[Fish Sandwich]

Hey everyone, guess what time it is!



Time, at last, to rejoice, for the epic finale of Kamen Rider Zi-O has descended upon us!

*sees overwhelming amounts of disappointment from the rest of the thread*

...



Alright, to be fair, there's a lot to unpack here, and not all of it is pleasant. I guess to start upfront with my overall opinion, I was... satisfied? It's a hard feeling to describe. I'm writing this having just finished the episode, and it met my expectations well enough to leave me entertained, while also not going beyond them enough to make this quite the event I hoped it would be. Perhaps with some time and distance I'll have a more concrete opinion in one direction or the other, but I'm obviously not going to wait like half a year to make this post.

So for now, this finale absolutely encapsulates everything that was Zi-O, good and ill. There's a lot of the usual confused nonsense, and a lot of plot points that mostly go somewhere, but don't feel like they were entirely figured out before they were put to film. I still can't tell you who Woz actually is, I still don't know what the origin of his jerkier counterpart was (was he like the Woz from Swartz's world?), I'm still unsure why they made such a point of Sougo's power over time growing in the middle of the series to the point where he may or may not have been literally dreaming up the future when he spent the back chunk of it getting kicked around in his own final form... and most pertinent to this episode, I don't know why they choose to go with this whole plan on the heroes' part that required Tsukuyomi to become a Rider when she doesn't actually get to do any cool Rider things. I think the show is taking it for granted that we'll see her sudden betrayal as some big moment to get us invested in how the story will end, but unfortunately it's simply not possible, even for someone like me who loves this show, to feel directly invested in Tsukuyomi's character for this to land. I know enough about her to realize what she's actually doing, and worse yet, I don't care enough about her to be worried. It's the worst possible combination, and Zi-O's endgame could've done with a lot fewer people pretending to shift their allegiance like this. It made sense for Kaitou, because he was trying to slip in and steal some crap, but if your entire goal is simply to stab Swartz, I don't even know why you would bother with all the theatrics.

I suppose you could very cynically argue that's just Zi-O's way of paying tribute to the Heisei era's grand tradition of screwing over female Riders at every opportunity, but yeesh do I ever feel sorry for Tsukuyomi. All that distaste I had for her early on has been transformed to pity at this point. Poor thing is nominally the third most important character in the show, yet only ever got to stand around looking and sounding extremely depressed while being entirely at the mercy of other characters, not even allowed enough control over her own life to do the whole dramatic fake traitor thing without immediately getting murdered for the trouble. She may be a boring plank of wood, but she's a plank of wood I kind of want to give a hug to.

Moving on to important characters numbers one and two, we've got Geiz, who is kind of barely in this episode, weirdly enough, but his one big scene is great. It's obvious, yeah, and it can't help but remind one of Ryuki's penultimate episode, which I think had a lot more emotional complexity going on, but this is the logical endpoint for his character, and it delivers. I'm sorry if you hated Geiz, but he's right up there with Zeronos in terms of my favorite secondary Riders, and I've been waiting the entire season for him to call Sougo by his name. So to see them hold it back right up until the end? To have Geiz finally take down that last little emotional barrier as he sacrifices his own life to save Sougo, so certain of his inherent goodness after all they've been through together, that his dying wish is for Sougo to become Oma Zi-O? Can the dramatic timing here be anymore perfect? Consider my heartstrings thoroughly tugged, alright? I'm only human.

As for the main man himself, Sougo is great here, but I'm uncertain if this is the perfect possible resolution to his journey. The buildup to the final showdown is solid, and while I've said this a lot before, putting him with his uncle is a recipe for a good scene that always works, especially in this case, with the ultimate payoff to Junichirou always looking for an excuse to fix a clock.

Where it starts becoming slightly embarrassing is that Sougo immediately wastes all that hard work with yet another subpar effort from Grand Zi-O. Which is something I've also said a lot before, and man is that depressing. Granted, they finally remembered to do something cool with his powers again, and getting to hear Eiji doing his usual "Sei-yah!!", stock audio or not, wins the episode major bonus points for me, but the problem is, they finally stepped up their game to the level I want... just in time for it to be the finale, which further raises my expectations. I know something crazy outrageous like finding 40 suit actors to have every Heisei Rider versus every final boss (or nearest equivalent) was unfeasible, although I get the feeling cheating it through the usual trick of a few composite shots and then just having a few characters on screen at the same time probably would've been a completely realistic option to let them do something that awesome (in fact, I'm pretty sure that's what they did for the big Another Rider throwdown in 43), but at least summon Kuuga, for f***'s sake! Have him use Clock Up! Have the epic golden royal Rider lineup of my dreams like I was saying at the end of the Another Zi-O II arc! This is the problem with a final form that has this much potential. There was never any way they going to truly tap it, but I did expect them to get more out of it then they did. Going back to the bit about plot points in this show that only mostly went somewhere, I'm not sure what good building up the idea of him needing the Drive Ride Watch did when it didn't make any discernible difference when he finally had it.

