I feel like the difference here is in how infectious Shouko's energy is. The Airimirers are very broad characters, mugging for the camera and playing for the cheap seats. Here, Shouko's energy is more internalized, bubbling over from excitement and happiness. It's not something done for others' benefit, like the way the Airimirers are constantly bugging Airi. Shouko's just a really happy girl, and it's very entertaining to see that.

I think I should warn you that, given your disdain towards Ozaki and Miura, that there’s a guy with a few similar characteristics to the former as a major character in the next season.

But given next season has Inoue (who’s first major series had a similar character who is considered one of the best things about that series by general audiences) as the head writer and Naomi Takebe (the producer who went on to do OOO and Gaim) as producer, I’m not sure how different your reaction will be.

As for the two-parter, I did enjoy it, but I felt erasing Shouko’s memories was a bit of a cruel twist. But luckily, the next two parter is one I’m much less keen on, so that makes this one’s strengths stand out more to me)

If you're saying that Kiva has a New Houjou, I'm going to lose my mind.

The Shouko conclusion worked, I thought, because it's giving Yuuto one more thing to be heroically tortured about, which is what gives Ryotaro the push to show Yuuto how deep the memories of him really go. It's sad for a moment, and then hopeful right after.

I really like this last pair of episodes. Shouko is a great guest character and I really enjoy it when the show starts playing around with the intersection between time and memory (see also: Piano Hobo).

I also want to give some kudos to Yuichi Nakamura. Takeru Satoh gets a lot of suitable praise for playing so many different characters, but Nakamura really does an underappreciated job of playing Deneb in Yuuto's body. The bit where he and Shouko kept apologizing to each other was delightful.

Yeah, the Possessed Yuuto has this great flustered exuberance that is such a polar opposite to Yuuto's grim cranky grimness that it always cracks me up. Terrific comedic performance.

And I could watch Deneb and Shouko bow to each other forever. Real glad they came back to that gag for the second part.

Well, now I also understand about Yuuto's aim about pushing people away from him to prevent the pain of forgetting him. However, I've seen ways in trying to closing off to other people for their sake that doesn't need to resort into aggressive and hostile methods, and is also straightforward in their approach to others, so while Yuuto has good reasons, his methods still makes him a jerk (at least for all before this episode), it's not that being rude is the only way to deal with this problem (of keeping people distant)... people have tendency that if someone unpleasant had at least beneath them, good reasons/points in what they do, then they right any choices they do and treat it as the only method to approach that, while blaming everyone else for "not understanding him". Though for this episode, it seems that Yuuto has changed a bit, where while he's usually angry at Deneb possessing him and making him look good in front of people, including last episode where people thanked him for Deneb's candies, here Yuuto, albeit more composed, acted in no different way to Shouko than Deneb in Yuuto's body did to her.

Well, you declare this moment as the most realistic way, and despite the popular belief, (though I'm not this, big time) optimistic people exist, usually, they use optimism as a defense mechanism for dealing with their lives better. This doesn't mind that they are always happy and cheery, they have their breakdowns, as any other person, they just prefer to keep going instead of moping around. And, yeah, it was only Deneb's act of generosity to Shouko at first, but, although most of the time Deneb was the one to interact with Shouko, this is a set up for something bigger, a pairing of, like you said, a troubled boy, against a girl that would be the solution to that, that is, if Yuuto would want to see Shouko as bigger impact than she is, as at least Yuuto is the one who asked Deneb to keep an eye on Shouko and likely would observe the situation too. Also got this... if Shouko's talk was about pupa transforming... or rather, henshin, into butterfly... then to integrate that into the world of toku... then someone who can't be a Rider, but keeps doing something (well Ryotaro had a talk about him being weak, but he's a Rider)... this should be put when Yuuto can't transform into Zeronos!

Well it's probably not just someday if Ryotaro admires Sakurai (at least in that time) and talked about he's the one to inspire Ryotaro like the declaration that being weak isn't an excuse to not do anything. And Ryotaro is, well, someone cursed with bad luck, but despite everything going wrong in his life, he never once falls into angst or emotional breakdown, and he always steps up to do the right thing, though at best Ryotaro isn't happy-go-lucky for obvious reasons. Ryotaro puts an iron approach to his misery as a determined guy. Well, as Yuuto being forgotten comes from his transformation to Zeronos, well, Ryotaro at one point forcefully took Zeronos' card away from Yuuto as likely an attempt to make him happy and remembered.

