’s introduced with Ankh just showing up with the medals.

And, man, I said how great it was that A To Z managed to find time for its entire TV series cast, so here’s a movie that Ankh’s human form is in for about forty-five seconds, and the full cast of W is almost entirely sidelined for a prequel story. It’s a bummer. It’s a movie celebrating two TV shows, and it’s compromised versions of both.

Plus, not super crazy about the concluding section. The villain at the end, Kamen Rider Core, doesn’t make much sense, or have a defensible viewpoint. It’s just a monster that hates Kamen Riders, and thinks they make everything worse, all so Akiko can feel bad about holding the men in her life responsible for abandoning her. He’s a giant flaming Ghost Kamen Rider, and defeating him isn’t clever or anything. It’s just new power-ups and Early-Bird suit debuts. I had honestly completely forgotten about him, and now I know why.

Yeah, man, did not dig this one! The OOO stuff is good enough, but it sucks to not really have any Eiji/Ankh scenes. (I mean, they literally never share a frame, so I’m just going to assume that Ankh’s couple scenes were filmed separately from the rest of the cast.) The W stuff features my least-favorite W plot – Akiko and Terui’s totally unconvincing romance – and one of my all-time least-favorite Kamen Rider tropes. It’s okay to say that Sokichi was a good Kamen Rider but a shitty dad! That would’ve made the movie so much better! Instead, we get a middle section that exposes the lie the first part is telling, and then a third part that ignores the exposure.

Not one I liked rewatching!

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---

OOOH MY GOD NOT AGAIN

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I can’t believe I watched this movie again.

It continues to be a weird chore, and yet every time I watch it it’s a weird chore in subtly different ways. I skipped the W stuff this time, since I watched that part last year, leaving what I thought would be the terrific OOO installment and the historically terrible Core finale. That turned out not to be so much the case?

(The Core stuff was still abysmal, in case you were worried that I’d suddenly come around in it.)

While I recall really enjoying the OOO installment a few years back, and I still like it now, I sort of hadn’t realized that its successes are all thematic, and its deficiencies are in the tonal. Like, in my initial write-up, I glossed over the fact that Ankh barely appears in this story. (Miura is literally never on screen at the same time as Watanabe or any other name character in the film. It’s all the Ankh hand puppet, which also barely shows up. There’s one shot of Ankh’s legs in the same shot as Eiji, but we never see Ankh’s face in the frame, so it’s probably a double. At least it’s the right team-up for that!) That’s kind of a huge deal! It’s not really an OOO story if it’s just Eiji and Hina, at least in all the ways people love Kamen Rider OOO as a TV show. You need that constant Eiji/Ankh chatter during a fight to give it that relentless energy of the OOO experience. Without that, it feels strangely empty.

What you get instead of that non-stop excitement is a slower, sadder story of the ways grasping, bottomless ambition can rob you of the ability to enjoy the world that you’re trying to control. You get these treasures back, and you lock them away. You care about someone, but can’t do anything more than control them. It’s tragic, and sort of beautiful, but it never quite feels like a proper OOO story in the telling. (I mean: Inoue. There’s your answer.)

I wonder how much of this was intentional – Inoue just being like I Don’t Want To Write For The Asshole Bird Guy, which, now that I see it, feels impossible – versus a victim of scheduling. It’s a movie that feels as weirdly incomplete and shambling as Kamen Rider Core, with huge chunks missing as the film plows along anyway. (Why were the Greeed hanging out in the Toku Caves?!) The OOO contribution to the finale of the film feels infuriatingly haphazard, never feeling looped in to the larger W story of Kamen Rider heroism that it’s trying to pay off, nor saying anything of value about the OOO perspective. Eiji’s just there as the Other Guy, the end. The Tajador stuff is still criminally undercooked, which you just can’t do with poultry. It’s all sloppy, and I kind of stopped caring why.

Please, Kouta Kazuraba in Fruit Heaven, let this be the last time I watch this dumb movie.

