Yeah, this one was definitely weird. I liked it, but it feels really out of place. The show just went in hard on its lore in the last few episodes with the Natives, the Red Shoe System, and some big reveals about Hiyori. And the follow up is something that feels like a complete throwaway Monster of the Fortnight story. There are some attempts at nodding to the larger story, but it feels like a major halt in the show's momentum. Even the first appearance of Hyper Kabuto's sword doesn't feel like a big event since it just appears out of nowhere with no explanation, Kiva style.

It is really fun, though. In some ways it feels very Showa with the whole school haunted by monsters and the Riders investigating it. There are some really nice shots that help build the horror element, including that great bit at the beginning with the baseball team. Keiko's a really engaging guest character, too, and I like how the show develops her character.

It's a really funny episode, too. Tsurugi's presence is incredibly forced and nonsensical, even by his own standards, but goddamn if he doesn't continue to be hilarious. I'm not sure what part I liked the most: the running gag of Jiiya getting dragged out of the classroom, the absurd response to the math question, or Tsurugi's delightful misinterpretation of his punishment as some kind of reward. So many good comedic bits in this one.

So, small piece of trivia I discovered when looking up the cast for this episode: Keiko's actress also appeared on Fourze as one of its teens in trouble, too. She was the photographer who didn't want to graduate because she liked high school so much.

No joke, I legitimately LOVED how Hyper Kabuto's sword shows up. The Worm Widowettes are mocking Kabuto for needing Hyper Clock Up to win fights, so Kabuto's just like Eff You Here's A Sword From The Sun Now What Are You Gonna Say. It's like he uses his new toyetic weapon as a comeback to shut up some heckling adversaries, and I love that? That feels like an intensely Tendou move.

One of the small choices the episode makes is to not dwell on Tsurugi's crush/obsession with Misaki during the school scenes, and I am incredibly grateful for that. That part of Tsurugi's character was the most (only?) cringe-inducing part, so I'm totally okay with the show letting it stay relatively unaddressed in the future. Him being all flirty for one second and her shutting him down with a look, and that only happening every six episodes, that's my limit.

Otherwise, yeah, A+ episode for Tsurugi insanity. You will hate me for saying this, but it reminded me a ton of the first appearance of Kiriya on Hibiki, and that made me happy.

I won’t have much to say about this storyline until you get to the concluding part.

And like Switchblade said, Keiko’s actress, Kasumi Suzuki, did go on to appear as the Coma Zodiarts in Fourze (the one where, if you ask me, they weren’t even trying to make their identity a mystery). But prior to that, she portrayed the villainess Rije in “that claw-footed Sentai you can’t remember the name of”.

https://i.imgur.com/fa7Rcqq.png

I vividly remember this fence.

Like, I don't know how true this is for other people, but the weirdest things get lodged in my long-term memory sometimes. Little associations that become inextricably linked with some feeling or event. I have a special fondness for the Liar Dopant episodes of Double because I can still smell the pleasant summer breeze coming in through the window I had open when I was originally watching them. That sort of thing – where you're not even sure what you remember happened that way (was it even those episodes?), but you remember it all the same.

The thing I associate this fence with is how entirely checked out I was on Kabuto in its later stages. I think I let these two episodes dominate a lot of my memory of the show in the long run, which is hopefully a huge mistake on my part, because this specific episode honestly was exactly how I remembered it, and that's not exactly a good thing.

First off, I mean, it was honestly sort of validating to find out how important that fence is. That school rooftop setting sees a ton of use in this first part alone, and since these are Nagaishi episodes, you'd better believe he's in love with prominently displaying that fence to stress it as the unique defining feature of that location. The other positive thing I remember about this episode is Tsurugi being the only character I even remotely care about, and that held just as true. He is beyond cute, and his puppy-like enthusiasm is impossible not to respond to in kind. This episode bores me, by and large, but not when he's on-screen. Never when he's on-screen.

Beyond that, though, there's a very generic, pretty low-stakes monster mystery plot that, honestly, I don't hate as a concept. As a huge fan of both Ghost and Wizard, I'm actually quite into the idea of a Rider show that can still make the time to do some fun weekly adventure stuff late into the run. It's nice to have some room to breathe, at least occasionally. One of my favorite bits in here is even just the classic Tendou/Juka scene at the start; a comforting return to the status quo after Kageyama and Renge were tearing that house up earlier. But like Die says, the emotional substance here is a little sparse, and as I'm about to say, everything surrounding it is full of things I remember not liking about this stretch of Kabuto.

