Kamen Rider Zero-One Episode 26- "We Are The Flaming Fire Brigade!" Discussion
 

Round 4 of the Hiden VS ZAIA contest involves a challenge between firefighters! Which team can save the most lives?

Zero-One 26 Raw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wla0wF1Tpw8

I like everything about Burning Falcon and will forever cherish these 3 episodes when it was the hottest thing around. Pun intended.

According to the Japanese subtitles, the jingle for Burning Falcon is “The strongest wings bearning the fire of hell."

Glossary:
Bearning: (noun) using a live bear to kill someone. Often used by the Viking berserkers in place of burning.

Parallel to build. Thouser is grease. Burning falcon is rogue. Locust metal cluster is hazard. Sucks for yaiba getting demoted and relegated to background and Fuwa is just there. Feel like the formulaic corporation competitions is dragging too long without moving the story. It's bad execution by not progressing the juicy meat of the main story(thouser bluray extra original mini series). Vulcan is dwarf by the duo CEOs. Vulcan barely gets to shine after collapsing like threes times and miraculous overcome the stress and painful bloody repercussion.

Most interesting part of this episode was the Jin and Horobi moments. Jin wants to free the Humagears on his own terms. The fight between Burning Falcon Jin and Vulcan again hints that Fuwa is the fourth Metsuboujinrai member, or related. They just keep dragging this out.

The rest of the episode was fine, a fire-fighting competition is pretty original and I liked the humour and drama and how it was balanced. Also interesting that Gai might have mistakenly identified the Firefighter Humagear as going berserk; he showed no signs of a connection to the Ark until Yua forced the belt onto him. Speaking of Yua, she better get an actual upgrade by the time she ditches Gai's ass because it's a long-time coming.

Also WTF is Gai thinking. Surely pulling out a ZetsumeRiser on live-television and acting all smug about it is a bad idea for his own company even.

Cinematography, choereography and VFX work continues to be top-notch.

It doesn't make sense for aruto not to use his freezing bear to save the Vice President and co even he said its no longer a game. Why risk and accept continuing the challenge with the fire fighters.

To be honest, at this point, Gai is just so smugly evil, and so barely bothered even when he is beaten, that it's not fun anymore. Every time he's onscreen I'm just waiting for him to leave. Even when he's eventually taken down a notch (for real) I can only imagine my reaction will be a completely joyless exasperated "Finally!"

oh hei,... another contest, another Zia cheating, another humagear going berserk, another JackRise,...

**Yawn!**

jeez let this crappy contest arc be over.

this is the first time this season when the 'Next Time on Kamen Rider Zero One' preview started I just turned it off.

I don't care. Next time is another part-two of this crap story arc.

*sigh*

I've never had a Kamen Rider season I liked and disliked so much at the same time.

I liked this episode a lot. Fun subplot with some really interesting stuff going on beyond the competition. Plus yet another awesome fighting scene wit Burning Falcon, I love it.

But - at this point Gai is just way too sloppy to be taken seriously. Every HumaGear records the stuff they're seeing, Izu was able to call out Yua with that, and with two of them on the scene, no one recorded Gai basically signing Yua to put a known terrorist hacking device on the HumaGear? And then straight up lies to cameras after?

You can’t just expose his evil ass with all of that? On the other hand - he probably would've blamed Yua and she would've taken the blame. Because for whatever reason Yua is still taking orders from Gai - we better find out what this is all about eventually.

AAAAAaaaaaaaggGGGhhhhHHH why are you toying with me like this Zero-One? It's one thing for Ryusoulger to hand Kamihoriuchi an underbaked script, but you? You're supposed to be better than this!

Okay, so, since we're still working with this damn formula, let me just recap the basics on my thoughts towards the competition episodes:

- Not bad
- Could be far better
- Needs more going on
- Subplots running on a treadmill
- Gai's actions rarely make sense
- For f***'s sake stop making Yua a secretary

Alright, now that we're back up to speed, let's go into specifics. This might take a bit, but if I don't get this stuff off my chest every week, I might start legitimately resenting this series.

First of all, unless the show does something to prove otherwise, bringing back MetsubouJinrai in the middle of these episodes only serves to exacerbate how much less exciting the competition is.

Seeing Jin fighthing Thouser and whatnot is sure to be fun, but it's not like the competition being over demands removing Gai from the show. If Zero-One can't specifically do something to tie these things together by the end of the fifth round, I'm not going to be happy.

Second of all, Gai is wearing my patience incredibly thin. I don't know what it is about Yuuya Takahashi and his evil CEO Riders, but I think I'm getting more fed up with Thouser than I ever was with Genm and Cronus, and people who were around for the Ex-Aid episode threads might remember I didn't always have nice things to say about them.