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I think you might've immediately contradicted yourself here? In the context of the complete two-parter, surely the actual meaning of this dialogue is more clear than it might've been when you were watching 13?

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Without going back to watch the episodes in full myself, I can't really get too deep into any counterargument, so I'll probably leave it at this, but -- did Tamura ever directly express concern for the well-being of "her" patients anywhere in the story? Because if her only real concern the whole time was just whether or not she'd be holding a scalpel, the basics of the narrative might check out more than you're giving them credit for.

I thought about that scene before, but it's hard for me to take the side of her dad/boss here. (Jesus, there are probably rules about this, too!) For the episode's only real pre-Yummy pushback on her attitude, it just reads to me more as a woman whose professional career and ability to save lives is being stymied for no clear reason. I feel like her saying "my patients" shows more concern for them than her dad/boss clarifying that they're the hospital's patients, you know? She's the better surgeon, and more likely to save them, and her boss/dad is handing those patients -- that she's been working with, presumably -- over to completely different doctors.

And, like, I don't want to fight you on this, because I think what you're saying is what the episode thinks it's saying. I just don't think it's really in the text of the first part the way the second part assumes.

The OOO portion of the movie is always bizarre as it’s so abundantly clear that Inoue is writing based on an earlier draft of the series what with Eiji’s part time job schtick and Ankh being shady as all shit. As that is one pf the major things about OOO it got rewritten alot behind the scenes for a variety of reasons. From the natural chemistry between Eiji and Ankh’s actors changing the plans for the show, to the same set of natural disaters that lead to Gokaiger get back a lot more veteran actors than they intended causing OOO to get considerably softened in it’s ending arcs

I don't know that I had a huge problem with this film's conceit of Eiji working a million part time jobs. Between Cous Coussier being closed while Chiyoko is at Carnivale, and Eiji suddenly giving a bunch of money to strangers, I think it works that he's picking up a bunch of short-term work.

Yeah, I've always gotten the vibes that this movie was written off of an outdated show bible that didn't reflect how the show would eventually evolve. Ending on a stinger of Gotou as Birth is definitely a sign of this.

I don't know the full behind the scenes story, but I remember that there were a lot of rumored plot developments while OOO was airing that ended up not coming to pass. It's always given me the sense - accurate or not - that OOO was really being made up on the fly.

The theme song has made this very clear: Anything Goes!

Hey, if it works it works.

Oh yeah I completely forgot about Giru/Gill being just a 6th standard Greeed that the others just know about.

So this was the first proper OOO related thing I watched, so I have definite soft spot for this one. Mostly because I didn’t have reference for the discrepancies with the tv show.

As for why those discrepancies happened, the script was written when the only available material from the show was a half-written first draft of the first episode, with Inoue being told about later developments that were intended to have been implemented by the point the movie came out (two new combos, the Kougami Foundation making its own Rider, Dr. Maki being a creepy amoral scientist and Eiji and Hina hanging out at a foreign themed restaurant). So if anything, it’s amazing the finished product has much resemblance to the finished show.

As for casting trivia, the guy playing Nobunaga doesn’t have any prior roles to this (we’re not on the train for his other Tokusatsu villain role), but he retired in 2016, citing his lack of fame and talent as an actor.

But I can talk about these two cameos.

Sentai-lert

We have Teruaki Ogawa, of Kakuranger and Gingaman fame playing an office worker at the company Nobunaga finds work at, but we also have the later Yuka Motohashi of Carranger fame in this movie (though as who, I’m not sure)

Yeah, the Greeed are just like Classic Gil midway through the movie, and that's all we get.

That was sort of my experience a few years back? Rewatching it outside of an OOO rewatch, I felt like it was an incredibly faithful OOO experience, since it seemed like it was at least talking about the correct stuff thematically. Watching it between Episode 14 and 15, it feels a lot jankier, because you can see all of the missing elements with nothing else in their place.

This is probably the best way to watch this one.