[Fish Sandwich]

Hey everyone, guess what time it is!



Geez, Zi-O, it's not Christmas. You didn't have to get me a present.

Although I'm definitely not going to say no to Another Drive coming with an evil Tridoron. We got an evil Den-Liner in Heisei Generations Forever too, and considering Drive and Den-O are pretty undeniably the Heisei Riders most strongly associated with their rides, I'm glad they both got this treatment. Even if I really would've loved to see Another Kuuga going around chopping buildings up with the front wheel of a giant CG Try-Chaser.

It's hard to get too greedy when this episode is packed with so much awesome crap happening. Just to cover the other obvious thing that everyone else has already mentioned, the fact that we got an episode of Kamen Rider where Eternal and Aqua face off is just wonderful. I especially appreciate that Aqua doesn't just get curbstomped on account of being nowhere near as popular. Zi-O has inexplicably decided to give the guy his due, and I'm really enjoying that.

The fanservice doesn't even stop there. Tsukasa giving a short dramatic speech, complete with the return of what I firmly consider to be one of the absolute most memorable, iconic pieces of background music in Rider history was cool, and while the twist with the Paradox Roidmude was neat, I actually liked Tsukasa still having his weird dimensional powers or whatever you wanna call them more. This is another one of those Go-Rider level bits of cleverness from Shimoyama, where in this case, he took the fact that Decade as a series had no rules, and turns it into a plot point that Tsukasa learned how to do that at some point (He's been entering and leaving crossovers this way since Chou Den-O and Decade with no explanation), and that there's no reason to assume that was an ability he had because he was Decade. It's a great moment, and it's very, very Tsukasa to not even be slightly inconvenienced by or upset about losing his Rider powers.

Most of the larger plot stuff happening, I'll hold off on for the next episode, but I definitely felt properly sorry for Uhr. He's had my sympathy ever since the Kikai episodes. It's a similar deal to Uva in OOO, where even though he's just as much of a jerk as his pals, I can't help but pity him for how he constantly draws the short straw. So the drama with him here landed perfectly for me, and it even let them pull one of my favorite tricks this show does with Geiz and Sougo talking about him at the start smoothly flowing into them talking about each other. I love it.

Props for Grand Zi-O actually doing Drive's Rider Kick, too. It's still not totally what I'm after, but it's a lot better than what we've been getting.