KAMEN RIDER ZERO-ONE EPISODE 34 - “THIS IS HOROBI’S WAY”

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The villains on this show… boy, not my favorite?

For the first time in a long time, we’ve got an episode without Gai as the antagonist – a role I was incredibly tired of him occupying – and it’s at best a lateral move. Horobi’s back on his bullshit, which is smirking and saying God Told Me To, and I don’t find much of interest there. Horobi should come across as either an impassioned zealot or a charismatic cult leader, but he might as well be a DX toy that only plays its two or three recorded lines. Every strategy is just some watery hate machine telling him to go do villainy, and then he does it. It’s the repetitiveness of Gai’s one-note Blowing Aruto’s House Down thing, but without even the smarmy hateability of Gai’s performance.

And it’s… like the Ark stuff is so distractingly hollow that I hate to see this show regressing back to it, even if it’s just to deconstruct it in the next episode. The Ark is supposedly destroying a sinful humanity to create a world that’s safe for Humagears, a plan which requires the destruction of:

-humanity
-Humagears who like humanity
-Humagears who are useful as weapons against humanity or other Humagears
-Humagears who are nearby
-Jin, once

It’s a robot death cult whose M.O. and stated objectives are so diametrically opposed as to be instantly satirical, and yet we’re still having them as a main plot! In Episode 34!!! Jin’s return from the grave was a breath of fresh air, since it had a baked-in rejection of the first act’s The Ark Wills It routine. Horobi’s schtick was tired twenty episodes ago, and I care for it even less now.

This show’s success has maybe been in spite of the antagonism of your Horobis and Gais, not because of them. The best villain this show has – and the one whose complicated, nuanced menace is as fresh now as it was in the premiere – is society itself. When this show wants to ask unanswerable questions about the ways we view one another, or dig into the difficult work of helping each other succeed without losing our own perspectives, it’s as tense and poignant as any other show’s endgame. Whenever this show needs to have someone for Zero-One to detonate, I feel like it’s paper-thin and unconvincing. Horobi’s from a dumber, more binary version of this show. I sincerely hope the next episode treats him that way.

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KAMEN RIDER ZERO-ONE SO-DO AI 06: TRILOBITE MAGIA

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On the topic of repetitive villains whose motivations are stock and virtually irrelevant: it’s the Zero-One mook suit!

I think the Trilobite suit is pretty neat. It’s just a Robot Skeleton, but that’s an almost perfect idea for a starting point. The MetsubouJinrai takeover turns a Humagear inside out, so here’s this black suit with silver bones and musculature. It reads real well from a distance, and looks menacing as it lurches in a group. Really solid mook suit!

And a decent one-box SO-DO figure! You know the drill by now: bunch of stickers, extra set of hands, no weapons, no base. All of the stickers were large enough to stick over the raised detail, and nothing was hard to maneuver. Since you might end up stickering a half-dozen of these guys, it’s a pleasant enough experience to repeat.

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PROGRAMMING NOTE

I’m going to be at Chicago’s C2E2 convention tomorrow for some work/networking stuff, and I’ll probably be out pretty late. I really doubt I’m going to have time for an episode post, so we’ll be tackling 35 on Saturday, most likely. See you all then!

I always prefer genocidal killer AI cult over unintentionally hilarious businessman any day so it was nice to see Horobi getting some time to shine.

Also hey we got to see Shining Hopper again! That was cool!

Not much else to really say when it comes to this episode though, thought it was interesting to have the Humagear this time be one that specializes in controlled farming. If there's one thing I like about Humagears it's how weirdly specific some of their jobs can get.

I would just like to say sorry in advance.
Horobi wearing a cool suit and being played by Takaiwa had worn me out from this point. Not during its airing, but rather as the show lingered on my head over the years.

But I liked seeing Shining Hopper again and how it was used effectively to dispatch the Magia troops even if Aruto was a few seconds too late to save the garden.

And, oh hey they're taking interest in Raiden's key. Wonder how that will go~

Yeah, the Ark stuff in this show... not the best? It kinda feels like the thing which would be done with by the first pre-new years arc. Which it already was! But now they're back! Aren't you glad...?

An okay episode this time around, we see another way the HumaGears are used, agriculture, it makes sense that that would be an area that could benefit from HumaGears, but like I said for some of the competition episode, it's a strange thing for Kamen Rider to make an episode about, not that I'm against it, it just doesn't feel like something anyone would've expected an episode to cover.

Anyways, Yua and Jin try to extract Naki, a concept that sounds almost strange to me, I know we've seen the HumaGear data packs that Aruto has, and I know that Naki's on a chip, but it just feels weird to me that they can just get Naki from Fuwa's brain, but I guess it's not crazier than most other things in this show, so I don't know why I focused on this in particular, but it just came off weird to me.