I mean, while I don't want to bang on about this forever (I mean, I definitely do, but that's not the point), I definitely would've been way more invested in whatever weird filler plot the show wants to do if it involved Hiyori. But it obviously can't do that right now, and her absence is one of those things that symbolizes how Kabuto has sort of entered a new era by this point, with many things starting to fall by the wayside. The old guard of supporting Riders are largely downplayed in favor of the Hoppers, characters I've established don't rub me the right way, which is why I cling so much to Tsurugi's continued presence. On a pure mechanical level, as well, their lack of Masked Forms is a sign of how the series has stopped caring about one of its defining features – Clock Up. There's a bit in the middle were Kabuto and Gatack ride in on their bikes, already in Rider Form, and the monster gets away by running fast.

It takes a lot to make me not happy to see bike action, but that'll do it. It's a scene that belongs in Blade more than it does Kabuto, and Tendou taking a dare not to even use Hyper Form's entire defining feature at the end rubbed some serious salt in that wound. I do not like the Perfect Zecter, or its introduction. It's a less clever rehash of how Tendou got the Hyper Zecter, and it feels more like a parody of him as a result. I feel like people who hate Tendou probably think scenes like this are how he was always written, when the show often handles him with so much more grace than summoning a sword from the sky to show off.

While there's a second half to this story left, this episode, at the end of the day, didn't do anything to convince me I was exaggerating its flaws in retrospect. It's not a total misfire, don't get me wrong; I wasn't sitting there waiting for it to be over, and it has its fun moments, but on this rewatch, I've repeatedly been surprised by how much better Kabuto holds up than I thought it would, and that wasn't the case here.

Oof, didn't realize that the HBV discussion also involves ep. 36...

Of course, yeah it's good to display disagreements to show that bonds can't be easily broken, that you should accept and tolerate the other's differences, but especially when it's done to check out someone's wrongness, which I'd disapprove if a friendship between certain person if they give free pass towards their missteps (but it still depends heavily, like if this is intentional in-universe due to the character being morally ambiguous), especially if the story pulls a protagonist centered morality; expecting you to do the same because they're protagonists. Though as this involves Tendou means this would lead into frenemy interactions (again not complaining), but I'd like to not make every disagreements lead to heated arguments. Every show probably yeah had one of the protagonists going bad, though it depends on the morality of those getting inflicted by this. Traditional heroes like Kenzaki in Blade or Emu in Ex-Aid would go for the possessed part (Genius Gamer M), because he should not perform those acts willingly, while anti-heroes like Makoto in early Ghost or Tendou here would have smaller qualms of getting their hands dirty to get the job done, but it's not always like that.

Also here, Tendou shows defiance to Mishima directly, controlling ZECT members in Misaki and Renge, and talk about how organization doesn't matter to him. Mishima sees Tendou highly, considering him first-rate human, so probably his response to him afterwards isn't like what he did to Kagami, Misaki, Kageyama, Renge, etc?

Ego-filled person is the one that wouldn't apologize, so obviously that would be weird for Kagami, to them, apologizing means you're lowering your level beneath those people. Though then..if Kabuto got a Perfect Zecter (the sword for Hyper Form) in ep. 37, then... stealing Zecter is really meaningful towards that, and this could negate his apology. But well, Hiyori is also a Native, so the argument applied to her here would be similar to Daigo. Also, Tsurugi intentionally attacked Daigo, with his complete vendetta to Worms, after declaring him as a friend due to him being Kagami's "friend"! (now, time to repair his relationship with Tendou then?? Considering he's the older brother of the girl who gave him takoyaki, and someone Kagami consider a friend). And regarding Zecters and Natives, this is also uncovered yet. Though it seems that, from what I catch at first, hearing the name Souji Kusakabe triggers Tendou and sets him berserk, before the Zecter explanation.

Also, for the info Tachikawa gives in this episode, that is the answer of why Tendou's parents are already on Earth before the meteorite. The Worm that impersonated Kusakabe parents are Natives too. Otherwise Tachikawa is the good monster for this series, like Shima of Blade or Cubi of Ghost, he had peaceful nature, uses his power only to defend the ones around him. He works at a nursery school and loves playing with the kids. Daigo saw a mother and her child being threatened by Worm and changed to his Native form and attacked the other Worms, letting the mother and child escape. And he's the male that has to be protected by other people!