With Gai, he's got both the Cronus problem of having inexplicably good publicity, combined with the Genm problem of constantly having things go his way even when they aren't going his way. He also adds on to that his very own problem, which is that I've completely lost track of what his motivation is.

We started with this notion of a belief in human superiority over AI, which seemed logical enough for a top-of-the-food-chain corporate boss character. But last episode he's suddenly talking about how cool arms-dealing is (?), and the reliance on ZetsumeRisers to create new Magia either shows that he's totally lying about thinking HumaGears are actually just destined to go crazy, or that the show has no idea how to have his belief be justifiable to him without actually putting his argument in the right.

The fact that he's now doing this s*** on live television, you might think that'd be my biggest gripe, but honestly, I'm mostly concerned that the show decided the beltless Magia shtick wasn't good enough. That was a great wrinkle in the plot! It played to the series' themes, and provided a neat visual cue to distinguish the new Magia from the old ones in a budget-conscious way. Everything about it fit, so why does Gai need, and how does he have, a drawer full of terrorist devices that look like they were thrown together from scrap-metal in a dirty, improvised factory?

All this confusion bleeds into his fights with Zero-One, where it's often not clear exactly what the stakes are supposed to be, beyond Thouser's wanton violence being mean.

Third, I'm still holding off on talking about Yua until we get to certain upcoming events, and while my outlook on her future is actually more optimistic than you might think, her role here provides the best example of what's wrong with the pacing on the subplots right now. We keep getting these hints of bigger things to come, but one of the reasons I keep insisting these episodes don't have enough meat on their bones is because all the hints are only different superficially.

What can we take away from Yua's discomfort at being asked to drive a HumaGear berserk, or being ordered to stop helping an injured man, besides that she's loyal to Gai and doesn't necessarily want to be? You know, that thing we've already learned like half a dozen times? Same deal for the constant teasing of whatever Fuwa's deal with Naki is.

I have no problem whatsoever with the fact none of these plotlines are hitting a resolution, what I'm upset about is that we aren't getting multiple puzzle pieces slowly doled out, giving us new information to theorize with, and leading to a more engaging overall plot. None of us would have time to do all this complaining about Zero-One if it would give us something fun to chew over while we wait for the big climaxes.

Fourth, and in that same vein, the plotline here is about 50% there. It wins major points for the twist that the HumaGear is the one that needed to learn a lesson from the human. It's the kind of thing I'm looking for from these episodes in how it specifically contrasts the other competition plots, instead of mirroring it. Good stuff. But it's not enough substance to carry the entire episode by itself, and everything around it feels as anemic as I'm unfortunately starting to expect. Aruto talks at the end about how him and the HumaGear "both learned a lesson", and all I could think was "yeah, that would be great... if it were true".

Listen, Wizard is my second favorite Rider show. I LOVE a good episodic plot, and that's exactly why this arc of Zero-One has been so frustrating. It forgets to do basic narrative things that make standalone plots work. Tying the guest character's story thematically into what the main characters are going through at the moment is a huge one of these.

For the story to come together, it's important to have somebody like Aruto gain something from the experience. A scene or two early on can establish either that's he's at a loss for how to deal with some larger problem, or tease a part of his backstory we've not yet heard, or show how he suffers from unresolved character flaws, and from there you have the weekly plot eventually connect to what you established, inspiring Aruto to new heights, or, going the backstory route, reminding him of something interesting that occurred in his past we can flash back to that gives the viewers new insights on what drives him.

And of course, it doesn't have to be Aruto specifically. Do it with Izu, Fuwa, Yua, Gai, heck, even a minor supporting character, if you can make the time. Episodes focused on corporate politics between Hiden and ZAIA would've been a great opportunity to flesh out Vice President guy whose name I can't even remember because he's been so unimportant. If him gunning for Aruto's seat isn't going to be a real plot point, you could take the opportunity to retire the shtick by doing a plot where he and Aruto eventually come to an understanding. Heck, go real out there, and pull one of my favorite tricks Wizard loved to use, having a guest character with ties to an existing one. What if Vice President guy's ex-girlfriend or somebody turned out to be the person Gai selected to rep ZAIA in one of the rounds? Could lead to fun scenarios, right? Bottom line, sprinkling in bite-sized character arcs for recurring members of the cast is a very, very good way to keep events feeling significant while the bigger stuff winds up.

Fifth, I've got a couple minor things I might as well get off my chest while I'm venting. Some of the comedy here was a little weak. The bit with Aruto and the firefighters getting all excited to "save" cute girls was timed great, but the gag itself is a little too nonspecific, I think. The jokes are funniest when they play off of the characters' existing traits. This is why it's cute when Izu mimics Aruto's gestures, and why if a show like Build did a gag about saving things from a burning building, it'd be Kazumin rushing headfirst into a blazing inferno after someone tells him there's like, an autographed Miitan body pillow in there.