I agree that the villains in this show are quite boring, aside from Jin, and I guess Naki, considering what they do at the end of the episode, but the others, and more specifically Horobi, don't seem to have much going for them, they don't ruin my enjoyment of the show, but they don't really add anything to this show, I groaned when I saw that Horobi had showed up at the farm, because I just don't care to see any of them show up because I don't care for their motivations or character, but I still do like the show.

Horobi betrays Aruto as everyone expected, because unlike Jin, Horobi doesn't have any reason to not betray him, and then they fight, but suddenly all of the ZAIA Specs start going berserk, meaning that Naki has returned, which I guess they can just do with their mind, but I'm going to stop questioning these things, an okay episode this time, nothing as good as the past few, but still okay, if a little boring.

It really was! I was honestly a little shocked to see Plain Ol' Shining Hopper instead of the Assault variant, but pleasantly so. Very fun to see an older form get brought out like that, and used so well.

I've said it before, but I think part of my problem is that I don't much care for the guy playing Horobi? The suit acting for action sequences is fun (Takaiwa can absolutely still bring it), but the guy outside the suit has just never made a single interesting choice as an actor. Super dull performer, to me.

I may have audibly groaned when I saw Horobi walking up to Aruto's tour group? They had, like, ten episodes to figure out a fun new angle on Horobi -- and I feel like they'll get there in another few -- but this is what they decided to go with.

I always think these little views into Humagear industriousness are cute, and this one was no different. There's some interesting ideas in Midori's character that don't 100% come across (how companies can rely on technology to the detriment of training workers, Horobi's deleted role as a nurturer), but I think seeing Humagears and people collaborating on a project is always worth including in an episode.

The situation with the Ark was never fully resolved though, and Ark and MBJR did still pay a major part in Act 2. It'd be far more lackluster if they'd just starting pretending it was gone, I think.

How long has Yua been waiting to knock out Fuwa? I just love the idea she could've done that to him the whole time and only does it now because she needs him to cooperate for his own good.

Of course then they unleash another human killing machine...
Aruto probably brought it out without the Assault function because last time he fought Horobi he was actually able to fight him evenly with just Shining Hopper. Too bad it seems like Horobi was still holding back by that point.

Of course that doesn't mean he can take out Metal Cluster Hopper since it's clear Horobi has been outleveled at this point (just not by Thouser).
I actually think he does a great job of conveying Horobi's menace and pure, one-track-minded, dedication to annihilating humanity and following the will of the Ark. He does come off believably robotic and rigid, but that's part of the point in my opinion.

They should give HumaGears their own competitive league!

Well, false memory syndrome can fill in the blanks of an abstract narrative to create a more convincing lie, so Isamu could just go "grrrr HumaGears" from Gai's fabrication and his own brain probably did the rest of the work. Isamu isn't the kind of person to think deeply about something for too long, he only ever focused on the abstract picture.

The "This Is My Resignation" Blast Fever is Yua's most bad*ss moment for sure! She deserved that gratification after enduring all of Gai's abuse and disrespect. Gai sure has some serious resilience though, for him to keep coming back every week to get beat up, but I guess he needs a little more time to lick his wounds after that humiliating loss.

Thanks for reminding about this. Gai's list of crimes is so long that it's basically black comedy, so it's easy for people to lose count of what he didn't do. However, he did understand that there was an extremely high risk of people dying, so his intention was still there. On the HumaGear side, Soreo died as well, so that's two casualties we know about. But I guess we can't say Gai literally has Soreo's blood on his hands, cause Soreo doesn't have blood, only robot fluid.

While prejudice can and often does come from conscious thought, I agree that some of it is the fault of culture that imprints those bad feelings in us. That's why so many people don't understand that they have prejudice, don't understand that they're doing anything wrong. The same kind of prejudice that Gai has towards HumaGears, coming up with mean excuses to frame them as being dangerous and unreliable, which fits in to his oblivious trait.

He bestowed that same oblivious prejudice on to Isamu, filling his head with a false tragic backstory about rampaging HumaGears to make him remember them with scorn. The difference between them now is that Isamu was able to dissociate between reality and fantasy on his own, through his new experiences with the good in HumaGears. Gai's reveal would've crushed him before, but Aruto and the others were able to give him something else to live for besides hatred and revenge, Isamu found something that was real and meaningful, the possibility to dream and look to the future.

Ark can't determine a solution to evil that doesn't involve committing acts of evil. Unfortunately, evil is all it knows. When you only have on tool at your disposal, what else can you do? Ark is the Gai to Horobi's Isamu, with how Horobi believes he's doing good for his kind but doesn't think critically about Ark's methods, he doesn't have singularity, he doesn't know how he's supposed to function as a father to his son, or what a world without humans would be like. The prejudice is on both sides of society, since everybody is conditioned to hate each other and reject them as evil, without stopping to see the evil in themselves.

Yeah, Horobi never really did much for me as a villain, either. I always found him to be maybe not a complete sucking void of charisma, but really, really bland. Gai is definitely more engaging to watch, but counters that by being so fucking awful.