Don't really understand their purpose to attack Tendou and Kagami here. Otherwise, this is the unealthy relationship yeah, the kind that should be avoided, the kind of friends that drags you down (of course Kageyama would submit to that, being actually even worse than Yaguruma), and one of that reason can be that them being miserable, so they try to drag others down to their level. Their walk, especially Kageyama's sneer seems zombie-like to me lmao. Probably that actually fits their character here of being "dead inside" for their nihilistic perspection of life (hell, darkness, suffering, etc.)? Though if you praise their act here, I wonder how would you respond against real life edgelords (one of their characteristics is that they think they're great due to their bad traits or supporting them, and being "different"), especially that on Internet here, they're plenty.

Tsurugi is the only person who is able to stomach Renge's food. And that's a total opposite of what he's pampered with for his whole life, with luxurious foods, previously he was able to enjoy an ordinary food in takoyaki, but here, he was able to enjoy a food that is ineligible to eat, the totally opposite end of the food he tasted before. Renge's clumsy tendencies in daily life is a total opposite too of her fighting capabilities that is above most soldiers (the part where the heated lid hits Yumiko, that made me wince). The best preparation for potatoes to me would be the crispy and crunchy one.

The thing that bugged me about this particular generic monster plot, the more I thought about it, is how lazily it tries to integrate the cast into the premise? Everyone's funny, but this plan is terrible. It's literally just Everyone Stand Around And Wait For Something To Happen. There's no real momentum to the plot at all, and that means if you're not laughing at something, you're probably bored off of your ass. I'd normally expect Tendou to more forcefully confront a threat, or agitate a situation until an adversary shook to the top. (When he tries to find the Drunk Doctor Duplicate, he's trying all sorts of crazy tricks!) Here, he's just, like, stationing guards? Even his interactions with Keiko are minor, non-illuminative. There's a real sense of complacency in this plot, and that's not what I associate with Kabuto?

One of the fun things about fiction is getting to play around with ideas you find... less entertaining in real life. I would probably avoid Real Life KickHopper and PunchHopper as much as humanly possible. But I love stories about them!

Yup as Fish touched on this is around the point budget issues lead to the removal of clock up from the series for the most part (I legit can only think of a few more times it gets used after this 2 parter).

Speaking of the most recent episode I really dig it granted it’s more in hindsight as setup for the next one, but a particular highlight of this one os the out of nowhere appearance of the Perfect Zector to sell toys..... I mean to allow Tendou prove his bullies wrong.

Maybe Tendou always said he wouldn't join organizations for a reason? The old him would've busted into that school and solved their Worm problem by the end of the day, in the process coaching a brand new baseball team to the top and only committing four or five felonies in the process. But now he's been in ZECT for a while, and his response to a problem is to... call in subordinates to help out? It's not totally tracking, is all.

Although I guess this could just be a newer, more mellow Tendou, after being broken down so hard in the last story. Like, yeah, he could do something daring and exciting to intervene in this situation, but hey, why not make a fun day with his friends out of it? Just chill on a rooftop making people noodle bread, and take it easy. A Worm is getting away? Eh, you can always get 'em later. One tells you not to use Hyper Clock Up? Sure, you're open to suggestions right now!

...I'm mostly joking here, but on the other hand, I think this head-canon might legitimately make the story work better. You really hit the nail on the head here; it doesn't much feel like a Kabuto plot in terms of structure.

I think the (unintentional?) subtext of that scene, If The Other Kids Are Laughing At You Just Go Buy A New Toy And They'll Shut Up, is both slightly tacky and incredibly funny.

I'll also accept Tendou Is Stretched Too Thin as a possible motivation for him half-assing this one. Dude's got a restaurant to run, a sibling to rescue, a militarized organization of nebulous authority to undermine, a superhero transformation that's maybe a little genocidal... and now he's also got to solve some disappearances at Juka's school?! If he could trust any of these people to handle anything important (like saving Hiyori, or working at La Salle), he'd do that. He can't, so they all get deployed to the school.

Also, I think he just wants to run restaurants as often as he can, and he's using this whole investigation as a smokescreen to get ZECT to fund his yakisoba stand.

Perfect Zecter is my favorite Final Form weapon and makes Armed Saber look like a toy by comparison! Its compatibility with the Kabuto, The Bee, Drake and Sasword Zecters gives it so much functionality and you've only seen a fraction of its power. Hyper Kabuto can do some really OP stuff with this.

Maybe it would be easier to remember the name of the claw-footed Sentai if we say it 5 times?

Aba-Aba-Aba-Aba-Abaranger!

I experience that as well, where a specific scene can trigger memories of watching it for the first time. In fact, any of the five senses can trigger those memories. Food is more than the flavors that compose it as they can hold sentimental value depending on the person eating it, like Gon for example with strawberry milk.