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Well, this was exactly what I meant, praising a character for being excessively energetic, but giving others hard time for not being that loud and broad type. I mean, of course it's completely valid to praise Shouko's acting and thinking that the chemistry between someone can be better than others, but this comment seems like being unable to tolerate difference; forcing anyone (albeit Airi isn't in despair and had a good reason to be excitable like that...) to don that enthusiastic and hyper behavior, that if not being morally grey or black, it's the only way for you to have a worth, otherwise people who don't act like that are "lifeless" or such.

Well, while people will (and ought to) have interest in 1 person to stay loyal to them, I do hope that Shouko doesn't act rudely to people not in her radar like declaring them as worthless and out of her league or something, like seemingly this scene does. Though like before, I would still wonder what would happen if Shouko hasn't had her interest pinned on someone yet and had people acting like Deneb of being charming and helping her in princely way.

But they're Kamen Riders who won't have humans' brittle body! Car would be nothing to Kamen Riders (even Kuuga Growing who pushes a truck without problem).

I mean, she's not rude to Urataros. He's specifically trying to flirt with her (because: Urataros) and she's not interested. The joke isn't that she's mean to him; the joke is that she doesn't seem to notice his flirting because she's already crushing on Yuuto/Deneb and Ura can't handle being rejected.

Ryotaro is usually pretty banged up after a Den-O fight, though. I can't imagine he could shrug off getting pancaked by a truck.

KAMEN RIDER DEN-O EPISODE 43 - "SOMETHING MISSING”

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Diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiidn't like.

The main problem with doing any time travel story, especially one that takes a year to tell, is that you really need to clarify what's happening. Like, Doctor Who gets ragged on for some dumb companion characters, but you 1000% need someone who can ask what the hell is going on in the story. There's a half-dozen things going on in this series, with singularity points and train lines and paradoxes and rewritten memories and etc and etc, but I more or less can't understand the stakes of just about any of them. Everything is in flux, constantly. There're plenty of solid emotional stakes, so there's still things to invest in on that level. I care about Ryotaro, and Momo, and Yuuto, and all the rest. How they feel about a story can save it more often than not. But the plot stakes are always suspect, always nebulous.

The main problem with this story is that not only do I not really have a handle on what the hell is happening, I also don't have a handle on why Ryotaro is behaving the way he is. It makes for a story that I don't get on a plot level, and I don't buy on an emotional level.

Like, one of the big things that Owner tries to explain (it is maybe this show's achilles heel that most of the timeline exposition comes from the character least interested in nailing down details) is that there's suspicion regarding Sakurai's importance to the plot. I mostly didn't understand a word of how they were getting at this (god bless the subbing team who had to translate this nonsense), but the end result is that Owner suggests that maybe it's not that Ryotaro is the only one who remembers Sakurai, but that Ryotaro's memories of Sakurai are the fake ones.

This is an absolutely preposterous theory. It's impossible to even briefly entertain, because there have been at least two characters besides Ryotaro who remember Sakurai, by name. (Ryotaro's nostalgia-addicted school chum and the evil banker both mention Sakurai's relationship with Airi. It's even a plot point when the school chum forgets it later!) The fact that neither person is immediately brought up to refute this theory is frustrating, because it means the show isn't paying attention to the details, or that they can't explain their dilemma in a clear and concise way. Either they're bad at the plot or bad at explaining the plot, and I'm not thrilled with either of those possibilities.

The emotional stakes for this one are way worse, and way more disappointing.

Basically, Kai shows up to remind Ryotaro that he's fighting to keep the Imagin's future from existing. Except, his closest friends are four imagination monsters from that future. If Ryotaro defeats Kai, then Momo and all the rest will disappear.

There are so many problems with the way this story is told after that.

First, we were already told about these stakes from the Imagin weeks ago. Not this specific avenue of their destruction, but the idea that their time was running out is not even close to a new idea. It's new to Ryotaro, but making it a huge turn in this episode weeks after the audience started to deal with it feels like Ryotaro is slow on the uptake. It's asking viewers to be as shocked and as shook as Ryotaro, when he's pretty much the only character who hadn't figured this out.