I'm also not sure if I just missed development here, but what happened to "don't explain the gags!"? Because Aruto literally thanks Izu for doing so in this one.

--

So that's my latest round of bellyaching with Zero-One. Hopefully my whining at least helps other people figure out what is or isn't working for them with this show right now. I swear I still like Zero-One quite a bit, but the good things it's doing simply aren't as interesting to talk about as all the things it's doing that I'm not so sure about, and I'm still hoping that'll change soon. I do have a feeling that next episode will be another case where the back half of the two-parter does a lot to redeem my disappointment with the first part, but we'll see.

A lot this arc feels like "the slump" that some rider shows get in the third act which makes me hopeful that the third act is going to be amazing all the way through.

isn't "the 3rd quarter slump" usually because the staff is both busy with the show and the summer movie ?
Because we're still due a summer movie so...

Oh crap your right I completely forgot that.

I'm only assuming that the fifth competition is either non-existent or is short in that ZAIA wins it easily. If they are smart, they'll have Izu pull an Objection maneuver when Gai is gloating where she uploads every single piece of incriminating evidence against ZAIA she's seen to the public and ZAIA can no longer proceed with the buyout because the entire companies publicity/stocks are in complete shambles as a result. At least that's what I would do if Gai is acting very sloppy with how he does things.

Anyway fairly standard episode, I did enjoy it a lot for what it was. Wasn't spectacular but we're finally getting a payoff towards Thouser's constant Jacking Breaks that seemed unnecessary at first, but make a lot more sense. At least if you know what's coming up next. Just needs a Scorpion in the pot... and then we're good. At least that's what I assume.

Scouting Panda Raider was fun though, granted any monster that uses rocket jumping to their advantage is a winner for me. I think what kinda helps this two-parter more than the previous ones is because this one is more connected/feels like an episode that had to be cut in half for airing reasons and not a cliffhanger for the sake of one? At least that's just how I felt it was.

Jin's motives are interesting, I'm curious if Yua is really the hooded character and Naki from the Project Thouser story is just a red herring in that they are there to set your expectation for who the hooded character is, when it's actually been Yua this whole time.

Overall fairly solid, and honestly nothing will be a truly low point for me like the Real Estate Whale Raider episodes. That was just... not good. But Zero-One could definitely still be better.

Let's just hope the rest of the stuff lined up for this month via scans is good enough to pick up the slack of this Tournament Arc.

I imagine when Gai loses the buyout, he's going to go absolutely insane, since it's a common thing where certain villains that mostly act calm and collected go crazy the suffer a huge defeat.
May seem out of place, but that's what happens when the show gives you nothing to work with.
Here's hoping after this buyout arc, the show will blow my balls off in quality.

Because what the shown so far in the show and revealed in the show, Yua is most likely the hooded woman.

The hooded woman hands out Progrise Keys that were in ZAIA's posession somehow. Her part of the Metsu name is Death. In the scans it is shown that Yua gets the Jackel Progrise key and a Raid Raiser. The Jackel Raider looks to have the Egyptian Jackel design. The Jackel also is used with Anubis the Egyptian god of the dead, so that could be the Death part. This would also explain on how Yua gets a Raid Raiser and how the hooded woman gets the keys.

Though this could all be coincidence.

I think it's Fuwa. The female voice is either a red herring or it's a female controlling him who's speaking.

The hooded figure magically appears and disappears in Fuwa's presence, which makes me think it exists in his mind and takes over his body from time to time without him realizing. Plus, Jin just teased him in this episode about the figure being "closer than he thinks"

Metsubojinrai.net can probably control him to some degree ever since he started using the Assault Bullet key.

If it was Fuwa then it can't be Assault Wolf that caused him to work for thd Ark as the fourth person existed before the show started. Now if there were some kind of implant put in him that could be controled RPM style then it could be him. I know Fuwa hinted that he will take Yua down before if he needs to so I am sticking with Yua.

Yua, honey, leave him already

The hooded figure isn’t necessarily the forth Metsubojinrai.net member.

At least, I think it isn't. There could be more than one. I just think Fuwa would fit and it would actually be kind of a cool twist for the character.

Although it's probably nowhere near as interesting as either of our suggestions, it could be just that one HumaGear featured in the Thouser special.

If previous episodes didn't show it already, Gai has got to be the very first Rider whom I actively root for him to die brutally, perhaps even more brutally than Sid being crushed by walls.

He's such an asshole, but the kind of lovable asshole that you just want to see him get turned into a baby and everyone will make the baby cry.