But wait, Grand Zi-O isn't his final form, is it? Of course not. Because the show thankfully remembered to do the one thing it absolutely had to do above all else in my eyes, and actually show us Sougo becoming Oma Zi-O. They didn't cheat their way out of it. It didn't just happen in some dream sequence or something stupid. He really did it. The transformation was really cool. He really blew through all those major Rider villains like it was nothing, and the icy yet enraged tone of his dialogue really did make it feel somewhat unnerving even though he's not doing anything evil. The intensity of that entire section of the episode reminded me a lot of Gaim's final showdown in terms of how downbeat it feels. Zi-O is defeating the bad guy, yeah, but it just doesn't come off as a triumphant moment, and I like something about that. I also like the workaround the show did find to explain how Sougo could be an evil overlord in the future, but also not become an evil overlord. I can't even complain that saying it's the friends he made along the way is trite or sugary, because all his friends are legitimately from the future and a result of history being altered. They actually are the big difference between the two of them, and I think the show effectively capitalized on that in these last few episodes.

Now, about that resolution. I really don't mind it at all. There are things about the way it plays out where I think it could've been improved. I don't think it's immediately obvious from the dialogue as written exactly what the show is going for with Sougo's decision as a resolution to his character's story, and like some of the more obtuse bits of Geiz's arc, it's hard for me to blame anyone for coming to whatever conclusions they have. My read of it is that this is yet again, a Rider show pulling a "reset button" ending that actually isn't about putting things back at all, and in this particular case, I think it stays very true to how Sougo's character has developed over the course of the series. It certainly had nothing to do with Sougo giving up his dream of becoming a king, because he makes it clear he considers this a mild roadblock at worst. His last words to his once-future self are especially telling. No matter what it looks like, this was about moving forward, and trying something new. He freed everyone who was manipulated by Swartz to finally have a shot at a normal life, and the optimism he shows while doing this is the pinnacle of the attitude he's had ever since the earliest parts of the show.



From that speech in the second episode, to the debut of Zi-O II, to the very end, Sougo was always all about having the faith to choose the future for yourself, and to push forward on that path no matter how uncertain or scary tomorrow seems, and that's pretty much exactly what happened here. Heck, even the lyrics of Over Quartzer match up almost perfectly with the ending. So I definitely don't think this choice was a mistake. The redundancy coming right after Build is unfortunate, but in its own right this ending made a ton of sense for the show on a thematic level, and it sits a lot better with me than I expected as a result.

Honestly, if I could change one thing about the episode, I think it would've been a very nice cherry on top if the end of the episode had changed the usual "thanks for supporting (insert show here) over the last year" message to "thanks for supporting Heisei Rider over the last 20 years". Or at least maybe put it in the actual episode like it used to be instead of exiling it to the sponsor segment, please? I mean, I complained about this when Build ended too, and I get the feeling I'm the only who cares, but I liked seeing that at the end of a Rider show every year, formality or not.

With all that said, I think that's a wrap on Zi-O for now. This show was absolutely not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but for my money, Zi-O had an ability to consistently rise above its rough edges in a way that kept things from ever getting too frustrating. Way back at the start of all of this, I framed the show like this...

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fish Sandwich

I feel like there's this kind of meta dimension to Zi-O, because the character is trying to defy fate by becoming a nice evil king, and the show is trying to defy fate by pulling off almost the exact same plot as Decade. As long as it has an actual ending, I guess it can't be too bad, right?

...and now that it's done, I say without a doubt it was mission accomplished on that front. While Zi-O did ultimately fall into the same trap of overcomplicated multiversal mechanics, in every other way, it totally succeeded in surpassing Decade, and also in erasing my early trepidation that it would turn out to be something less than great. For all the mistakes it made along the way, the things about this show that were good shined like diamonds to me. From the investment I felt in Sougo and Geiz the whole time, the human drama of episodes like the Another Zi-O arc, and the insane spectacle of ones like the Agito arc, those are the kinds of things I'm going to remember most strongly. All the terrible Inoue episodes and half-hearted infodumps in the world just can't change that. This show was boatloads of fun, and I'll always look back on it fondly, from here to the future.