Second, the conundrum Ryotaro has (use the Imagin to destroy their own future or save their future by dooming humanity) is unbelievably cliched and not terribly compelling. Are we expecting Ryotaro to ride a magical time train with his good friends while all of humanity is obliterated by an army of imagination monsters? Is that supposed to be a realistic decision he has to make? I don't want to make a Kobayashi Maru joke here, because it's not just something that crops up in her stories. It's baked into the formula of Kamen Rider. Kamen Rider is, for fifty years now, about using evil to fight for good. That usually necessitates a story where the hero deals with the possibility that defeating evil will leave him with nothing to fight with. It's to this show's credit that it's not power that Ryotaro will lose but friendship, but this is still a disappointingly standard plot point (that it is tough to ever make work) with two startlingly unequal scenarios for the hero to choose from.

Third, in typical Impossible Decision fashion, the hero opts to make no choice, and so we get a long-ass fight scene of Ryotaro getting beaten up. He won't fight with the powers of the Imagin, but he can't survive without them. It's a non-solution that's especially bizarre because it's not like Ryotaro stopped fighting, he just stopped fighting with his friends. It doesn't make any sense. It's a decision that's impossible to understand (he's more or less opting for suicide?!) and leads to literally everyone on the show yelling at him to explain himself. It's meant to be frustrating, but it is such prolonged frustration that I wanted to turn the episode off.

Finally, after Ryotaro gets beaten up because he won't fight with the Imagin and he won't come up with a way to win without them, we get the big emotional standoff at the end between Momo and Ryotaro. Momo is the voice of the audience, furious at Ryotaro for tanking an easy fight because he wouldn't fight with his friends. Ryotaro's response is We Aren't Friends Anymore, which is probably supposed to be some extra-shocking moment in an episode that's probably supposed to feel filled with shocks. Instead, it felt tone-deaf and out-of-character to a degree I'd've never thought a show forty-three episodes in could manage. It makes Ryotaro the bad guy in what's either a misguided tough-love decision, or a full-on psychotic break.

I'd probably be more forgiving of the latter, since we literally just did a story where Ryotaro showed Yuuto the power of connections and the stupidity of pushing away the people you care for. Like, it was the end of the last goddamn episode. So to follow that up with Ryotaro saying that he's Not Here To Make Friends... dumb. Incredibly dumb.

And that's pretty much the whole episode for me. Incredibly dumb. I barely understood what was happening in the plot, and I hated what the main character was doing in reaction to that plot. Ryotaro is at his most unlikeable in this episode, and it made this my least-favorite episode of Den-O. Just a massively disappointing experience to watch this one.

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THE BAGGAGE CAR

-So, one of the big reasons I don't speculate on Kamen Rider cliffhangers is so I don't get my heart set on any one theory. As such, I found the reveal of the God Spoons to be a pretty funny subversion. If you went out of last episode expecting some massive info dump or a cool new power-up, you were probably a little less amused! I can only imagine how much more I'd've disliked this episode had that been the case for me.

-However. It seems as though the show is hinting that the Pocketwatchman isn't Sakurai from the future, but Ryotaro from the future. Like Kai's reaction, it's an interesting twist, but I don't really know what to make of it.

-Even Kai is lame in this one! His whole standoff with Ryotaro is shot in a really mediocre fashion (check how shaky the camera move is as Kai enters the frame), and his taunts are just generic Sneering Villain bullshit. There's no spark to his role in this story. Everything but that one Yuuto/Deneb scene let me down!

Yeah, I wasn’t totally keen on this two-parter either. Ryotaro just came off as an unnecessary jerk to me.

Our main villain for Den-O, the Albinoleo Imagin (I confused him with the Leo Imagin before) makes his debut here. He’s voiced by Takuya Kuroda, who voiced the Owl Imagin earlier in the series. Check my response to episode… I want to say, 13?… for more on him.

But for now, here’s the voice for the briefly seen Armadillo Imagin.

Wataru Takagi

Notable Anime roles: Bunbee in the Pretty Cure series, Crimson Rubeus in Sailor Moon R, Wataru Takagi in Detective Conan, Jagi in Hellsing Ultimate, The Joker in Batman Ninja, Sparky/Epxeriment 221 in Stitch, Eikichi Onizuka in Great Teacher Onizuka.

Notable Tokusatsu roles: Kishiryu DimeVolcano in Kishiryu Sentai Ryusoulger.

Notable dubbing roles: Cheetos in Beast Wars, Daffy Duck in Looney Tunes, Flim in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Glen Whitman in Transformers, Ignacio in Nacho Libre, Jetstorm in Transformers Animated, Tip in The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea